Houston, we have a problem (but it could be worse)

I've always thought of Stanton Welch as a competent but not great choreographer, so I was interested to see a reviewer's opinion of his latest work, which premiered last night as part of the San Francisco Ballet's New Works Festival. Writing in today's New York Times, Alastair Macaulay was not shy about saying what he thought of the four works on the program. Mark Morris's piece fared the best with adjectives including "awkward," "tepid," and "static." At least (for Welch's sake) Welch's piece didn't come out at the bottom of the "ghastly" pile.

Welch's new work was title "Naked" and set to Poulenc's "Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos." Macaulay's main criticism was lack of dynamics: fast music got fast movement and slow music got slow movement.

Macaulay's comments on James Kudelka's "The Ruins Proclaim the Building Was Beautiful" fall in the "no, tell us what you really think" category:

[It] lasts no more than 30 minutes, but only by clock time. While you watch, you begin to feel that Bill Clinton probably eloped with Michelle Obama long ago, that the problems of Palestine and Iraq and Afghanistan must have all been sorted by now, that whole generations of human life have passed and aliens have surely taken over the planet and then departed, all while you are stuck there in the theater trying to find the least interest in watching the same tepid floozies doing the same limp steps.

Wow.

The other piece on the program was by Julia Adam, who choreographed "Ketubah" for Houston Ballet in 2004.