My Chronicle report on the newly unveiled plans for San Francisco Ballet’s 75th season:

“San Francisco Ballet will crown its 75th anniversary season with a New Works Festival of 10 world premieres in 2008, as well as an international tribute to the company with visits by the New York City Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada and Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, the Ballet announced Wednesday.

The season, which also includes a tribute to Jerome Robbins and the return of the classic story ballet “Giselle,” will run Jan. 29 to May 6. San Francisco Ballet will then embark on a four-city national tour in September, including engagements at New York’s City Center and Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center.
It’s a strikingly forward-looking celebration for the country’s oldest professional ballet company, the one nod to history being a revival of former Artistic Director Lew Christensen’s 1938 piece of Americana, “Filling Station.” Instead of staging a retrospective, Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson is looking to the company’s future with fresh choreography by an eclectic clutch of dancemakers both luminary and emerging.

Some New Works Festival participants, like Julia Adam, Val Caniparoli and Yuri Possokhov, are homegrown talents; others, including Paul Taylor, Stanton Welch, James Kudelka and Christopher Wheeldon, are international figures with long ties to the Ballet under Tomasson’s 22-year tenure. One, Jorma Elo, is new to San Francisco. Mark Morris, always news-making, will use a new score by famed minimalist composer John Adams, co-commissioned by Stanford Lively Arts and Carnegie Hall. Also creating a work on the company is local modern dance great Margaret Jenkins.”

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