FEATURED EXHIBITION

Exhibition on view
March 18 - August 30, 2008

A landmark celebration of San Francisco Ballet’s 75 years of excellence, Art & Artifice / 75 Years of Design at San Francisco Ballet examines the role of design in SFB’s continual, imaginative reinventions of itself, which have enabled it to endure as the oldest professional ballet company in the United States.

The history of design at the San Francisco company, founded in 1933 by former Ballets Russes dancer and choreographer Adolph Bolm, tells the story of ballet design in America in microcosm.

The exhibition surveys early influences from the Ballets Russes, Russian artist Leon Bakst, modern American artist Paul Cadmus, stage and film designer Irene Sharaff, European artist and designer Nicholas Georgiadis, and many more.

Curated by Brad Rosenstein, Professor William Eddleman and Melissa Leventon, the exhbition is open free to the public during normal gallery hours.

PERMANENT EXHIBITIONS

The following exhibitions are also on view at the Museum:

Maestro, Photographic Portraits by Tom Zimberoff
San Francisco Stage 1900
San Francisco in Song
Stars of the Early San Francisco Stage
150 Years of Dance in California

ANCILLARY EXHIBITIONS

INNOVATION IN TRADITION
GUEST CURATOR: MURIEL MAFFRE

On view at the Opera House before and during scheduled performances through May 6, 2008.

Innovation in Tradition adopts a deconstructive viewpoint on what goes into the making of new choreography and stage productions. The collected documents of the process, generally never considered in sequence, seek to give an insight into how innovation operates within the tradition of ballet.

“The creative act doesn’t create out of nothing,” says Arthur Koestler. “It combines, reshuffles, and relates already existing but hitherto separate ideas, facts, frames of perception, associative context.”

Creating for one of the most prominent 21st-century ballet companies involves not only reconsidering ideas of line, verticality, extension, and weightlessness that form ballet’s aesthetic paradigm, but also the notion of working on multiple planes at once, and then taking a sudden “leap into the dark.”