One reason for the company’s success has been its smart balancing act between the Old World and the new. Like the great companies of Europe, San Francisco Ballet has always had its own school, an anchor in the community as well as a training ground for dancers. (Invited to organize the company that was the forerunner of the New York City Ballet, George Balanchine’s famous response was, “But first a school.”) “Having a school says so much about the company and what it wants for the future,” says artistic director Helgi Tomasson, who was one of the most distinguished dancers at the New York City Ballet before taking over the SFB in 1985. “The students are involved in productions, they sit in the doorways and watch rehearsals, and they learn the style this company has-the freshness, the joy, the pride.”
The importance of the school became apparent the moment the curtain went up on the gala: two small girls were onstage to open “Little Waltz,” which Tomasson created for the students. They simply knelt for a moment-but what kneeling! Those 9-year-olds in pink exhibited perfect placement, their heads, shoulders, backs and arms all poised in classical harmony.
At the same time, the company’s artistic focus is thoroughly American. When dancer Willam Christensen began running the company in 1938, he introduced a vitality born of years on the vaudeville circuit. “My brother and I were billed as ‘Dancers Extraordinary’,” says Christensen, lively and witty at 90. “There were great artists in those days. Jack Benny would be onstage and a bunch of penguins would go by on roller skates, and he’d just stand there, looking. It was timing. Those people knew theater.” So did Christensen. A 1950 ballet he choreographed for the SFB-just revived for the Oakland Ballet, across the bay-was “Nothin’ Doin’ Bar.” The scene is a speak-easy, where people are drinking and roistering. “Someone plants a bomb and the place blows up,” says Christensen. “The next thing you see, they’re in heaven, all dressed in white, with wings. They’re drinking milk.” Christensen is best known, however, for introducing American audiences to the classics. People would love them if they were presented as the great storytelling vehicles they are, so he staged the country’s first full-length “Swan Lake,” “Coppelia” and “Nutcracker.” “I’d never seen ‘Swan Lake,’ only the second act,” he says. “But there was a big Russian colony here during the war, and those Russian officers were from old noble families. They remembered everything.”
Like many ballet companies these days, the SFB has a deficit-$3.2 million on a budget of $18.8 million-but executive director Joyce Moffatt is determined to keep it from growing. “When we see that contributions or earned income are not on target, we start right then going through the budget and adjusting,” she says. “In the last few years we’ve had a wage freeze, and we canceled two weeks of performances in Los Angeles this season. Last year we had a surplus-$60,000. We instantly applied it to our deficit.”
Financial micromanagement, though, isn’t enough to keep a company alive-only a good show does that. When Tomasson took over from his predecessor, Michael Smuin, a choreographer who specialized in the glib and the glitzy, he found a company in disarray. “Some of the repertory was not that great, and there was a lack of discipline,” he says. “When I suggested that the dancers wear pointe shoes in class, I almost had a revolution on my hands. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.” The results are astonishing. The best of these dancers combine the speed and musicality that Balanchine brought to American ballet with the flexible, beautifully detailed upper bodies of the Russian tradition. In such warhorses as the excerpts from “Sleeping Beauty” and “Don Quixote,” presented at the gala, they are handsome and confident; and in Paul Taylor’s “Company B,” set to songs of the Andrews Sisters, they are loose-limbed, jivey and dazzling. “Look at the audience participation when people watch the Super Bowl,” says Christensen. “Why can’t ballet make an audience respond like that?” The response to “Company B” may not have been quite of Super Bowl proportions, but it was wild. And the Super Bowl didn’t get an encore.
