Since taking the helm of the organization twenty-five years ago, Artistic Directors Kent Stowell and Francia Russell have turned the Pacific Northwest Ballet into one of America’s premier ballet companies. The legacy of Balanchine is kept alive here through Russell’s brilliant stagings of his work and the teaching of his rigorous technique in the excellent ballet school. Unfortunately, twenty-five years of Balanchine’s choreography has been accompanied by twenty-five years of Stowell’s.

Serenade was sublime and beautiful. No one has ever managed to extract emotion from music and set it to dance as successfully as Balanchine. I often wonder if any dancers can bring these same emotions to the stage as well as the dancers of the PNB. Although Balanchine is best described as a Modernist whose work is more abstract than narrative, his work somehow makes us think more about love than anything else. How he does this, I still cannot say.

There is one powerful moment in the choreography where principle dancer Louise Nadeau wanders searchingly across the stage through a still ballet corp before coming to an abrupt halt on the other side. Principle dancer Jeffrey Stanton appears from the wings, pauses, then follows her. Their coming together, which takes place to the slowest strains of Tchaikovsky, is one of the more moving scenes I have seen in a dance performance. The indeterminate nature of this drama, with its the modern, urban sense of surrounding isolation, resonates with us.

Stowell’s Carmina Burana, by comparison, is a ghastly spectacle; quite possibly one of the more tasteless pieces of fluff ever staged by this major ballet company. Sadly, it is too characteristic of Stowell’s oeuvre and sensibility. As is often the case, his leaden and repetitive movement has little or no relation to the music. But there is something more embarrassing about this piece: without a ballet narrative or an evening’s worth of music by a featured composer to keep him on track, Stowell finds himself completely at a loss for what to do. For someone who has been choreographing full-length ballets for decades, he demonstrates a shocking inability to establish a tone that might enable the viewer to enter into the drama of the piece (if that is what you choose to call it). Too many of the dances look as though they would be more appropriate in some fey production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Fiddler on the Roof than a lyric ballet set in the Middle Ages. When performed by dancers dressed in flesh-toned body suits that suggest Hieronymus Bosch’s fallen souls, the result is laughable.

Things get worse. Trying to evoke a sense of lasciviousness and debauchery, poor Stowell resorts to ripping-off Mr. B. himself. The In Taberna section of the ballet is clearly a dumbed-down version of the master’s Prodigal Son with some corn-ball theatrical flourishes thrown in to please the audience.

It is hard to predict what will become of the PNB after the departure next season of Stowell and Russell. Will the company continue to be the nation’s foremost interpreter of George Balanchine’s choreography? Will the school remain a center for passing on his technique to future generations? Let’s hope so.

While I will not be sorry to see Stowell’s works dropped from the company’s repertory in the years following his retirement, I fear that this popular and incoherent disaster will outlive its more innocuous brothers and sisters.

Drunkenness, medical birth, sex, death, celebrity and serial killer personalities, film, and related subjects inform the collection of images Waters produced in his collage-like work. These are familiar subjects culled from terrain explored through the lens of his filmmaking career spanning nearly four decades.

Waters described how, by accident, he embarked on an obsessive interest in photography. Almost ten years ago, he wanted to get a still image from one of his earlier films — one he never had. He felt that a static image from the film could capture a unique essence of it, and provide a document of his memory of the film. While watching a video from the film, he snapped a photograph of the scene to isolate the image for a production still, called “art” in the industry. The result led to his exploration of the endless possibilities of finding moments in his films — and from other works; to extract images that could be derived from photography.

Initially, his first photographs contained compositional and reproduction flaws. He remembered when he used to be embarrassed about the imperfections of his earliest films. But imperfection is esteemed in modern art today, he said, and no longer worries about the flaws and mistakes in his images.

End Reel (2002) depicts a projectionist’s hand-written note — similar to a changeover cue — regarding the end of the film reel. Waters mentioned that a film audience will never see the end reel notes during a film screening as the reels are changed, but he wanted to have a document of this note for his collection. In another film-related work, Epic (2003) is short-hand for what the film “The Poseidon Adventure” is about: a sinking cruise ship. The image shows the film’s opening title in reverse, upside-down.

Several other works capture interesting juxtapositions and accidental imagery that offer amusing visual puns and wordplay. In 7734 (2003) Waters reveals Catholic-school code for a so-called “bad word”; when the work is rotated upside-down, “7734” becomes “hELL.” Cameraman machismo is subverted with a double-entendre in Swish Pan. And Glinda the Good Witch gets morphed with the Wicked Witch in a blurry cauldron of blue, pink and green in Wicked Glinda.

John Waters, commenting on working as an artist, described his attraction to art world elitism in contrast to his work as a filmmaker. Comparatively, as a filmmaker, he must try to appeal to everyone while working within the industry’s ratings system. However, he felt he has more freedom as an artist, and aspires to appeal to just one elitist person who recognizes his art — and to no one else. He said it’s like speaking a “secret lingo,” participating in a “secret club” and speaking the way bikers’ talk.