SF Ballet's Dos Mujeres Celebrates Emotional Latina Works
Dos Mujeres is San Francisco Ballet's tribute to Latina women, featuring the choreography of Colombian-Belgian Annabelle Lopez Ochoa with the San Francisco Ballet premiere of Broken Wings and the world premiere of Carmen by Cuban-born Arielle Smith. For the occasion, the lobby of the War Memorial Opera House is decorated in big, brightly colored Latin-inspired flowers and ornaments. The scenic curtain art is a vibrant painting of three women designed by Oakland-based textile artist Maria Guzman Capron. Following each performance, audience members are serenaded in the lobby by the all-female Mariachi ensemble Mariachi Bonitas de Dinorah.
Arielle Smith's world premiere ballet Carmen departs so considerably from the original story of the Bizet opera as to be unrecognizable. The opera is set in Spain, where the naive soldier Don Jose is seduced by the fiery Carmen, who betrays him with a matador, and he kills her in a bullfighting arena. The end. In Smith's ballet, Carmen is apparently the proprietor of a shabby Cuban bar whose husband catches her in a passionate embrace with another woman. Instead of Bizet's iconic Carmen score, composer Arturo O'Farrill has created an original and stirring score that "contains hints of George Bizet's original score," according to the program. The story, music, and setting make this ballet Carmen in name only.
On Wednesday night Carmen was danced by Jasmine Jimison, her husband Jose by Esteban Hernandez, with Sasha Mukhamedov as the chef Escamillo, and Myles Thatcher in the role of Gilberto, Carmen's father. Nine additional dancers provided a diversion and filled the comical roles of job applicants. Gabriel Hearst's costumes were simple, with the main characters mostly entirely in red or black and the dancers in either white or yellow. Although the dancers on Wednesday night were very expressive in their gestures, the production is more like unspoken theater with some dancing, and a waste of the considerable talent of these dancers, especially Jasmine Jimison and Sasha De Sola in the lead role on different nights.
Broken Wings is brilliant both artistically and visually. Lopez Ochoa's tribute to the life of famed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo focuses on Kahlo's lifelong crippling pain and anguish resulting from a bus accident when she was eighteen. On Wednesday night Nikisha Fogo was compelling in expressing Kahlo's suffering and brief moments of joy. Before her tragic accident, she dances happily with her boyfriend Alfonso, danced by Esteban Hernandez. A brilliant, flashing strobe light and clashing music represent her crippling accident. Several dancers in skeleton costumes accompany her, pulling her this way and that in her torment, moving a large box that represents the confinement of her crippling condition. Fogo was in and out of the box as crises in Kahlo's life unfold. Not explained in the program, Kahlo's miscarriage is represented by one of the skeletons pulling a red cord out of her abdomen, and the inside of the box is splashed with red.
Dancers in various colorful costumes symbolize aspects of Kahlo's life and condition. The skeletons, male Fridas, a female deer danced by Jihyun Choi, which apparently represents Kahlo's vitality, and birds, which apparently represent the freedom she lost with her broken wings.
Kahlo's husband Diego Rivera was danced convincingly by John-Paul Simoens, a guest artist courtesy of Oregon Ballet Theatre. Rivera consoles Kahlo through her suffering, yet cheats on her with other women. The brief role of Frida's boyfriend Alfonso was danced by Cavan Conley. Kahlo's sister, also a brief role, was danced by Sasha Mukhamedov.
Like a Kahlo painting, Lopez Ochoa's Broken Wings uses the complex symbolic and emotional language of myths and dreams. It is an intelligent piece, using various costumed characters to symbolize the emotional and mental states in Kahlo's life, and well deserving of the standing ovation it received.
San Francisco Ballet's Dos Mujeres runs through April 14 at the War Memorial Opera House. For more information, see sfballet.org.