Her Story at Pacific Northwest Ballet

“You never take me to the modern ballets,” my 8-year-old complained. “I only get to go to the story ballets.” Was she right? Conventional wisdom tells us to introduce kids to ballet through story, but I’ve never really bought it. After all, little kids are far more likely to spontaneously erupt into abstract dance than adults are, so why would they have a harder time understanding it? But as a reviewer, I do tend to take the kid closest to the age that readers are likely to want to bring, so maybe my artistic younger daughter had been unfairly sequestered in the story ballet ghetto? Fortunately, Pacific Northwest Ballet came to rescue with Her Story, a mixed rep of contemporary ballet choreographed by three of the world’s leading choreographers. The title implied a feminist theme, but the only link between the three pieces is that the choreographers are all women, and all three pieces are magnificent.

Her Door to the Sky

Music: Benjamin Britten (Simple Symphony, Op. 4, 1933-1934)
Choreography: Jessica Lang
Scenic Design: Jessica Lang
Costume Design: Bradon McDonald
Lighting Design: Nicole Pearce
Assistant to the Choreographer: Clifton Brown
Duration: 21 minutes
Premiere: August 24, 2016 (Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Becket, Massachusetts)

Of the three, this one was the most conventionally pretty. I always hesitate to use that phrase, at it smacks of faint praise. But that was the phrase I used when I first saw this piece in March (it seems so much longer ago than that) and after all, beauty is usually the thing that draws us to ballet. In March, I thought the execution was a little rough, but this time everything was completely smoothed out and the performance was as silken and fluid as the full, colorful skirts on the dancers.

Sometimes it’s tempting to skip repeat performances, because ticket money is limited, and we want to see new things, but I’m always struck by how different art is every time you witness it. This time I didn’t particularly notice the floor work and lifts that impressed me in March. Perhaps because this time I was with my daughter, who was intentionally exploring non-narrative dance for the first time, impressions were related to framing.

“Her Door to the Sky” is inspired by Georgia O’Keefe’s Patio Door series. The set resembles a stucco wall with a large, central window/door and a row of ground-level smaller squares. This assemblage of windows quite literally frames the “story” of the dance. Faces appear behind the low windows, lifts place dancers inside the square of the big window. Vignettes pause in front of it. At times I imagined the dance from the back side of the wall. A viewer outside the patio door would see many of the best moments of the piece, and hints of much of the action as dancers passed in front of it. What they would see would be intriguing, but they would still miss so much. In the ballet, we are privileged to share the patio with the dancers while so often the stories we see in real life are viewed from outside the wall.

Last year, my daughter’s second grade art teacher taught a unit on O’Keefe, and focused on that series instead of the more famous flowers. I still have my daughter’s watercolor of a ladder a la mode O’Keefe. Since her teacher is a dancer, I assumed it was related to PNB’s premiere of Lang’s ballet, but it turned out to be coincidence. In any case, it gave my daughter a leg up in recognizing the colors and shapes of the dance. Interestingly, she found a narrative in the ballet. She told me it was about sisters. The sisters often competed, but the oldest, “the pink one” was ultimately in charge.

Afternoon Ball

Music: Vladimir Martynov (Autumn Ball of the Elves, 1994)
Choreography: Twyla Tharp
Assistant to the Choreographer: Charlie Neshyba-Hodges
Scenic and Lighting Design: Randall G. Chiarelli
Costume Design: Mark Zappone
Duration: 19 minutes
Premiere: September 25, 2008; Pacific Northwest Ballet

Twyla Tharp’s “Afternoon Ball” gives us characters without narrative, although with characters, there is always an element of narrative, since you can’t be any certain way without doing something. The booklet describes it as a portrait of a lost generation, and the costumes indicate that generation is mine. Three Gen X’ers dressed in flannel, ripped fishnets, and cargo pants, perform separate, self-absorbed solos.

