Pacific Heights: Dancing
"Francisco Ballet, America’s oldest professional ballet company, is celebrating its seventy-fifth birthday with a big tour, which earlier this month included a stop at City Center. For the past quarter century, S.F.B. has been directed by Helgi Tomasson, and you can tell. Tomasson, born in Iceland, spent his early performing years in Denmark, a country whose ballet favors clear, buoyant, and musical dancing.
"Then there is Tomasson’s own personality. His stage career culminated in a fifteen-year stint at New York City Ballet, during which time he occupied the sometimes undervalued position of 'dancer’s dancer.' He was correct, honest, and unshowy—virtues dearer to experts than to the general public.
"Before Tomasson, the co-director and trendsetter of S.F.B. was Michael Smuin, a cheerful vulgarian who had worked as a night-club dancer in his youth and liked razzle-dazzle better than classical ballet. When Tomasson was brought in to replace him, in 1985, Smuin’s creations soon vanished, and a lot of his dancers also left, either by their own volition or by Tomasson’s.
"This caused a scandal, and a great improvement. Those people whom Tomasson kept, he drilled; as for the vacated slots, he filled them with promising young dancers from far and wide. Today, three-quarters of the principal dancers are foreign-born. Miraculously, Tomasson has welded this collection of Spaniards and Russians and Pennsylvanians into a single instrument."
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