


The shadow moving slowly across the sun in quiet grandeur set an overall tone for the ballet. The ballet opened with a video of an eclipse projected high on the scrim at the back of the stage. Though McIntyre never knew his grandfather he believed they may have shared a perspective on life, and his grandfather’s dementia and death were essential features of the choreographer’s understanding of the man. His grandfather was tall, though not quite as tall as the six-foot-six choreographer, and athletic.

The choreographer came to the company’s preceding summer developmental sessions wanting to choreograph a ballet about his grandfather. Trey McIntyre’s work, Your Flesh Shall Be a Great Poem, was a charming and emotionally poignant work. All three of the evening’s world premières began from a premise that was realized in abstract and tonal, rather than narrative ways. Of the three programs presented so far in San Francisco Ballet’s Unbound: A Festival of New Works, Program C was the most conceptual.
