Friday Preview of Director’s Choice at Pacific Northwest Ballet

Last Friday, I got to watch a professional ballet rehearsal through PNB’s Friday Previews program. I’m not sure whether the assortment of peripheral ballet experiences has expanded in recent years, or if it’s only my awareness of them. For ages, I religiously attended every Pacific Northwest Ballet rep while studiously avoiding any activities that might increase my knowledge and understanding of ballet. It was some kind of misguided hippie idea about pure experience or something, I don’t know. So I don’t know when Pacific Northwest Ballet started selling tickets to rehearsals, but I’m so glad they did. Last Friday, I attended a Friday Preview of Director’s Choice, and from now on, attending ballet rehearsal is going to be part of my experience of every production.

This wasn’t my first experience of a ballet rehearsal. A few years ago, I wrote an article on the Nutcracker, and as part of my research, PNB graciously allowed me to sit in on rehearsals. In one rehearsal room Ballet Master Paul Gibson rehearsed little soldiers in matching leotards. It resembled a very organized ballet class. Then I sat in the balcony overlooking the main rehearsal room where Artistic Director Peter Boal rehearsed young Claras until the corps stepped in. My ignorant eyes couldn’t tell if they were practicing the snowflakes or the flower petals, despite the piano accompaniment. I relished the chance to see something that is usually forbidden, but without guidance, much of what I saw was lost on me.

Friday Preview

Fast forward to my discovery of Friday Previews. For certain productions, a limited number of general admission tickets are available to watch one hour of rehearsals on the Friday evening before opening night. The final Friday Preview of this season was last week, for Director’s Choice, which opens tonight. Director’s Choice is always among my favorite reps of each season, and it usually includes the pieces that are most challenging (read: exciting) for viewers, so I ponied up $25 for a ticket.

Per the instructions, I showed up at the Phelps Center next to McCaw Hall, which hosts the ballet school and rehearsal studios. I joined a couple dozen people in a waiting room. At five o’clock, we were escorted across the hall to the main rehearsal studio, where three rows of chairs on risers lined one wall of the room. We also had the choice of taking seats in the balcony (the preferred option for parents with fidgety kids). I took a seat in the middle row in the middle of the room.

Unlike the Nutcracker rehearsal I watched, this was no stolen peek behind the curtain. It combined a practical rehearsal with a pre-performance lecture, and greatly expanded my understanding of the pieces I will see tomorrow night.

The rehearsal lasted exactly an hour. I arrived home no later – but so much richer – than most people commuting from a day job

One Flat Thing, explained

First, the stager (whose name I unfortunately missed) introduced One Flat Thing, reproduced. I have seen this one before. Audiences didn’t love it when it premiered here, but I was impressed by the complexity of the movement. It seemed both intricate and unpredictable in relation to classical ballet. Now I know that’s because a lot of the movement is improvised, and every performance is different. The movements that are scripted are not tied to the music or even to a 1,2,3,4 count, but to the movements of other dancers in a complex web. One study (this one? or maybe this one?) mapped the piece and found 300 of these nodes, or connection cues that trigger movement sequences.

Peter Boal and the dancers (who also gave input) used different metaphors to describe the movement – a matrix, because dancers move in the spaces to the sides, under, and above the tables; or dual roles of dancer and conductor, because the dancers are both performing and guiding the performance of others. To me, it sounded like they were physically manifesting what jazz musicians do. Or a day in the life of a modern family, with every person following their own schedule, with some events informing the others and everyone coming together, briefly, at critical junctures.

After the introduction, we watched a few minutes of rehearsal. Only a week from the performance, there was still a lot to work out. One dancer’s butt collided with another’s face; it would have been funny if it hadn’t looked so painful. The dancers kept going, but the stager called a halt. Assured that no noses were broken, they moved on, and we got to see the next 7 minutes as they would appear on stage, until a foot slipped and a dancer tumbled to the floor.

Red Angels

We also got to see parts of Red Angels. Where the emphasis in the first part had been on helping us understand a challenging piece, this part of the preview helped the audience see more of the process behind a (slightly) more traditional piece. Boal was staging this piece himself. He spent equal time explaining background to the audience and correcting the dancers.

Trading Grace for Graciousness

Audiences love ballet for its grace and elegance, but I treasure that beauty more for having glimpsed the work that creates it. The rehearsal room reeked – I’ve smelled fresher martial arts dojos – the dancers were drenched in sweat and from that distance we could see the bruises that covered their legs. Boal confided that dancers around the world favor PNB’s tables for OFTr; dancers in other productions often suffer cuts from the table edges.

I am grateful to the PNB dancers for their generosity. It’s not easy to let strangers watch you learn, especially when presenting a flawless performance is your primary work standard. Besides opening their rehearsal to our voyeurism, the dancers graciously paused in the middle of their work to answer audience questions. Switching gears between doing a thing and reflecting on it is a lot harder than it sounds.

Benefit of Knowledge

Since my earliest days watching the inimitable Patricia Barker, there have always been a few dancers who stood out to me. Usually it was because of a particularly amazing solo role that caught my attention. Sometimes a physical characteristic like skin tone or unusual height makes a dancer easy to spot. Rarely, I can recognize a certain quality of movement in a dancer. One of my goals as a viewer this season has been to learn to recognize more of the dancers. The Friday Preview was great for that; I could recognize dancers’ faces from Instagram. I look forward to seeing how many more dancers I can identify on stage after watching them rehearse up close.

It’s true that you can enjoy ballet with absolutely no education. Good art is powerful even when the viewer doesn’t understand it. Everyone hates the movie critic who hates all the movies, but knowledge doesn’t have to jade the palate. Information can be the MSG that enriches the experience. OFTr is impressive to the untrained eye; when you know what is actually going on, those 14 minutes are mind-blowing.

Details

Director’s Choice was the final Friday Preview of the 2017-18 season. The 2018-19 season has just been announced. Friday Previews haven’t been announced yet, but I plan to attend all of them.

Director’s Choice runs through March 25 at McCaw Hall. Tickets to Director’s Choice are still available online.

{Note: Photography is strictly prohibited in the rehearsal studios so I am using performance photo and video from PNB’s YouTube channel.}