What is clear from the instant the curtain goes up, revealing the screen filling the proscenium arch, is that Swimmer, the world première that closed San Francisco Ballet’s Programme 7, is as much a media work as it is a dance piece. And in terms of media, sets and lighting, the 40-minute work is as carefully choreographed as an intricate tango, timed to the split second.
Choreographer in Residence Yuri Possokhov used the John Cheever short story, of the same title, as the overall structure of a series of vignettes using cultural American moments from the mid 20th century. In the 1964 short story a man at a cocktail party decides to 'swim' home, using the various pools lodged in his neighbors' gardens. It’s a kind of heroic journey that somewhere in the middle morphs into a lifetime. He begins as a young man, full of vigor and alcohol, and arrives home an exhausted old man, whose life and house are empty, ready to be discarded.
Where Cheever’s swimmer’s voyage is calibrated by the people who own the pools he swims through, Possokhov uses the voyage to portray an America that he, as an outsider from a different culture, is haunted by. The program notes point out that Possokhov uses “works of iconic American art that he discovered as a young man, long before he came to the United States.”
Each pool Possokhov’s Swimmer dives in comes from a hodge-podge of the 20th-century American imagination: Rosalind Russell and Marilyn Monroe swanked out in red sequins in Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Lolita and Humbert Humbert from another Russian’s classic portrayal of American sexual mores, the couple in Edward Hopper’s desolate portrayal of late night urban loneliness, Nighthawks, an aquarium of Copacabana fish meant to reference Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, and Holden Caulfield’s vision of catching children as they fall through fields of rye.
Possokhov says that this set of mostly literary images is comprised of things that “stuck [with me] so many years, I can’t get out from them.”. He notes: “I don’t know why, but they hooked me.” And there is a kind of randomness to them that can only be explained by a personal and emotional connection.
What holds the piece together is the formidable visual talent of Kate Duhamel, the video designer, along with Alexander V. Nichols’ television screen-like envisioning of the sets. The imagery used in the video projections and sets combines the stark geometries of late ’50s advertising with a more effusive rendering of pool water, somewhat reminiscent of David Hockney’s LA pool series. What is eyebrow-raising impressive is the way that the live figures sync into the media projections. As the Swimmer moves through his ranch-style home he interacts with shower, breakfast table and newspaper, kisses his cardboard wife and spins his cardboard children. The animated bus ride from home to office was a marvel of images and bodies. And the final swim through the waters of the pools, which had become oceanic in scale, took on an iconic beauty of its own.