KQED | A Monumental Mural by Ranu Mukherjee Opens a New SF Ballet Program

 

 

by Sarah Hotchkiss

18 December 2024

 

 

The San Francisco Ballet and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have announced a new partnership to annually commission curtain drops from Bay Area artists.

 

Earlier this year, Maria A. Guzmán Capron’s curtain appeared on stage before and between SF Ballet’s Dos Mujeres program. The Oakland artist’s preparatory maquette, a textile collage that SF Ballet scenic artists carefully translated in paint onto a 30-by-60-foot canvas, was later acquired by the Fine Arts Museums.

 

For the ballet’s 2024–2025 season, multidisciplinary artist Ranu Mukherjee will design a curtain for Cool Britannia, a Feb. 13–19, 2025 program of three ballets by British choreographers: Sir Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour and Dust by Akram Khan.

 

Mukherjee is no stranger to dance. For the past six years, Mukherjee has collaborated with choreographer Hope Mohr on increasingly in-depth performances, including a recent residency at the Mills College Art Museum. In January, Mukherjee and Mohr’s piece score for transitional times will combine live dancers and projected video at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts.

 

It also just so happens that Mukherjee lived in London when the term “Cool Britannia” (a pun on “Rule, Britannia!”) was coined — picture the rise of Oasis, Blur and the Spice Girls in the mid- and late ’90s.

 

Of the music included in SF Ballet’s Cool Britannia, only Chroma includes a bit of rock, with a score by Joby Talbot and The White Stripes’ Jack White. But all three are decidedly modern.

 

“Cool Britannia features three essential choreographic innovators in ballet who are unafraid to break with and reimagine artistic traditions and push them forward,” SF Ballet Artistic Director Tamara Rojo stated in Monday’s announcement. “This new work of art speaks directly to Cool Britannia’s themes while supporting the Ballet’s vision of bringing new, multi-disciplinary artistry work to the War Memorial Opera House and to our San Francisco community.”

 

One of Mukherjee’s challenges was to create a cohesive image that could introduce audiences to ideas flowing through the three separate pieces. “There’s this incredible conversation between really angular movements and machine language, and then the fluidity of the body,” she says. Her final painting, set against a shimmering, deep blue background, depicts plants in space.

 

“Plants are the ultimate makers of form because they make form out of air and light,” Mukherjee says. She included specific species that were grown by civilians during WWI to create medicine for the war effort; Dust is a one-act ballet about the human experience of the war.

 

Now, the work lies with SF Ballet’s scenic artists to transform Mukherjee’s roughly 18-by-36-inch painting into a massive mural.

 

The collaboration between SF Ballet and the Fine Arts Museums will also mark the Legion of Honor’s 100th anniversary. Several notable events are planned for 2025 to celebrate the milestone, including pre-performance conversations with museum curators and artists at the ballet; a discussion of SF Ballet’s 1990 production of Krazy Kat (alongside the Legion of Honor’s upcoming Wayne Thiebaud exhibition); and chamber music performances and Dance-Along workshops at the Legion of Honor.

December 18, 2024