It’s hard to do Alexei Ratmansky’s Shostakovich Trilogy justice, but I was so knocked out by it last year that I had to try. This is a review I wrote of last year’s San Francisco Ballet premiere timed to serve as preview for this year’s encore run. A little excerpt:
“The ballet has no plot per se, but Ratmansky ingeniously and very subtly suggests a story. The first panel of the trilogy is danced to Symphony No. 9, an eerily bright romp that was commissioned to celebrate Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany. The dancers wear a murky mix of brown and green, with just a flash of gold on the underside of their skirts (this is ballet, after all). The women wear their hair is in peasant braids and cavort with the men like rustic folk to cheerful Haydenesque themes.
Before long the mood – and the music – darkens, and a principal couple comes in (the always-dramatic Sarah Van Patten and the dashing Carlos Quenedit on last year’s opening night), looking warily over their shoulders. They seem to ask, is all this cheerfulness too good to be true? Two pizzicato notes are plucked by the cello between melodic refrains and the dancers look suspiciously left and right—not when the notes are plucked, but in the pauses when we hear, in our imaginations, the ghostly echoes of those two notes. Then they join the dance.
Here we see Ratmansky’s brilliant musicality. A lesser choreographer would have made that wary principal couple either flail despondently or smile obscenely, foregrounding the symphony’s more disquieting tones. But Van Patten and Quenedit hit the perfect note of ambiguity: were they mildly enjoying the coerced jigs? They remain unreadable to those around them and to us, conveying that they themselves may be unclear how it feels to participate.”
You can read the full piece on KQED Arts here.
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