Don’t let the title of Cool Britannia — San Francisco Ballet’s current program, playing at the War Memorial Opera House through Feb. 19 — lead you to expect anything laid back and loose. From the hot-wired partnering in Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, which opens the three-panel bill of dances by British choreographers, to the starkly relentless war threnody of Akram Khan’s Dust, the audience feels the heat.
Fitted between those pieces is the sublime Within the Golden Hour, a revival of a 2008 Christopher Wheeldon work. Gorgeous, lyrical, affecting, and elegantly structured, it puts the program’s other works in high relief. That’s not so much to suggest a rank ordering as it is to acknowledge and appreciate the ways in which mixed programs can grow and sharpen responses. Beyond liking one piece and not caring for another, we’re invited to explore and expand our tastes and temperaments, our openness to the new and rediscovery of the familiar.
With the opening move of Chroma (2006) — a woman visually panning the side of her male partner from toe to head — any idea of capital-R romance vanished on Saturday afternoon, Feb. 15. What transpired instead, in couple after couple, was a bristling, evolving exchange of flexing torsos, brisk lifts, crisply outthrust limbs, and powerfully joined hands that seemed to send an electric current between the dancers.
At times, the moves turned borderline robotic. At others, a limber tenderness emerged. Forces of strength and acquiescence, combat and connection, propelled the action, at once sinuous and austere. As one couple played out their issues, another were poised on the upstage lip of John Pawson’s softly glowing box set (lighting by Lucy Carter), ready to take their turn.
All of it was exactingly and excitingly danced to the pulse-pounding, metallic rock-inflected score by Joby Talbot and Jack White III. If the closing ensemble turned blurrily frantic — the film Everything Everywhere All at Once came to mind — it also clinched the deal. Whatever the propulsively cyclical Chroma delivered, there was always more to come.
No sooner had the three leading couples in Within the Golden Hour paired up than they began floating free and joining others who flowed onstage to conjure leafy glades one moment and river currents the next. Wheeldon, a master showman whose credits range from classical ballet to Broadway, creates richly evoked worlds. In this one, music by Ezio Bosso (with a slice of Vivaldi on the side) added a buoyant sense of lightness and wonder. Conductor Martin West led a choice performance.
Golden Hour unfolds in seven movements that offer a range of delights, from those picturesque natural images to a kicky pas de deux that began with something like a ballroom dance lesson. A pair of men ping-ponged together. In one very slow duet, time seemed to slow almost to a stop, a daring risk that didn’t quite pay off.
Three couples carried the proceedings with winning ease, weightless steps, and empathic responsiveness to one another. Katherine Barkman and Esteban Hernández, WanTing Zhao and Myles Thatcher, Jasmine Jimison and Fernando Carratalá Coloma — each pair charmed in distinctive ways.
Color-drenched design added a sumptuous richness. The glowing rectangles of Jim French’s lighting invoked Mark Rothko. Color gathered and deepened like pooling rainbows in the soft folds of the skirts by costume designer Zac Posen.
Fittingly enough, the dancers were still at it as the curtain fell. Nobody, it seemed, wanted this Golden Hour to end.
A very different sort of time — grindingly repetitive, grueling, all but unendurable — prevails in Dust (2014). Created by Khan in centennial memoriam of World War I, the work taps the whirling movement vocabulary of Indian kathak dance to suggest the famously brutal war’s nightmarish horrors. These SF Ballet performances mark the piece’s North American premiere.
A light that never fully dawned gradually rose, picking out a still figure who might have been a lifeless, headless torso. Unpacking himself with agonizing wrenching and lurching, Wei Wang was riveting as the embodiment of suffering, later joined by an intense Dores André. A crowd from the murky upstage depths marched forward like a firing squad. Soon enough, in their swirling heavy coats and neutering headdresses, they began to spin.
“We’re Here Because We’re Here,” an absurdist WWI song sung in the trenches, played on a static loop. Dust itself was static, even maddening by design and hard to witness. It was a bleak spectacle, about as far from the chemistry and comfort of human partnering as could be.
