I saw two dear and familiar chestnuts and one brand-new melodrama in the Opera House, composing the second program of the season at San Francisco Ballet. Frederick Ashton's Symphonic Variations (1946) and Balanchine's Symphony in C (1947) made elegant bookends at the beginning and the end, both pieces elevated by the regal presence of Maria Kochetkova looking right at home in the biggest and most glittery tiara. The showstopper came in the middle.
This was RAkU, a new work by resident choreographer Yuri Possokhov, clearly created as a tribute to (and vehicle for) the incomparable Yuan Yuan Tan. There is a plot-line, of sorts, which vaguely represents an actual incident in Japanese history – when a monk burned down the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. This mysterious act of arson has been treated in literature many times. Most famously, Yukio Mishima wrote a novel about it. The version on which Possokhov based his ballet was a recent short story by Gary Wang, a Shanghai writer and an old friend of Yuan Yuan Tan.
The first thing to say about RAkU is its instant success with audiences. Both the opening performance and the later one I saw ended with the crowd in a frenzy of applause and yelling quite unprecedented in my own experience as a response to a new short ballet. All this unanimous emotion was certainly a tribute to the powerful stage effects in part, but was of course primarily a personal tribute to Yuan Yuan Tan. As Rita Felciano wrote in danceviewtimes, "It was a bravura performance and I couldn't begrudge Tan the audience's standing ovation. She had worked for it."
All the same Felciano had real reservations about the substance and staying power of the ballet. She wished it had been more convincing as a narrative, and I knew what she meant. Setting up initial expectations as a story-ballet, it remains in memory as a series of passionate vignettes that don't really add up. Still, I am not complaining. The standard of coherence required for fiction to work well is, after all, much higher, much more stringent, than anything required for the theatrical arts. Several of the eternally memorable triumphs of Sarah Bernhardt and Greta Garbo and Maria Callas relied on works of the utmost incoherence, works that in many cases no one else has subsequently bothered to perform at all. And perhaps their very weakness as freestanding art made them all the more useful as vehicles – more easily molded to the gifts and personality of the star. I think it is no coincidence that every review of RAkU I have read has relied heavily on that word vehicle. For myself, I am all in favor of any vehicle that gives me a whole half hour of Yuan Yuan Tan in absolute command of that enormous Opera House stage.