According to the Oxford English Dictionary, mastery means having superior force or power.To have mastery, then, means to have somebody in your power.Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Artistic Director Peter Boal most definitely had me in his power on the opening evening of the 8th Men in Dance Festival at the Broadway Performance Hall.Boal retired from performance five years ago, when he left his job as a principal dancer at New York City Ballet to take over PNB’s artistic helm, so most Seattleites haven’t had a chance to see him dance.What a shame, because Boal’s solo, Carveresque, choreographed by Spectrum Dance Theater’s Donald Byrd, truly showed us a dance master.
Boal took the stage in unassuming jeans, a blue tee shirt and white sneakers, but as soon as he started to move to Prokofiev’s Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1, he took command of the hall.The smallest details capitvated:a fixed gaze over his shoulder at us, an extension of his arm that stretched his fingers delicately toward the wings, a daisy-chain of pirouettes executed with the perfect lines inculcated over decades of ballet training.Carveresque was a lovely little solo; Boal’s experience and artistry elevated it to a polished gem.What a privelege to watch this true master in his element.
If Peter Boal’s mastery is the sum of his talent and his accumulated experience, choreographer (and Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer) Oliver Wevers’ duet, from a work in progress called Monster, showed us a master in the making.Although he’s been creating new dance for several years, last year Wevers solidified his commiment to to his future as a choreographer when he formed his own dance company, Whim W’him.Monster was performed at the Men in Dance festival by two of Wevers’ PNB colleagues, Lucien Postelwaite and Andrew Bartee.A pas de deux about longing, attraction, love and shame, the performance was dedicated to the victims of homophobic bullying who recently took their own lives.Postelwaite and Bartee, in red shorts and socks and grey shirts, were a couple pulled to one another by passion, driven apart by a shame they struggled to transcend.The men seemed to cuddle up, one man’s back up against the other’s chest. Spooned together, they moved across the stage, then broke apart, palms shielding their faces from an unseen, perhaps unfriendly, witness to their passion.With music by Max Richter, and festival lighting design by Meg Fox, Monster was a moving combination of technical prowess, artistic power, and emotional wallop.Whim W’him premieres the full dance in January, 2011.
The opening night of Men in Dance offered eight other works, from Alia Swersky’s site-specific pre-show sextet Small Spaces to Deborah Wolf’s premiere Frattura. PNB corps de ballet member Barry Kerollis’ Cypher and Wade Madsen’s 1982 work Breath of Light were highlights of the program’s first half.But for me, the evening’s indelible image was a man in his mid-40’s, showing us all how it’s done.Peter Boal, a master.
