The Seasons by Val Caniparoli

Music: Alexander Glazunov

This was an odd neo-classical ballet. Dryads and Satyr dance around in a loose story about the transition of the seasons. The definition component were the wavy arm motions throughout. While it's good to see new kinds of choreography, and it did work a few times, the wavy arms were overused to the point that they turned comical and we were laughing to ourselves when they reappeared.

Mopey by Marco Goecke

Music: Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach and The Cramps

A teenage-angsty fun solo performance. It's a great piece for solo male dancer. We've seen it three times and each time the transition from the classical music to The Cramps' "Surfin' Bird" is a well-timed jump of energy for the performer and audience.

I think I've seen it enough for a while, though. A break of two years should be good.

Petit Mort by Jiri Kylian

Music: Mozart

This ballet is set apart by its props. Guys have foils that they balance and bend. The Ladies have large black dresses on wheels. It's fun with some unusual choreography.

Diana Szeinblum's Alaska

An interesting and mildly engaging piece. With all the hype and writeups we had heard before we saw this piece, along with the sold-out crowd, I had expected something much more substantive.

It was mostly interesting to watch, but didn't really say anything and the dancing wasn't very innovative. Not all that different from many other middle-of-the-road performances we've seen by others. It did have some nice live music accompanying.

This show will be available to watch online in January when OtBTV premieres. Here's a 2-minute excerpt.

Maillot's Roméo et Juliette

Pacific Northwest Ballet

Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Choreography: Jean-Christophe Maillot
Scenic Design: Ernest Pignon-Ernest

The second performance we've seen in two years.
I think it may be my favorite full-length story ballet.
I like the light and shadow on the white set pieces and how the set moves and lighting shifts to create different spaces throughout the performance.
The story has a very good balance of passion and comedy.

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.

Balanchine's Jewels

Jewels is a ballet by the well-known choreographer George Balanchine. From the program:

"Balanchine's unique Jewels, made for New York City Ballet in 1967, is a three-act plotless ballet and the first of its kind."

Each "act", which in truth are more each like their own one-act piece, was created with a particular jewel in mind: Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds. While I can't remember exactly which one, I know we've seen at least one of these three acts on its own at some point over the past few years, as part of an evening of short pieces.

A little bit about Balanchine: Because both the current director Peter Boal (who was a student of Balanchine) and the previous long-time directors Kent Stowell and Francia Russell(who both danced for Balanchine) are strongly associated with this choreographer, a large number of the ballets Chad and I have seen at the PNB have been Balanchine works. He has defined much of what is now known as modern American ballet, and we have never seen a Balanchine work we did not like. As far as we've been able to tell, his ballets stand out from those of other choreographers primarily due to their strong musicality. That probably sounds strange to anyone who's never seen ballet, but in truth, alot of ballet does not have movement which goes right along with the music in the way that you expect something called "dance" to do. The other primary defining style for me is his obvious innovative experimentation with the ballet form, while still staying within the confines of what most of us traditionally think of when we think the word "ballet".

We got a unique opportunity for Jewels that we've never experienced before: we were invited to watch the dress rehearsal. Not only was this interesting because we got to see the dancers warm up onstage for their pieces before performing them (amusing especially for the incongruous combination of fancy dress costumes with leg warmers, warm-up pants, and sweatshirts), but it let us see the performance twice in the same week, each with a different set of principal dancers. I think seeing it this way changed the experience by deepening it. I believe I was able to pay much more attention to all the small details that I might not otherwise notice had I only seen the piece once.

One of those details that was very prominent in Emeralds was the unique use of arm movements. In traditional ballet, the arm movements are usually very specific and mostly seem to be there to put a finishing touch on the featured movement of the legs and body. But in Emeralds, the arm movements were themselves an important expressive part of the dance, and often seemed to be even more featured than the leg movements. The effect overall was very beautiful.

My personal favorite of the evening was Rubies, which has a Stravinsky score and is described in the program as "the American heart of Jewels." While it maintained all the essential ballet tradition in general, it was fun and obviously influenced by jazz style in the same manner Stravinsky's score was. While all of the costumes for Jewels (designed by Karinska, see my note below) are great, those for Rubies are especially interesting and fun, in many vibrant shades of red and a sort of modified flapper meets All-American Revue that really helped to draw attention and enhance the jazzy movements.

I liked Diamonds too, but not as much as the other two. This one was much more rooted in traditional ballet, and had alot of what seemed like very difficult technical dancing. There was quite a bit of spontaneous applause during and after the execution of alot of the crazy complicated spins and leaps involved during this act.

Factoid: Some very interesting history I learned from the program was about the costume designer Karinska, who was a longtime collaborator with Balanchine and is known as "one of the great dance costumers of the twentieth century." She was responsible for creating 9,000 costumes for the New York City Ballet, and even costumed 11 movies in the 40s and 50s, including Ingrid Bergman's Joan of Arc costume. Besides being a major influence on many other performing arts costumes of her era, she was responsible for two of the major costume design changes that have become standards in ballet today. One was the "powder-puff" tutu, which instead of the weird sticks-out-in-the-air pancake style that older ballets used, drapes softly onto the hips and bounces nicely when the dancers move.The other standard she created was the very modern-looking knee-length chiffon ballet dress.