Review: San Francisco Ballet’s Unbound Festival Plunges Into the New

Let’s take the pulse of ballet today; let’s start from scratch. With Unbound, a festival of 12 new works by 12 different choreographers over 17 days, San Francisco Ballet means to do just that. The first program opened Friday.

Although the festival is a sequel to one 10 years ago, this one is much more adventurous, intended to take this prestigious company, directed since 1985 by Helgi Tomasson, into unknown territory. Five of the choreographers are working for the first time with this company, including two women (Cathy Marston and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa); local choreographer Alonzo King (whose company, Lines, is one of America’s best-known); Dwight Roden (artistic director of Complexions Contemporary Ballet); and David Dawson (a British choreographer long established in Europe but only now receiving his first American commission).

The company’s chief requests to the 12 choreographers were, apparently, to keep décor simple — and to use James. F. Ingalls for their lighting. Two of the scores are pure commissions, while two others are commissioned arrangements of scores using some older material. Other music ranges from Bach to electronic.

The opening triple bill shows its three choreographers — King, the well-known Christopher Wheeldon and, most impressive on this occasion, Justin Peck — all thinking out of the box. Only King’s “The Collective Agreement” uses pointwork. This, nonetheless, is deliberately unconventional, too. Jim Campbell has designed three squares of lights, suspended at the back and sometimes slowly rotating: You change your mind even about their shapes, just as you do about King’s dances.

The work starts with two male-female duets (Sofiane Sylve with Tiit Helimets, Jahna Frantziskonis with Joseph Walsh) that, though unalike, each involves two-way negotiation. King’s women aren’t submissive; these relationships, although somewhat schematic, are interestingly suspenseful and modern. Later on, more complex ensembles develop. One memorable twist introduces an almost uniform corps de ballet of 10: nine look-alike women in formation with a man who’s both similar and different enough to create a marvelously disconcerting effect.

The score, commissioned from King’s frequent collaborator, Jason Moran, runs through a wide range of instrumental sonorities. Structurally, the whole ballet feels like an array of études or scientific specimens rather than a world, but you sense the intelligence within it.

Wheeldon’s “Bound To,” his 10th work for this company, has not only a gimmick — the dancers all keep producing brightly illuminated iPhones — but a sermon, too. Having shown us individuals fixated on the screens in their hands rather than on other people around them, the piece concludes by projecting a sentence that says recent studies link an increase in teenage suicides to hand-held personal devices. (No suicide seemed to happen in the choreography.) Jean-Marc Puissant’s décor shows images of distant trees, as if the action occurred in a public park.

At times, the compositional skills that Wheeldon shows with ensembles and solos in “Bound To” seem unsurpassable. Apart from his long-established gifts with patterns and steps, he has recently developed a sense of fluent expressionist gesture (evident in his full-length 2014 ballet “The Winter’s Tale,” danced by the Royal Ballet and National Ballet of Canada). Long passages in the male solos, for Angelo Greco in “Wavelength” and for Lonnie Weeks in “Trying to Breathe,” show how eloquently he can construct dances that unfold compellingly as both formal choreography and expression.

Wheeldon has given himself two particular challenges here: a few ensembles of same-sex couples (something he has seldom, if ever, tackled); and exclusive use of soft-shoe footwork (thus avoiding any of the sublimity that pointwork can bring to ballet). He passes both assignments easily. I wish, though, he would give himself a third challenge: to make duets in which the two people are not involved in constant physical contact and partnering.

And his thought becomes labored when he keeps hammering home how some people need to keep staring at their portable screens: notably a pas de deux for Yuan Yuan Tan (staring at hers) and Carlo Di Lanno (trying to fit in). The ballet is accompanied by Matt Naughtin’s commissioned orchestration of work by English folk-rock musician Keaton Henson; it’s not hard music to listen to, but Wheeldon’s response leads me no deeper than its surface.

The program ends with Peck’s “Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.” This ensemble work is set to electronic music by M83 (Anthony Gonzalez, Yann Gonzalez, Bradley Laner and Justin Meldal-Johnsen) — a score I would otherwise resist, but Peck draws me into it.

It could be seen as a companion to “The Times Are Racing,” a hit Peck creation in 2017 for New York City Ballet set to Dan Deacon music. As in that, the mood here is urban, with the dancers all in sneakers and an assortment of street wear (by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung); whereas that dance was made from tap and pedestrian movement, this one features two duets whose fluent phraseology and stretched lines owe far more to ballet. As in King’s “Argument,” these duets — beauties both — are deliberately contrasted: Sarah Van Patten and Luke Ingham are impersonally harmonious, while Doris André and Wei Wang are shown as separate beings whose meetings are part of independent lives.

Ingalls’ lighting for “Hurry Up” includes, in the group sections, amber lights directed at the audience. Even though there is no glare, it’s an alienating effect. Though the “Hurry Up” duets emerge from a social context, it’s not one that makes a clear impression. The work also ends too abruptly. But this imperfect piece is the most valuable creation of Unbound so far.