10 reasons you’ll love SFB’s “Nutcracker Online”

Why the San Francisco Ballet’s Nutcracker Online production, you ask? Because of course you have other options to watch The Nutcracker online this year. Dozens upon dozens of options, from companies all around the world. So. Here, up front, are ten good reasons: Because the first full-length North American Nutcracker started right here Those 600 … Read more

SFB’s 2016 Program 6 and 7

Breaking news on May 23, 2016: Promotions announced! See addendum (and my own personal promotion wish list) below! How quickly the time flies, over at the San Francisco Ballet, at least when you’re sitting in the audience, savoring the programs as they roll onto the War Memorial Opera House stage, entertain, enlighten, and roll right … Read more

San Francisco Ballet’s Triple Treat: Maelstrom, Caprice, Rite of Spring

It was a night for music lovers, not just ballet lovers, last Saturday at the San Francisco Ballet. Beethoven’s Piano Trio no. 1, Saint Saens’ Symphony no. 2 (injected with the sublime 2nd movement from his Symphony no. 3) and Stravinsky’s iconic The Rite of Spring. We are so fortunate, we of the San Francisco … Read more

Artist Spotlight: SFB’s Maria Kochetkova

She showed up in London, an apprenticeship with the Royal Ballet secured after her win in the Prix de Lausanne. Bolshoi Ballet had said “no thanks” upon her graduation at their ultra-elite training school. Here in the West, she decided, she would build her career. Shockingly, though, her Royal Ballet contract wasn’t renewed the next year. The English … Read more

Shades, Ghosts and Birds: San Francisco Ballet’s Program 3

My first glimpse of the magic that is “The Kingdom of the Shades” came when I was sixteen, via the opening sequences of the film The Turning Point. The music, the image of twenty-four women attired in white, descending a tiered ramp through silvery lighting, striking arabesques in perfect synchronicity, haunted me. Particularly once I got some … Read more