The Blake Works is what happens when you take sweat and a filthy bass line, and pour them into a leotard. It's 21 dancers moving like they're at last call and the floor is theirs. It's ballet that dances like it has somewhere better to be, but stays to entertain us anyway.
William Forsythe's triple bill is the kind of evening that makes you wonder why every ballet doesn't feel like this. The staging was aggressively minimalist: bare stage, harsh lighting, and hardly a set piece in sight. Give me nothing, put it on a black stage, add a barre, and the music by James Blake.
And into that void, SF Ballet poured movement that was fluid and modern and undeniably street-inflected in ways that made me think less of classical dance and more of the film Step Up, Britney music videos, and a very specific dance from short-lived TV show Étoile. The one with the barre.
I did not like this ballet. I loved it. And there's more to say here, but the premiere was not the only event under a spotlight on Friday.
SF Ballet has been roasting under national scrutiny thanks to its lingering curtain call at the Kennedy Center coming up in May. The internet did what the internet does, and suddenly patrons were ready to burn their season tickets over the idea of lending the company's prestige to what had become a Republican trophy case.
Saul Sugarman
Just before the show began Friday, someone from the comms team pulled me into a quiet corner in the press room. The board had voted: the Kennedy Center performances were off. I slipped away to thumb a national scoop into my phone like a man in a ballgown sending out a gay APB faster than William Hearst's carrier pigeons. When Prologue began, I was still typing.
I tuned back in properly for The Barre Project, the evening's second piece that was born on Zoom during COVID lockdown. (My favorite of these was bathtub Swan Lake.) A projection overhead showed four squares, each with a barre, and the hands of ballerinas waved into frame. Then the video became reality. Dancers worked through exercises like it was morning class, commanding the barre like it owed them money.
It was then that my notes started looking less like a ballet review, and more like an 11 p.m. group chat after three dirty martinis.
"They are painted into these outfits," I wrote. My boyfriend saw this and added: "It's as if spandex had a sexier, naughtier sibling."
Dancers then spilled into the background, while three of them just started going at each other and trading moves like they were at a house party. As my notes put it: It really gave me like a 90s dance-off.
I'll note here that Blake Works came to the War Memorial before. SF Ballet first performed Blake Works I in 2022, but this is the first time the full triple bill has been staged in North America. It premiered at the Paris Opera in 2016, where Forsythe hadn't made a work in 17 years.
He showed up, studied the French school's training, and then choreographed a finale that included an actual hip-hop-style dance battle set to a track called "Two Men Down." So no, I wasn't imagining the 90s energy; Forsythe put it there on purpose. He also put one dancer in street clothes surrounded by 20 people in matching leotards. The normie was always part of the plan.
Specific dancers did fabulously on Friday, but I was also told after the show this was the top of the SF Ballet's class. Sasha De Sola, Nikisha Fogo, Harrison James, Joseph Walsh, Frances Chung, Cavan Conley, Madeline Woo, Jasmine Jimison, Max Cauthorn, Wei Wang, Esteban Hernández, Wona Park, and Isabella DeVivo—all of them graced the stage. So of course it looked not only that hard for any plebe to ever do, but they made it look effortless. (Albeit, sweaty AF at times.)
I've come to expect this sort of contemporary dance early in the season along with an after party. This one was a packed house, but maybe a little less vibey than the Cool Britannia and Mere Mortals after parties.
We danced while several women ravenously asked my name and availability to make them couture. And I personally stayed as long as I could, reveling in the fact that this company just did two extraordinary things in one night. They gave us one of the best performances I've seen on the War Memorial stage, and they stood up.
In the days since, our coverage of the Kennedy Center cancellation racked up some 600,000 impressions across Instagram and Facebook, and New York Times acknowledged my existence.
The bots arrived on cue, lamenting that the ballet had made a decision "based in politics." To which I'd say: have you ever actually watched a ballet? Art has always been political.
Forsythe choreographed a hip-hop dance battle inside the Paris Opera, the oldest ballet institution in the world, and put a smiley face emoji on a classical dancer's head. Mere Mortals interrogated artificial intelligence through the myth of Pandora. Dust, which SF Ballet performed just weeks ago in Cool Britannia, depicted the unseen labor of World War I.
If you walked into the War Memorial Opera House expecting ballet to stay quiet and pretty and out of the conversation, you weren't paying attention to the art form you claim to love. SF Ballet didn't make a political decision. They made an artistic one. And on Friday night, they danced like it.
Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic.
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Photos of SF Ballet by Chris Hardy. After party stills we found via Tyra Fennell.
