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There's a moment, about twenty minutes into the San Francisco Ballet's latest production, when you stop watching dancers and start watching something else entirely. The performers move through a wash of deep indigo and burnished gold, and the mural behind them—Ranu Mukherjee's monumental new work—seems to pulse in rhythm with their arms, their turns, their breath. It's not that the dancers are posing for the art. It's that the art has decided to participate.
That collaboration—between the 93-year-old ballet institution and the San Francisco-based visual artist whose work draws from Bengali mythology, California ecology, and the aesthetics of the diaspora—is the kind of risk that could have gone spectacularly wrong. Instead, it lands like a revelation.
Mukherjee's murals aren't decorations. They're arguments. Her work has always refused easy categorization, weaving together hand-painted details, digital overlays, and a color palette that pulls simultaneously from temple frescoes and cyberpunk film stills. When the SF Ballet approached her about creating a backdrop for their 2024 season, she didn't just deliver something beautiful. She delivered something that thinks.
The resulting piece—an enormous composition that dominates the full width of the War Memorial Opera House stage—features layered imagery that rewards attention. Look quickly and you see swaths of crimson and teal, shapes that suggest both organic growth and architectural fragments. Look longer and you notice figures emerging from the patterns: a hand here, an eye there, something that might be a bird or might be a prayer. The mural shifts depending on how the lighting designers angle their instruments throughout the evening, which means no two performances offer quite the same visual experience.
This is the part that interests me most. A painted backdrop used to be static by definition—literally fixed, immovable, the same from opening curtain to final bow. Mukherjee and the ballet's technical team have subverted that convention entirely. The mural becomes a collaborator, its meanings multiplying as the choreography evolves.
The ballet chosen to debut alongside this work is HELLO, WORLD, a contemporary piece by Canadian choreographer Medhi Walerski that already plays with themes of connection, isolation, and the performance of self. Walerski's choreography—angular and introspective, full of moments where dancers seem to reach for each other without quite touching—finds unexpected resonance against Mukherjee's densely layered imagery. The company's program notes describe the piece as exploring "how we present ourselves to the world versus who we actually are," and that tension plays beautifully against a mural whose surface reveals new selves the longer you stare.
What the SF Ballet has done here is reject a false choice. For decades, arts institutions have treated classical ballet as a kind of museum piece in itself—something to preserve, protect, and present with minimal intervention. The thinking goes that Tchaikovsky and Balanchine deserve reverence, that innovation means dilution. But the company, under the leadership of director Tamara Rojo, has chosen a different thesis: that tradition thrives when it's challenged.
This isn't the first time the SF Ballet has pushed against its own boundaries. They commissioned Amy Sherald to paint a portrait for their gala. They've presented world premieres from choreographers like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Crystal Pite. But the Mukherjee collaboration feels different in scope—less a one-night event and more an invitation to rethink what the stage itself can be.
I spoke with a longtime subscriber during intermission who admitted she'd been skeptical when she heard about the mural. "I thought it would be gimmicky," she said, laughing at her own doubt. "Like they'd projected something on a screen. But this is different. You can feel that it's painted. There's weight to it. It makes the dancers look like they're moving through something real, not just space."
That word—weight—comes up a lot when people describe Mukherjee's work. Her pieces have physical presence, a quality that can be rare in visual art that lives on walls and in galleries. On the opera house stage, that weight becomes theatrical. The dancers don't just perform in front of the mural; they perform with it, against it, sometimes into it. During the second act, a quartet moves in near-darkness, the mural's gold-leafed elements catching what little light remains, and for a moment the painted figures seem to move as well—or at least to encourage the illusion that they might.
The collaboration raises questions that ballet has been asking for years but rarely answering in such material terms: What is tradition if not a conversation with the present? How do you honor the rigidity of technique while making room for everything that technique can become? The SF Ballet's answer, embodied in Mukherjee's work, is that these questions aren't obstacles. They're the whole point.
There will be purists who disagree. There always are. They'll argue that the ballet should speak for itself, that visual additions clutter and dilute. They're not entirely wrong—the art is loud, and it does demand something from the audience. But demand isn't the same as overwhelm. Mukherjee's mural asks more of you, not less. It asks you to watch with your peripheral vision, to let your focus drift, to resist the urge to look at one thing at a time.
That's a skill worth cultivating. In an era when attention is the most contested resource in any room, the SF Ballet has made a mural that fights back. It rewards the people who stay present.
And maybe that's the real statement here: not just that art can bridge cultures (it can, it does, we know this) but that art can teach us how to look again. At ballet. At each other. At the stories we tell to explain who we are.
The performance ended with the mural fully lit one last time, and the audience sat in that glow for a long moment before anyone applauded. Nobody rushed. Nobody checked their phone. The image held us all.
