Tanja Liedtke's construct

Construct was an incredibly dynamic, athletic and precise dance performance. It loosely followed a chronology of growing up and featured scenes of that in quick succession. What struck me was how precise the dancing and choreography was.

An early scene featured one dancer trying to prop up the other two who were stiff, tippy and jointed like mannequins. He eventually gets an electric drill and starts bolting and adjusting the limbs of the other two. The coordination of the movements were amazing. He would point at a knee and, without actually touching, the dancer's knee would turn and bend resulting in their whole body tumbling. This kind of finely tuned interaction continued throughout.

The overall style of almost mechanistic movement reminds me of Kidd Pivot and I very much like that.

Jerome Robbins' West Side Story Suite

Jerome Robbins was the choreographer for the original 1957 Tony-award-winning production of West Side Story, the well known Broadway classic that was turned into a musical movie in 1961. In 1995, Robbins extracted a sequence of dances from the musical to make this ballet suite for the New York City Ballet.

While in this form Chad, unfamiliar with the storyline, found it difficult to grasp what the story was fully about, the dancing was all nonetheless engaging and suprisingly still felt very current if you didn't mind the datedness of the wardrobe. The issues of street life and racial tensions that it addressed are still very much with us, and the choreography still expressed these difficult issues in a way that felt relevant and interesting.

Update: We saw this again on 11/6/2009
I (Chad) was able to follow the store better the second time. While it is odd to have ballet dancers singing, it was pulled off mostly well and I enjoyed it better this time.

Susan Stroman's TAKE FIVE ... More or Less

Chad and I first saw this piece last year as part of PNB's Laugh Out Loud! Festival. It was a favorite of ours then, and it was equally enjoyable the second time around.

Based on the interesting and enjoyable music of Dave Brubeck's Take Five and Paul Desmond's Blue Rondo a la Turk and Strange Meadow Lark, this is an engaging piece choreographed for 11 dancers. Very energetic, complicated, and musical, with plenty of interesting visual elements.

Balanchine's Slaughter on Tenth Avenue

We saw this as part of an evening of short works at PNB's Broadway Festival.

Balanchine originally choreographed this piece for the 1936 Rogers and Hart musical On Your Toes. In 1967 he made a ballet with new choreography but with the same general concept for the New York City Ballet.

Slaughter on Tenth Avenue is a ballet-within-a-ballet, which itself tells a story of a strip joint and a customer who falls in love with the boss' girl. In the larger ballet, a jealous premier danseur has hired a mobster to kill his rival during the premiere of Slaughter. PNB made use of the lower boxes and enacting the mob setup outside the curtain to set the story up.

They also showed a bit of a movie version of Slaughter on a giant movie screen before the beginning of the performance, which was interesting for historical perspective.

The performance itself was catchy and fun.

Christopher Wheeldon's Carousel (A Dance)

Christopher Wheeldon created this piece in 2002 while he was resident choreographer for the New York City Ballet. We saw its Seattle premiere as part of an evening of short works at PNB's Broadway Festival. It is a reinterpretation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1945 musical of the same name, a story about the ill-fated marriage of a carnival barker to a young woman who works in a mill.

While the ballet is based on the story, it is not really a story ballet. It was really more of a thematic and emotional riff on the relationship of the two young lovers and the difficulties they faced living in two different worlds.

I found this ballet particularly visually striking, especially the interesting tensions it created using the corps as a swirling and frustrating barrier of society, people, and movement, always getting between the two as they reached to connect with one another. One very striking scene had the dancers holding poles to simulate the carousel itself, while the couple tried to find moments of connection while mostly being blocked by the swirling carousel.

This is the 3rd piece of Wheeldon's to enter PNB's repertory, the first 2 being Polyphonia and Variations Serieuses.

The Seafarer by Conor McPherson

A Seattle Rep production by Conor McPherson of a contemporary Faust tale set in a poor Irish fishing town.