San Francisco Ballet

I went to a performance of San Francisco Ballet last Friday with my mom. Tickets here are expensive, so we were up in the first balcony. The program consisted of 3 ballets performed to Tchaikovsky's music. The first piece was Balanchine's Theme and Variations. This is a notoriously difficult piece. Frances Chung and Taras Domitro were in the lead roles and they handled the difficult and very fast steps admirably.

The second piece was Kenneth MacMillan's Winter Dreams. I love MacMillan's choreography in Romeo and Juliet. This was a premiere of this piece at SFB. The story is based on Chekov's "Three Sisters". The program didn't give a lot of detailed information on who all the characters were, even though they were all listed by cast in the program. It would've been nice to get some kind of summary for those of us who are not so versed in Russian theatre. The role of the sisters were performed by Sofiane Sylve, Maria Kochetkova and Lorena Feijoo. The ballet did have a very strong theatrical feel to it and even without knowing the story, you could see that this was a family of people and they were not a happy bunch. The heart of the story is sister Masha and Sofiane Sylve was exceptional in the role. This ballet was performed on a dark floor with very low lighting, which unfortunately made the men, in their dark costumes, very difficult to see from our seats.

The final piece was a new one by SFB's Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson. This piece was lighter, brighter and a lot of fun. It's divided into 3 sections, based on Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, with a slower middle section. Sarah Van Patten was wonderful in this part, with her two partners, Tilt Helimets and Vito Mazzeo. The costumes in this piece were beautiful.