All Premiere at Pacific Northwest Ballet

All Premiere is the second program of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 2018-2019 season. In contrast to the Jerome Robbins Festival, which was a unique sort of double feature, All Premiere is an annual tradition at PNB. Every year, PNB does one program of all new ballets. Sometimes they are literally brand new, and sometimes they are just new to PNB. Usually there’s some of both. Like Director’s Choice, you can count on All Premiere to feature some of the most interesting and innovative contemporary ballet available. This year was no exception in being exceptionally good.

Why Premiere?

In a way, an all-premiere program is kind of insider-y. If you go to the ballet all the time, it won’t take very many seasons before you start seeing some repeats. For those folks, an all-premiere night is a special treat offering the rare chance for an entire evening of ballets you’ve never seen before.

But if just going to the ballet at all is a special treat for you, the odds are good that everything you see will be new to you anyway. If you hardly ever go to the ballet, or you’re just trying it out, why take the risk of seeing a bunch of untested material? Why not wait for a classic like Swan Lake?

The classics are famous for a reason, and there’s nothing wrong with sticking to them if that’s your style. All Premiere is a gamble (at least, if you don’t already know how your taste aligns with artistic director Peter Boal’s). But the flip side to a gamble is the potential payoff. You get to start at the cutting edge of contemporary ballet; and you might just get to say, “Oh, yeah, I saw that super-famous ballet when it premiered.”

As for me, I already know that I like the choices Boal makes in programming new works. But this year he really outdid himself.

Overview

As anyone who has ever hosted a party can imagine, there are so many things that go into putting together a full evening ballet program. Many of them are not even visible to the audience – like don’t perform ballets en pointe after dancing barefoot. Sometimes in a mixed rep program there are obvious themes, or a natural emotional or stylistic progression. This year’s All Premiere program might be the most eclectic I’ve ever seen. Rather than following any sort of thread, it seemed like the program played with scale and focus. It moved from the cosmic to the intimately personal, and then backed away from emotion to offer an ironic bit of perspective on the arts world.

But it wasn’t disjointed. There were a few commonalities – for example, lighting design was really prominent in all three pieces, and musicians were not always stuck in the pit. There was also an emphasis on community. It was on stage a little bit in the way that the dances referenced more familiar works: echoes of Crystal Pite’s Emergence were felt in the sense of scale of the first piece, and in the costumes of the third one. The wry humor in that one was reminiscent of an earlier work by the choreographer of the second ballet.

But mostly it showed up in the credits. Audience Education Manager Doug Fullington (who also directs Seattle’s Tudor Choir – who knew?) stepped onto the rostrum to conduct the orchestra for the third ballet. The first ballet featured the Pacific Lutheran University Choral Union; the elaborate lighting design was by PNB stage crew member Reed Nakayama; the costumes were by PNB principal dancer Elizabeth Murphy, who also runs a small dancewear company. And of course, it was also choreographed by PNB soloist Kyle Davis.

Aside

Honestly, it’s a little intimidating how much creative energy all these people have. Every one of them is impressive enough for their primary accomplishments, which take more talent and commitment than most people have. Yet they all find time to manage side gigs. What, prima ballerina isn’t enough?

{Another Aside: PNB’s website states that the program contains profanity and is suggested for audiences ages 13 and up. I brought my nine-year-old, and neither of us noticed any profanity. But we don’t care much about language in my house, so we don’t tend to notice when lines are crossed that other people do care about. There was a suggestive use of a cactus. My daughter didn’t notice but consider yourself warned.}

A Dark and Lonely Space

Music: Michael Giacchino (Jupiter Ascending Symphony, 2013-2015, rev. 2017)
Choreography: Kyle Davis
Scenic and Lighting Design:  Reed Nakayama
Costume Design: Elizabeth Murphy
Duration: 45 minutes
World Premiere: Pacific Northwest Ballet November 2, 2018

The name seems a bit ironic, considering how much this ballet was produced in-house by colleagues. But there was absolutely nothing homespun about it. A Dark and Lonely Space uses the soundtrack from a sci-fi movie. It keeps to the outer space theme, dealing with nothing less than the birth of a planetary system. The cosmic scope is evidenced not just in the dramatic music. There’s a full cast, full orchestra, a soprano soloist hovering over the stage, and a choir of something like 60 singers tucked into the boxes at the side of the house so that the music is literally immersive.

Davis has choreographed several pieces before, but this is his first piece for the PNB mainstage. You wouldn’t know it. Like Crystal Pite, he took the “go big or go home” approach to this opportunity to use the whole Company. In theme and execution, I feel like A Dark and Lonely Space will take its place in the ranks of epics like Emergence, Carmina Burana, and State of Darkness.