I thought my daughter would love Tharp’s irreverent style and the way her movements seem to derive directly from the body rather than any canon of balletic style. Even at her darkest, Tharp’s dances look like fun. But instead, she felt like there was a story she couldn’t figure out. She was frustrated by not knowing what it was all “about.” Meanwhile, I got caught up in a story that wasn’t there.

I’ve been reading the graphic novel series Nana, and the punk aesthetic of this ballet fits it so neatly, I read a Nana narrative into the piece. Sometimes Nana (Angelica Generosa) and Ren (Benjamin Griffiths) come together in a pas de deux, but even then, they are too caught up in themselves. They end up competing or actively hurting each other. Sometimes Nobu (Lucien Postlewaite) comes and shares their space, but he’s a third wheel and he keeps falling on his face. Once, in a slow, careful arabesque, he seems to get his shit together and fly straight for a moment before the other dancers knock him back down.

In the second half an elegant couple waltz in like Morticia and Gomez Addams. Is their love Ren’s dream of a grown-up future? A memory of a happier childhood? At the last moment, Nobu pulls it together enough to rescue Nana. They flee the stage and Ren dies alone, freezing in the gutter.

Plot Point

Music: Bernard Herrmann (from Psycho, 1960), with additional soundtrack by Owen Belton
Choreography: Crystal Pite
Staging: Sandra Marin Garcia
Scenic Design: Jay Gower Taylor
Costume Design: Nancy Bryant
Lighting Design: Alan Brodie
Duration: 32 minutes
Premiere: April 22, 2010; Nederlands Dans Theater
Pacific Northwest Ballet Premiere: November 3, 2017

Sometimes life is as perfectly scripted as the movies. Like taking a third grader to find out what non-narrative ballet is like, and seeing a ballet about storytelling. Using music from the soundtrack to Psycho, Pite explores the technical process of storytelling. Video projections label pivot points in Campbell’s Hero’s Journey – inciting incident, binding point, crisis – in a rough outline. Then she storyboards with faceless character types. At first, the storyboards foreshadow the action, followed by the actual characters’ fleshed out scenes. But eventually the lines are blurred and the storyboard dancers begin to interfere in the main action – the story starts to tell itself, maybe, or the storyboards begin to control their characters, physically forcing them to act – have they become the dancers’ motivation? Like Hitchcock, Pite moves back and forth in time, so the viewer must try to piece together the timeline. What connection do the couples at the party have with the heist? What happens to bring the birthday girl to suicidal despair? Fight scenes with movie sound effects elicit uncomfortable laughs. Unfortunately, my daughter didn’t get the reference when the double-crossing Celia (Noelani Pantastico) turns towards the audience and sees the storyboard conductor. She screams in horror as the orchestra plays the most recognizable riff in cinema history. Guns are brandished so often that the actual, final gunshot comes as a shock.

I fell instantly in love with Crystal Pite the first time I saw one of her dances, Emergence, and my passion has only deepened with Plot Point. Like a great Hitchcock movie, the clues and motivations are all there, but so subtly hinted that it takes multiple viewings to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, I could only see it once this season, but incomplete understanding didn’t stop me and my daughter from an involved discussion of ballet and story. My daughter had her doubts about the appropriateness of ballet dancers using their voices during a performance. “That’s not ballet!” she complained. I’ve certainly seen that choice go wrong in the past, but I loved it here. In the end, my daughter decided that this rep was a bit too abstract for her. She preferred the type of ballet that didn’t have a story, but had a clear theme – something like Jewels.

Wait, I took her to Jewels last month? That’s not a story ballet! I think I got played by an eight-year-old. But since she was playing me for access to the arts, I’m not going to hold it against her.

If I could, I would return to watch every single performance of this piece until I could work out all of the plot points for myself. Even if there isn’t a true “story” to be found, I feel like studying this ballet would make me a better writer.

Remaining Performances

Fri, Nov. 10 at 7:30 pm 

Sat, Nov. 11 at 7:30 pm 

Sun, Nov. 12 at 1:00 pm

Tickets are available online.