Director’s Choice/Pacific Northwest Ballet September 24-October 3, 2010
Every so often you attend an art event that leaves you fully sated. It was neither too long nor too short, too frothy nor too ponderous. You were amused, intellectually provoked, aesthetically pleased. Frequently you’re able to apply one or more of these attributes to your experience with the arts, but when all of them line up, like cherries on a Vegas slot machine? Not a regular occurrence. That’s why watching Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 2010-2011 season opener, Director’s Choice felt a little bit like hitting the performance jackpot.
PNB Artistic Director Peter Boal has assembled four dances by three choreographers for this program. All four were created in a very narrow time frame, 1983-1991. While the artists share an era, and each dance is very much a response to the accompanying music, the four dances are very different.
The program opened with a pair of dances from Jiri Kylian, longtime artistic head of the Nederlands Dans Theater. Last year Seattle audiences saw Kylian’s Petite Mort, a mesmerizing rumination on love, sex, and power. Set to Mozart piano concertos, beautifully performed by Christina Siemens, the dance begins with six men performing simultaneous pas de deux with fencing foils. Despite the quiet, almost restrained power of the music, Kylian manages to insert touches of whimsy. Five women partner large ball gowns on wheels. They twirl the skirts, peep coyly from behind the strapless bodices. All twelve opening night dancers delivered strong performances, although the men were slightly off beat in the starting sequence. Real life husband and wife Karel Cruz and Lindsi Dec were especially notable in their duet. Dec continues to develop her artistry.
Where Petite Mort brings a subtle wit, Kylian’s 1983 Sechs Tanze (Six Dances), also set to Mozart, is a laugh out loud romp. Men in powdered wigs, bare chests and white knickers cavort with wild-haired women in camisoles and filmy skirts. They flirt and fight, caper and roll across the floor. Many actors say that comedy is far harder than drama. You need to know your lines, but you’ve also got to nail the timing. That seems to be true with dance as well. On opening night, PNB soloist Chalnessa Eames showed she’s got what it takes: impeccable technique and brilliant comic ability. We don’t see enough of her. As the zany antics unfold, with the wheeled ballgowns and fencing foils from Petite Mort making cameo appearances, the audience howled with laughter. It was easy to overlook the choreography’s demands. The cast made it look simple.
If Kylian’s choreography was ironically beautiful, Nacho Duato’s Jardi Tancat is poignantly lovely. Seattle audiences first saw Duato’s dance in 1996, and it’s been an audience favorite ever since. Duato was dancing with Kylian’s Nederlands Dans Theater when he created Jardi. While he may have been influenced by the Czech artist, Duato’s piece is Spanish to its core, a sometimes despairing portrait of the demands of the agrarian lifestyle in a land where water is scarce. Performed to haunting songs by Maria del Mar Bonet, the dancers twirl, drop to the ground, seem to limp across the stage, hands pressed to their backs to stave off the pain of their labors. They are confined to their garden (Jardi Tancat is Catalan for “closed garden”), hemmed in by stark, bare sticks. These are leafless tree branchs, or prison walls. Although Jardi has been in the PNB repertoire for awhile, both the opening night and subsequent Saturday matinee casts danced this piece as if for the first time. Ariana Lallone, in particular, embodied the pathos of the Spanish peasant.
Director’s Choice ends with the PNB premiere of Jerome Robbin’s 1983 Glass Pieces, set to three different compositions by Philip Glass. When New York City Ballet first danced this, the New York Times’ critic Anna Kisselgoff called it “a work that succeeds in taking ballet into a brave new world.” That brave new world had already been forged by contemporary choreographers working out of lower Manhattan, choreographers like Laura Dean and Lucinda Childs, both of whom had close ties with the Minimalist movement. Robbins' dance is hardly minimal; how could it be with a cast of more than 40? But the first and second sections, in particular, are, like Minimalism with a capital M, about patterns, order and randomness. As the dance begins, and the lights go up on a back drop that looks like a piece of graph paper, the dancers stride across the stage, one by one. They are busy urbanites, late for appointments, alone in their multitudinous humanity. Into their midst, one by one, come sleek, unitard-clad couples. Their physical appearance, and their pas de deux, seem to slice through the disconnected crowd.
The dance’s second section echos this theme of contrasts. One by one, silhouetted against a blue backdrop, a line of women emerges from stage right. They are a ticker-tape of bodies, performing a robotic series of gestures and movements, cogs in the machine, never stopping. Into this physical drone bursts a couple, Carla Korbes and Batkhurel Bold. These two principal dancers have been frequent partners over the past two seasons, and their partnership has developed onstage heat. Bold, so big and dark, seethes with an intensity that he rarely displayed in past years. Korbes, pale and blond, matches Bold’s strength and skill. Their duet in front of the human assembly line only points out an ongoing struggle between technological progress and the cry to be a unique human being.
Glass Piece’s third section is less successful than the first two segments of the dance. The music, excerpted from the composer’s opera Akhnaten, is more muscular, and so is the choreography. Lines of men, then women accumulate on stage. They strut, twirl, coalesce and break apart. These movements must be spot on, like the music, to be fully successful. For the most part, the corps de ballet was successful, but there were a few obvious lapses.
The music ends, the applause fades away and the dancers take their last bows. You are left to ponder the experience. It’s too simplistic to say “I laughed, I cried, I was moved.” And yet, that was true. Director’s Choice is a program with such variety of emotion, of music, of movement that it reminded me of the best box of chocolates: salt caramels, decadent dark truffles, chocolate-dipped cherries. It was delicious, and varied, and satisfying.
