Brief Comments on Morris' Sylvia

by Juan Morello

I'll give a more detailed review in a future posting. But I wanted to add just a brief comment here after seeing one of the last performances at SF Ballet last week. The word that kept coming to mind as I walked home on one of those glorious spring days in San Francisco was:

Beauty.

The sets were beautiful, the music by Delibes was beautiful, the costumes were beautiful, the dancers were beautiful. Dragging dead bodies around on stage and a drunken orgy somehow became beautiful in Morris's world. Certainly the bare buttocks in the last few minutes were meant to be beautiful.

What I liked the most about this reworking of an older classic is that Morris opted for an overall package, rather than star treatment for individual dancers. None of the dancing really stood out as show stopping. That worked much better here, where all the parts blend into a much greater whole.

I am reminded of the Greeks and Romans who wrote extensively on beauty, and always seemed to define it in terms of balance. Beauty in faces, bodies, architecture, sculpture, etc. was a glorious mean, a sum of all parts working harmoniously together to create a very pleasant sensation. Whether concsious or not (and I suspect it was conscious) Morris stayed very true to these classic ideals in creating a new modern classic.

A final note on beauty in context. I couldn't help compare the harmonious dance visions onstage with the incredibly disgusting and gruesome images we saw coming out of Iraqi prisons all week. The contrast between our better and baser instincts as Americans and as humans could not have been more starkly portrayed. My neighbor, who also attended the SF Ballet, summed up this feeling with this statement:

"Sometimes dance helps me forget how ugly life can be."

Thanks Mark Morris and the San Francisco Ballet for a little balance in this crazy, chaotic, out of control world.