Since assuming his role as Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Artistic Director in 2005, Peter Boal has moved swiftly and aggressively to expand the company’s repertoire and range of expression. The cumulative effect of this effort had never been as starkly evident as it was last month when the company debuted choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot's Roméo et Juliette in lieu of the moribund version created by former PNB co-Artistic Director Kent Stowell in 1987. Maillot’s spare, emotionally intense ballet was as breathtaking and as subtle as any full-length narrative work ever staged by the company.

With Director’s Choice, the fourth program of the season, Boal continues to challenge his dancers and his audience, seeming to inspire the former while entertaining the latter. But if the evening is representative of Boal’s sensibility, it is a difficult one to define. The four works performed - Paul Gibson’s Sense of Doubt, Edwaard Liang’s Für Alina, Ulysses Dove’s Vespers, and William Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced – all appeal to our sense of curiosity about the nature of human interaction, but with varying degrees of depth and sophistication.   

Former PNB Principal (and current Ballet Master) Paul Gibson’s Sense of Doubt, set to selections of Philip Glass, is an astonishingly mature and tonally-nuanced work. A dance grounded in the experience of uncertainty, its movement slowly builds to moments of realization that emerge from a state of unconscious disaffection. Never lapsing into melancholy or ecstasy, Doubt tells its story with a confidence and sense of engagement worthy of Balanchine. The dancers, dressed in dark gauze and hauntingly illuminated, perfectly capture the prevailing mood of sobriety and introspection. Noelani Pantastico, who played the demanding role of Juliet in every performance of the last program, dances a series of solos that provide the work with its dramatic focal point. Gibson is a choreographer to watch.

The evening’s other three works, all PNB premieres, were more rooted in modern dance traditions than in classical ballet. While each was compelling and performed with a level of intensity characteristic of the company, none quite rose to the heights of Gibson’s Doubt.

Edwaard Liang’s Für Alina, a pas de deux set to the spare piano solo by Arvo Pärt of the same name, conveys a halting sense of intimacy. Batkhurel Bold and Miranda Weese may be dancing with one another, but they are also dancing around the unknown obstacles which, whether internal or otherwise, keep them apart. The restrained quality of Liang’s movement establishes an emotional indeterminacy that suggests a relationship fraught with fear, betrayal, or loss.

Ulysses Dove’s 1986 work Vespers is a meditation on the experience of God, faith, mortality, and sisterhood. Set to Mike Rouse’s percussive work Quorum, it was inspired by Dove’s grandmother’s congregation and her religious devotion. The group of women, seemingly possessed by the power of the lord and motivated by the hardship of existence, sway up and down in their chairs, collapse on the floor, then rise and move towards center stage. The movement, an amalgam of modern, jazz, and African modes, ebbs and flows as the dancers take positions in chairs across the stage and return to the floor and back from whence they came. Once again, Pantastico is the piece’s standout performer, though the other dancers – Kaori Nakamura, in particular – respond in kind. Dove’s passion is easily the most tangible and straight-forward of the evening’s choreographers.

The final piece of the evening, William Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced, is less about matters of the heart than the novelty of staging a dance around a grid of shiny aluminum tables. Nevertheless, the work holds our attention with its apocalyptic sense of urgency. A full cast of PNB stars – Ariana Lallone, Olivier Wevers, Jonathan Porretta, James Moore, and Pantastico among others - struggle with one another and against the force of gravity like the crew of a space ship that awakes to finds itself hurling towards the sun. While there may be a strong element of gimmickry in the piece, it presents Forsythe with a challenge he overcomes with his considerable skill as a choreographer. He succeeds at maintaining and gradually heightening the audience’s level of interest, but to what end?

After an evening of work by choreographers so determined to engage our emotions, Forsythe’s impulse to dazzle while flying in the face of expectation seems both invigorating and callow. Boal’s ambition, clearly, is to make sure that all of us leave McCaw Hall satisfied.