The prevailing sense memory many audience members may take away from San Francisco Ballet’s Raymonda is that of propulsive ensemble dancing combine with more than 600 eye-popping costumes that explode like fireworks across the War Memorial Opera House stage. This happens over and over in both the folk-inflected character dances that invoke Hungary, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire as well as other crowd and smaller numbers in this production of an 1898 rarity. Alexander Glazunov’s glossy and rambunctious score, vibrantly performed in a new adaptation under Martin West’s baton, provides the coruscating soundtrack.
Flashy, alluring, and sometimes feisty as they are, the athletic jumps and spins, the swirling and boot-stamping and brassy display, all but overwhelm the fragile storyline of the titular heroine’s search for love and meaning. The imbalance is intrinsic to the work itself, which may explain why it’s infrequently staged in full. SF Ballet Artistic Director Tamara Rojo’s production, first mounted at English National Ballet in 2022 (with character dances by Vadim Sirotin), received its North American premiere on Saturday, March 1.
Rojo’s Raymonda is at once a partial excavation of Marius Petipa’s original choreography and a freshly conceived exploration of the piece on new terms. By transposing the action from the medieval era of the Crusades to the Crimean War (1853–1856), the ballet is now poised on the cusp of combustible international modern warfare. Behind all those colorful native steps and costumes (a sartorial feat by designer Antony McDonald) are nations and would-be empires roiling with ambition. Projections of period newspaper headlines — “WAR!” screams one — set the context before the curtain goes up.
The narrative begins unassumingly in an English country manor, where Raymonda (Sasha De Sola on opening night) bids farewell to a family friend and future fiancé, John de Bryan (underwhelming guest artist Joseph Caley), who’s off to war. Driven by a desire to do her part — and might it also be an impulse to pursue John? — Raymonda darts off to the Sevastopol front. Rojo has cited Florence Nightingale, who valiantly mustered nurses and ministered to the wounded in the Crimean War, as a touchstone and inspiration for her heroine. That said, precious little nursing actually takes place, aside from a sublime healing turn by Jasmine Jimison as Sister Clemence.
What does promptly develop is a love triangle. Before he heads to the battlefield, John entrusts an Ottoman ally, Abdur Rahman, to look after his bride-to-be. In a triumph of sinuous insinuation — hips and shoulders, arms and torso snakily flexing — Fernando Carratalá Coloma is a force of coiling seduction, a tambourine jangling in the pit like a rattler’s warning.
De Sola, whose demure self-composure borders on placidity, comes to unsettled life around Carratalá Coloma’s Abdur. Later on, in her several pas de trois with the two men, she can’t help stealing glances and involuntary tugs in Abdur’s direction.
In the ballet’s most transporting and resonant scene, Raymonda falls asleep in her tent, sending her into a moonlit dream conjured by white-clad nurses bearing softly glowing lanterns. The women are joined by flanks of soldiers in matching ghostly white. As Raymonda floats out to join them, she seems adrift between two realms, the real and the imagined, confinement and possibility, death and life.
Twice more, in brief but striking moments, the stage is plunged into shadow, with everyone but Raymonda frozen in place. As she alone weaves with touching uncertainty through this twilight zone, it’s as if the audience has entered her yearning subconscious.
Much of the second and third acts are given over to the character dances and wedding party festivities. It’s all done with high spirits and panache, although there were some miscues. But this part of the show does grow wearisome — the balletic equivalent of a dance competition, with each act trying to top the last.
De Sola, whose performance grew more absorbing as opening night progressed, made her third-act solo into an inward meditation. Slowly raising one leg inside her billowing skirt, she seemed to stop time, balanced on her other leg. Not long after, she made an exit that no one — maybe not ever she herself — saw coming. Audiences are left to imagine where Raymonda’s future might lead.
SF Ballet’s production of Raymonda runs through March 8.
