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Pacific Northwest Ballet is starting their 2019/2020 season with a powerful pair of 20^th century ballets: George Balanchine’s Agon and Kent Stowell’s Carmina Burana. Paired with crowd-pleaser Carmina Burana, Agon tends to be a bit overlooked. But as any reader of fiction knows, it’s never a good idea to overlook the quiet ones.  

Pure Dance

As I mentioned before Agon is a dancers’ dance. It’s contemporary ballet stripped down to the essentials. There is no sense of narrative or even character. The dancers wear black leotards with white tights or white ones with black pants. There are no sets and even the lighting is straightforward.

With nothing else going on, you are forced to concentrate on the movement, which does not lend itself to interpretation. Agon is really about geometry – dancers move through lines and angles ending in interesting shapes at pauses in the music. It’s like the world’s most beautiful math class. Agon gives us surprise and asymmetry rather where classical ballet offers harmonious balance and satisfied expectations.

Challenging Music

Stravinsky said he was inspired by a 17^th century manual of French court dances when he wrote the music for Agon. I will have to take his word for it, because I can’t find the sonic connection. The program booklet describes the score as a

…fiendishly – and to him [Balanchine], delectably – difficult score

-Jeanie Thomas, PNB program

I’m not sure about delectable, but it is certainly difficult for the listener. I’m open-minded – I don’t think music has to be pretty. In fact, I’m listening to the new Blood Red Throne as I write this. Even so, I would have to say the music of Agon is rather more grating than challenging.

I would never listen to this without the accompanying ballet. But that’s okay, because the two were (literally) made for each other, and the score would be pointless without the ballet. When people first start watching ballet, they often expect each physical movement to tightly bound to each musical note, as if the dance were the literal physical translation of the music into movement. As much as it is physically possible to do so, Agon actually does this. It’s like the section of Fantasia where the oboe is a squiggly, pink line.

Intellectual Humor

So, yeah, Agon is a ballet more for the head than the heart. But surprisingly, it also has a lot of humor. Scattered throughout all the dramatic and elegant shapes are movements that are just – silly. Granted, the opening night audience was pretty high-energy (Artistic Director Peter Boal even commented “We got the party crowd tonight” when he came out on stage to address the audience) but chuckles rippled through the audience several times during Agon. Sometimes they were in response to funny movements like prissy little hand waves while walking en pointe. But sometimes the laughter expressed sheer delight and surprise, like when Lesley Rausch moved from a classic ended up in this iconic pose in a movement so quick audiences could hardly see how she got there.

Agon may be a heady ballet, but it has a little heart, too.

Details

Music: Igor Stravinsky
Choreography: George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust
Staging: Francia Russell
Lighting Design: Randall G. Chiarelli
Running Time: 30 minutes

Premiere: December 1, 1957; New York City Ballet
Pacific Northwest Ballet Premiere: March 30, 1993

Remaining Performances

October 3, 4 & 5 at 7:30 PM

October 6 at 1:00 PM

Tickets start at $37, and are available through the PNB Box Office at 206.441.2424, in person at 301 Mercer Street, or online.

Cast I Saw

1st Pas de Trois
Benjamin Griffiths
Elle Macy*
Margaret Mullin

2nd Pas de Trois
Noelani Pantastico
Dylan Wald*
Christopher D’Ariano*

Pas de Deux
Lesley Rausch
Seth Orza

{I attended Carmina Burana/Agon courtesy of Pacific Northwest Ballet. The tickets were theirs; the opinions are mine.}