Transition by Reggie Watts & Tommy Smith

This was a great, fun, energetic, and thought-provoking evening that included musings on romance, race, and the dis-humanity of our ever increasingly technologized lives, as well as wildly creative music (including of course, a love song to Sasquatch), and many very funny homages to 80s pop culture.

For me this evening was a perfect balance of message and entertainment, allowing us to enjoy thoughtful ideas with plenty of sweetness, never crossing the line to either pointless spectacle nor overly-serious artyness.

The 39 Steps adapted by Patrick Barlow

Seattle Repertory Theatre


A zany spy thriller with Pythonesque humour. Lots of fun stagecraft with a train chase, shadow play and two actors playing about a dozen characters, some in the same scene.

Doesn't amount to much, though.

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.