Dash & Control

Jerome Robbins? "Too self-obsessed. He's forgotten his point of view. He is not pushing forward any more." Martha Graham? "She thinks everything is expressible through a new technique." The Royal Ballet? "Too tradition-bound." The Bolshoi? "Too obsessed with characterization and athletics." The Kirov? "The finest in the world." Balanchine? "The greatest influence on ballet and dance in the Western world. He is pushing forward." So says the San Francisco Ballet's Lew Christensen, who in his 17 years in San Francisco has developed his company into one of the most versatile anywhere, and second only in the U.S. to George Balanchine's New York City Ballet.

Graceful Combat. Though he acknowledges his allegiance to Balanchine, Christensen's distinctive trait as a choreographer is that he has no readily identifiable style, prefers to let the subject define the method. Last week the San Francisco Ballet shoved off on a two-month cross-country tour with two new Christensen ballets--Lucifer and Life: A Do-It-Yourself Disaster--prime examples of the diversity that has become the company's trademark.

Life is pop ballet, a modern parable that mocks contemporary values. To the stabbing atonal music of Charles Ives, the dancers move through four stages of life against a background of giant flats of pop art--IBM cards, an ice-cream cone, green stamps, comic-strip characters. By contrast, Lucifer is classical ballet, eschewing pantomime and narrative for a more abstract visualization of Hindemith's austere Concert Music for Strings and Brass. After the angels assemble for "a typical day in heaven," Lucifer appears, defiant and strutting, and engages in graceful combat with Archangel Michael, only to be felled by a brilliant ray of white light from above.

Brother Act. Christensen, 55, studied "fancy dancing and social deportment" as a child in Brigham, Utah. At the urging of a balletomane uncle, he and his two elder brothers, William and Harold, formed a dance team and toured the vaudeville circuit as "the Christensen Brothers." Then came a four-year tour of duty as an infantryman in World War II, and Lew returned to find himself too stiff-muscled to dance. He turned to choreography and in 1948 took over the reins of the San Francisco Ballet from his eldest brother William, who had headed the company for a decade. In all, Lew has created some 70 original ballets, including the frolicsome Con Amore, Jest of Cards, one of dance's most dashing spectacles, and Beauty and the Beast, an exercise in controlled romanticism.

Though the San Francisco Ballet ranks as America's oldest (founded in 1933) classical ballet, the troupe has never known the security of a permanent home. They have to squeeze in performances at the opera house between operas or at downtown theaters between touring shows. "San Francisco is simply not a red-hot ballet city," explains Christensen. Still, fueled by a steady stream of talent from the first-rate San Francisco Ballet School, operated by Christensen's brother Harold, the company has maintained an enviable standard of vitality and exuberance.

"I'm trying to create ballet that will not be a museum piece," declares Christensen. "We must see how far we can get from preconceived ideas--that is how you push the ballet forward."

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