You can certainly say this much about San Francisco Ballet’s new program devoted to choreographer Hans van Manen: In an evening that begins with the calculated geometries of his Grosse Fuge and ends with the flowing sinuosities of 5 Tango’s, variety is the defining spice. “Van Manen: Dutch Grandmaster” opened on Friday, April 5, at the War Memorial Opera House and runs through April 19.
Recognized for, among other things, a minimalist aesthetic and erotic content, van Manen yoked those forces together in Grosse Fuge (1971). Set to orchestrated extracts from two of Beethoven’s gorgeously anguished late string quartets, the piece opens with four male dancers aligned on one side of the stage and four women clustered in the opposite upstage distance. The men, bare-chested, wear floor-length black skirts. The women are clad in tight white leotards. In Jan Hofstra’s chilly arctic lighting, the chasm between the sexes feels immense.
The men move first — indifferent and self-absorbed initially and then with more spiraling connective energy. Eventually the women abandon their frozen posts and partner up with the men. While some of the dancing on opening night was full of spirit and playfulness (outstretched arms, bicep flexes, several episodes of buoyant hopping, a woman chasing a man offstage), there was also some fuzzy execution.
The big reveal, literally and metaphorically, comes when the men whip off their skirts and cast them aside. Affixed to the fronts of their tight black boxer briefs are handle-hold fixtures, which the women soon grab onto. Grosse Fuge offers viewers the disquieting image of women being dragged about as they cling to a spot not far from their partners’ pubic bones. True, before the curtain comes down, the women show more volition and assertiveness. That said, audiences will have to decide for themselves what they make of the sexual valences in this uneasy work.
For sheer unambiguous delight, nothing matches the high-octane drive of Solo (1997). The shortest piece on the program, it features three terrific dancers — on Friday, Cavan Conley, Victor Prigent, and Alexis Francisco Valdes — all in matching purple T-shirts, taking their solo turns, like breakdancers cheerfully competing for the pure fun of it.
Solo is a quick-study anthology of the ways people can move through and command space — prancing and sprinting, jogging and skating backward, slurrying along on their knees, raffishly pausing to waggle hips or head. Everything flies by like an Olympic relay race. The only downside: The J.S. Bach solo violin partita is a recording, blasted too loudly through the speakers.
Where Solo is all about locomotion, Variations for Two Couples (2012) opens with languorous, long lifts. Frances Chung floated across the stage on Joseph Walsh’s arms while Sasha Mukhamedov was partnered by Aaron Robison. As the music morphs from Samuel Barber to Einojuhani Rautavaara to Bach and Astor Piazzolla, the two couples play out their fluidly organic, long-lined pas de deux, separating to mirror each other’s moves and then drawn back for limber extensions or a whirl of pirouettes.
Van Manen works in some cheeky details. The women are on pointe one moment and flex up from the heel the next. The men shoot look-at-me little glances out at the audience as they exit. Those head waggles turn up again. There’s a touch of tango near the end — a preview of the program’s coming attraction.
When both alluring couples were onstage together, these Variations seemed to be more than the sum of their parts, a communion of distinct but like-minded souls.
5 Tango’s (1977) occupies the final portion of the evening. A hybrid of tango and ballet, the work only fitfully does service to its source, the steps more delicate than dynamic, without enough of the scissoring interplay of feet and legs that makes tango so exciting to watch. Once again, the music (by tango grandmaster Piazzolla) is recorded, which inevitably saps a sense of immediacy and occasion.
There are some fireworks and felicities along the way in this tango fantasia. Backed by a suave and stylish 12-member corps, lead couple Esteban Hernández and Dores André held the stage with admirable panache. He unleashed a furious, kinetically taut solo. She rose like a triumphant blossom from the opening bud of the male dancers who surrounded her and who then fell to the floor in what seemed an inevitable triumph of beauty.