Silent Ghost

Music: Dustin Hamman, King Creosote & Jon Hopkins, Ólafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm
Choreography: Alejandro Cerrudo
Staging: Pablo Piantino
Lighting Design: Michael Korsch
Costume Design: Branimira Ivanova
Duration: 20 minutes
Premiere: July 10, 2015, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet
Pacific Northwest Ballet Premiere: November 2, 2018

This is the third ballet by Alejandro Cerrudo that PNB has acquired. I saw the first one, Memory Glow, at Director’s Choice in 2014, but I don’t remember it very well. The second one, Little Mortal Jump, blew my mind both times I saw it – first at Director’s Choice in 2016 and again this last April when it was performed with Emergence.

So I was already interested in Cerrudo’s choreography, but I was also excited about the music. Most of the time ballet uses music from the classical music canon. Cerrudo always pulls together disparate recordings that only go together when combined with the dance. Silent Ghost uses music from Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm who are both precious to me. I saw them both at Decibel festival a few years back. It was just as satisfying as I expected to see a ballet set to music I already knew and loved.

How Was It?

Silent Ghost has none of the humor of Little Mortal Jump, but it does have the same indescribable sense that you’ve seen something profound without quite understanding it. To me, it felt like the sort of reverie that you fall into watching the ocean or watching rain outside your window. Usually I make my own narrative watching ballets like this, but this time I was content to just watch the dancers, notice their movements, and let them go – like you are supposed to do with thoughts when you’re meditating. Even watching without attachment, Silent Ghost felt deeply intimate. Not at all romantic, but more like going inside yourself and finding new things where you thought everything was already familiar.

Cacti

Music: Franz Joseph Haydn (Sonate no V “Sitio” from Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze, Hoboken XX, 1B, 1786-1787; Allegro from string quartets Opus 9, no 6 in A major, 1769), Ludwig van Beethoven (String quartet no. 9 in C major, Op. 59, 1808, from Andante con moto quasi allegretto), Franz Schubert (Presto from string quartet Der Tod und das Mädchen, 1824, arranged for orchestra by Andy Stein)
Text: Spenser Theberge
Choreography: Alexander Ekman
Staging: Ana Lucaciu
Scenic Costume Design: Alexander Ekman
Lighting Design: Tom Visser
Duration: 27 minutes
Premiere: February 25, 2010, Nederlands Dans Theater 2
Pacific Northwest Ballet Premiere: November 2, 2018

via GIPHY

From Cerrudo’s deeply personal Ghost the program took a sharp turn to the cheeky with Cacti. Apparently, his frustration with reviewers (which of course instantly makes one very self-conscious when writing about it) was the initial inspiration. Per the program booklet, he says:

Cacti was created during a period of my life when I was very confused and upset every time someone would write about my work. I did not find it fair that one person was going to sit there and sort of decide for everyone what the work was about. I … still question this unfair system mankind has created.

Obviously, I disagree. You make a thing and put it out in the world, and people will have opinions about it. They will share those opinions with others. That is not unfair. That is how culture works. It’s what happens to reviews, too. When one tells people “what the work is about” or just “what I thought about it,” no one is obliged to listen. Which leads to the part where Ekman is totally right. A lot of what people write is total BS.

The recorded “review” that plays during the first part of the dance is a hysterically spot-on mockery of the pseudointellectual analysis that scares newbies away from the arts and hurts creators’ feelings. But reviewers aren’t the only ones full of shit, and I’ve heard the same sort of pap from artists themselves.

But is it Good?

Cacti hits the mark because Ekman wisely broadened the target to include all the fine arts nonsense. Ekman gives us the dancers’ prosaic inner monologue and movements stuffed with contemporary dance clichés like audible breathing and percussive slaps; running in place; awkward still poses under stark spotlights; nude-looking costumes; and mystifying props. The dancers start out “imprisoned” on top of little boxes. Later, they appear carrying potted cactus plants.

The recorded voice describes the boxes in Dio-esque oxymorons then intones, “but the beating heart of the work is the cacti.”

It’s LOL-worthy, but can the reviewer be blamed for thinking there must be meaning behind something so bizarre?

Even a good joke will only get you so far. Just like any comedy, the trick to Cacti is the timing. The dancers are often tightly synchronized in their ridiculous posturing, keeping time with both the recorded narrative and the music. Sometimes that music is the orchestra, and sometimes it’s a string quartet that walks around the stage interacting with the dancers or just getting in their way. There are so many moving parts that watching them fit together has some of the same fascination as a Rube Goldberg device or In the middle, somewhat elevated.

Tickets

The remaining performances are:

November 8 – 10 at 7:30 pm

November 11 at 1:00 pm

Tickets may be purchased online. Subject to availability, tickets are also available 90 minutes prior to each performance at McCaw Hall – these tickets are half-price for students and seniors; $5 for TeenTix members. If you are between ages 20-40, sign up for ThePointe to receive discounts.

{I attended All Premiere courtesy of Pacific Northwest Ballet. Opinions, as always, are my own.}