ALICE

Chapter One. Down the Rabbit Hole. Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting and of having nothing to do.

That’s the very familiar beginning to a very new artwork. Because while many of us have been sitting around with nothing to do most of this year, local dancers have been hard at work. Seattle Dance Collective and Pacific Northwest Ballet have both created some of my favorite dances during the pandemic, and last week they added one more: ALICE.

About ALICE

ALICE is a coproduction of Seattle Dance Collective and Pacific Northwest Ballet. To my knowledge, PNB hasn’t done that sort of thing before, but I’m sure it helped that SDC’s directors are also dancers in PNB. The choreographer, Penny Saunders, worked with SDC last summer to create their first digital release, Home. And while creating the film ALICE, she was also staging another new work for PNB’s digital season entitled Wonderland. More on that later.

The Zoom-choreographed ALICE was mostly shot inside My Little White House, a 170 square foot studio with lots of mirrored surfaces. It helped create the sense that the dance occurs after the dancer, Noelani Pantastico, followed the instructions on the EAT ME label and grew large. It also made for challenging filming logistics. At about nine minutes, the piece took more than a day to film using two iPhones, with Saunders and director Bruno Roque crammed behind the cameras and away from mirrors.  

ALICE and Wonderland

Saunders also created a companion piece for Pacific Northwest Ballet’s digital season entitled Wonderland. Pantastico also made fleeting appearances in that piece. The two pieces are a pair. But they are a pair like the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, not like Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Michael Wall did the music for both (as well as for Home) but it wasn’t the same music. For ALICE, the score was dominated by a robotic voice reading not-so-random passages from the book.

There were some mutual references in the costumes (reversed suits, a red gown) but since both dances made use of very different spaces, the movements themselves were also very different. ALICE was a much more literal interpretation of the story. It played with scale in ways that mimic the book, while creating a sense of quarantine claustrophobia.

Wonderland, appropriate to its title, focused on location. It was about the theater, a place of wonder, and it evoked some of the loneliness Alice felt when lost in the forest, as well as a nostalgia for live performances, much like the nostalgia for childhood the book often inspires. Besides the parallels, the most direct connection among the three pieces was the sense of the surreal (also a dominant feeling of real life this year).  

Me and Alice

On the one hand, I’m primed to love this piece. Alice in Wonderland is a childhood favorite of mine. I memorized “The Jabberwocky” in fifth grade. Using my annotated collector’s illustrated hardback, I memorized “The Walrus and the Carpenter” with my kids a few years ago in lieu of reading bedtime stories. The book even published on my birthday in 1865. On the other hand, like a friend of mine who loved Tolkien so much she named her son for one of his characters, my love for the story makes me hold very high standards for interpretations of it. But unlike my friend, who hated the Peter Jackson movies, I adore ALICE.

Details

World Premiere November 9, 2020 online
Choreography: Penny Saunders
Directed & filmed: Bruno Roque
Music: Michael Wall
Dancer: Noelani Pantastico

Available for viewing on the Seattle Dance Collective website, Vimeo, or embedded below.

{Alas, Wonderland is no longer available for streaming. But ALICE is free for all viewers. If you enjoy the piece and have the means, please consider donating to Seattle Dance Collective so that the show can go on again next summer. To see PNB’s upcoming digital productions purchase season tickets for access to PNB’s virtual programming like I did. You can do that here.}