Seventy years ago, San Francisco Ballet was mostly a regional company, admired and respected but little known outside the West and Midwest. That all changed when Ted Shawn brought the company to the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the summer of 1956, helping expose the company’s talents to a packed house of dance lovers and critics from the East Coast and beyond. The troupe’s knockout performances of eight ballets over three programs helped significantly elevate its national profile and launch its visibility abroad. Critics extolled the dancers’ youthful beauty and exuberance, stylistic unity, and elegant technique. London’s Dancing Times called them “expertly drilled and beautifully disciplined,” and Newsweek proclaimed, “The Company which had once been a source of regional pride has now matured into a national asset.”
Fast forward seven decades and San Francisco Ballet, which returns to Jacob’s Pillow this week for the first time since that auspicious debut, is now America’s longest-running professional ballet company and one of the world’s most internationally acclaimed dance organizations. Jacob’s Pillow executive director Pam Tatge calls it “a remarkable homecoming” of a company born in 1933, the same year Jacob’s Pillow was founded, as well as a rare opportunity — the last time the full troupe toured to the East Coast was 2018.
San Francisco Ballet is known for sustaining beloved classical traditions (they were the first to bring an annual holiday “Nutcracker” to US audiences) while also commissioning and supporting new works that move the art of ballet forward. Jacob’s Pillow specifically requested a repertory program that would showcase the stylistic diversity and depth of the company. The mixed program in the Ted Shawn Theatre will feature live accompaniment for select works by 22 members of the Grammy Award-winning Albany Symphony and choreography by Hans van Manen, Helgi Tómasson, company artistic director Tamara Rojo, George Balanchine, Akram Khan, and William Forsythe.
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Tatge says the wide-ranging program also highlights the company’s eloquence across a spectrum of emotional tones. She cites the work of Dutch choreographer van Manen, who passed last year. “His work is so at once intimate and grand. The first half of the program in the Shawn opens with his ‘Grosse Fuge,’ which is rarely performed and showcases the incredible breadth of expressiveness of this company. Set to Beethoven, it’s just a glorious work. Then to bookend with Forsythe, and in between classical pieces like Balanchine’s ‘Diamonds’” and a duet from Akram Khan’s ‘Dust.’ It’s really a range of work that [illuminates] what this level of dancer can achieve.”
Expanding the company’s presence at the festival, programs also will be presented on the outdoor Henry J. Leir Stage (indoors if weather is inclement) and feature live piano accompaniment. Performances include pieces by Ben Stevenson, van Manen, Liam Scarlett, Marius Petipa, and Sir Frederick Ashton. Tatge is especially excited by the prospect of seeing Ashton’s “Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora” set against the open-air backdrop of the Berkshire Hills. “It’s going to be stunning for audiences,” she says.
An engagement of this magnitude is an impressive feat for Jacob’s Pillow. “It’s a heavy lift to bring a ballet company from the West Coast,” Tatge says. However, she says it affirms the festival’s commitment to including one major signature program every year. “It really forwards our presence as the national dance center and one of the most important international festivals in the world.”