When Yuan Yuan Tan was scouted by San Francisco Ballet at her Shanghai school, she was a mere shrimp of a girl. Just 17, the dancer looked younger than her age, and so slight that you wanted to drag her off to the nearest takeaway. She was too young to leave China and fly thousands of miles to a ballet school, even though San Francisco Ballet is America's oldest, and well known for its protective team spirit and family atmosphere.
But their artistic director Helgi Tomasson realised Yuan Yuan had potential, although she needed to grow in strength, technique and expression. Tomasson wrote into her contract that she had to gain weight and keep it on.
No starving cygnets here. No more waiflike Wilis. Rude health, high centres of gravity, strength radiating from every muscle: that's the ticket. But if strength and health is the hallmark of the San Francisco company, which reaches both London and Ireland for the first time this season, it's not the only one.
Five years have passed in which San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House had to be re-fitted under Tomasson, who ascended to the ballet's top billing not long before the 1989 "Big One" struck. Cracking the ballet's 66 year-old Beaux Arts home, the quake fractured the ornate ceiling where the United Nations was launched a half-century ago. Private citizens turned their pockets out to pay the bills.
A Balanchine discovery from Iceland, Tomasson arrived on the West Coast after experiments under Michael Smuin had given rise to growing demands for the crowd-pleasing favourites. Classics are classics for a reason. Many dancers felt torn; others, like the company's best-known prima ballerina assoluta, local girl Evelyn Cisneros, went along reluctantly with Tomasson, but gradually got used to his uncompromising technique.
Tomasson had to weather plenty of controversy, then tough out the quake aftermath and costly renovation of the Opera House while the company bivouaced in various ad hoc sites around town. But he won huge public support; and this was critical, because increasingly the ballet is funded by private fans such as the Hewletts, Packards, Hearsts, Davies and De Youngs, as well as the Strauss family (as in Levi Strauss). Public funding is peanuts. If you wonder why the arts scene is bigger in one US city than another, it's because art depends on philanthropy here. Indeed, it was S.O.B. (which stands for "Save Our Ballet", not what you'd think) that rescued the company when it almost died from lack of public funds back in the 1970s. To make the trip to Belfast, they drew on a special fund to which Billy Vincent of the American Ireland Fund contributed, as well as Maryon Davies Lewis, Brian Burns and Richard and Rhoda Goldman.
As well as his rigorous neoclassicism, Tomasson's thumbprint is a diversity of body types and tremendous vigour. Seriously concerned about the anorexia that wreaked havoc throughout the dance world in recent years, he was not doing anything unusual by writing in a weight clause on contracts. In Boston, a young corps de ballet dancer died from anorexia two years ago. In Prague, the once porky corps de ballet who wrecked their male partners are now racked by bulimia under the Velvet Revolution instead. The ever-present threat of injuries also takes a toll; male soloist Joan Bolado blew a knee tendon last season and has been out most of the year. The ballet keeps an army of counsellors and physiotherapists at the ready. "It says something for the company that dancers know they will be cared for if an injury occurs, and they choose to come here," says Jim Killeran, the Opera House's project manager. "Certainly the men all have tremendous strength. But they're all shape and sizes and backgrounds: Yuri Possokhov comes from the Bolshoi, Christopher Stowell is a little short fella, Roman Rykine is really big and jumps high like all the Russians; Ikilo Griffin too, and he's local. They're a very eclectic bunch and Helgi manages to balance tradition with new choreography."
Ensemble mentality is another hallmark; there are 20 soloists, 10 principals and no prima donnas. Instead, a whole range of dancers are snagging the kind of reviews any dancer would die for in the international press. Since Christmas 1942 San Francisco's Ballet has been doing Nutcracker, which is one reason it's survived 66 years, if not always as solidly as now.
Many of those little girls who fell in love with the Toy Soldiers were related one way or another to chunks of money, and helped steer the local deep pockets the ballet's way.
To become one of the top three large-scale classical companies in the US, alongside New York's City Ballet and Miami's takes decades of patient practice. But this company has known spectacular ups and downs. Could this left-wing, blue collar city's desire for a ballet at the height of the Depression have been something to do with a disproportionate number of Russian and Italian immigrants? Along with the Irish, they had a strong appetite for opera; and still do. But ballet? Another curious factor was that of the Christensen brothers who literally wrote ballet's early history here. In 1939, Willam Christensen choreographed America's first Coppelia; in 1942, his brother Harold Christensen bought San Francisco Ballet and introduced The Nutcracker to the nation. In 1951, their brother Lew Christensen, America's first premier danseur, was appointed director, and the ballet settled in the Opera House by 1972. One year later, Michael Smuin and Lew Christensen collaborated on Cinderella. In 1974 San Francisco Ballet faced bankruptcy, but the community responded with an extraordinary grassroots effort. In July 1985 new director Tomasson unveiled his spectacular new Nutcracker, followed in 1988 by a revelatory new full-length Swan Lake and a Sleeping Beauty. And that's when I came in.
NEVER a ballet fan, I started going to the Opera House after the 1989 earthquake, when the company was appealing for volunteers. I'd only been in the city for a few months, making a precarious living as a freelancer. When I showed up, the punctilious chief usher Martin Diaz instructed us mixed opera fans and newcomers to walk softly and carry a big torch, to wear black from head to toe, and be ready at all times to lead people to safety in the dark.
That way, you could watch any opera for free from the best acoustics in the house. But there was a catch. Part of the requirement to becoming a permanent usher was that you had to watch at least six Nutcrackers consecutively. Was I disgusted! Sitting on the top step for Butterfly in order to share one sodden hankie with cranky old Sol and a James Baldwin-look-alike from the Castro was what I'd had in mind.
Certainly I hadn't envisaged running around after a bunch of spoiled little girls in overpriced party frocks. I loathed ballet, always had done, ever since a bad Coppelia as a kid.
Well, I soon realized, I had never seen ballet like this. Clara's touching dance, all little bursts of joy and hesitant vulnerability; the magical Christmas tree that grows and grows; the Rat King; the March of the Toy Soldiers; the Sugar Plum fairy; the Waltz of the Roses. The music, just getting more and more ravishing. It's a box of chocolates that somehow still adds up to a full stomach, and converts even the hardened balletphobe to the eloquence of bodies in motion.
Lucky, indeed, are those who still have their first experience of the San Francisco Ballet to look forward to.
Grand Opera House, Themes and Variations, November 3rd to 6th. Grand Ballet Gala, November 5th. Tickets £15 to £37.50 available from festival box office or Belfast 241919.
