More of PNB@Home Rep 1

I can never curb my enthusiasm over a good night out at the ballet. I didn’t expect to have the same problem with a virtual ballet performance. But the first program of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s digital 2020-2021 season was just as good as anything I’ve seen live. Of course there are trade-offs, but I discovered that recorded ballet can be worth buying tickets to. And as much as I loved what I saw in Act 1 of Rep 1, Act 2 topped it.

Mopey

Filmed October 2020
Choreographer: Marco Goecke
Composer: C.P.E. Bach and The Cramps
Dancer: James Moore

Mopey is one of my favorite ballets of all time. I’ve seen it three times now, and every time I see something new. The first time was at PNB before I started blogging. The second time was up close and personal at Seattle Dance Collective’s first program in the tiny Vashon Arts theater. And now, I’ve seen PNB’s recorded version. Moore danced the piece all three times. The first time, the title, hoodie, punk music and self-flagellation all put me in mind of teenage angst. Last year I noticed that the contrast between the angular movements and softer, more elegant sections; and contrast between the classical and punk portions of the score was leavened by silence. The story was more complex than I had thought.

With the close-up detail provided by the camera making even the movement of fingertips clear, this time an armpit scratch made me notice a bunch of ape-like or monkey movements. It made me think of the piece as less about an individual’s maturation, and more about our unsteady progress as a species.  

The camera also added its own elements to the piece. At times, Moore’s arms moved so fast they left a visual trail in the video. It was used as an effect in a Bruce Lee movie, and after that I noticed a bunch of elements from martial arts forms that – well, how the hell did I miss that before?! But even without referencing anything else, those after-images worked perfectly with the piece. They belonged there.

The Calling

Filmed August 2020
Choreographer: Jessica Lang
Composer: Anonymous
Dancer: Dylan Wald

I never thought I’d see a male ballet solo that compared to Mopey. And maybe I was right, because The Calling is more of a complement than a comparable; it’s the yin to Mopey’s yang. I’ve heard of this ballet before, and I’ve seen pictures of it. PNB performed it in 2015, and I have no idea how I missed it, since I had season tickets that year. But it’s a tragedy that I did. I never want to miss an opportunity to watch this ballet again.

I expected it to be gimmicky. It’s essentially a stationary ballet because the dancer is nearly immobilized by a giant skirt spread in a perfect circle around him on the floor. So even if it wasn’t cheesy, I expected any merit to be in the technical challenge – like telling a poet to write a sonnet devoid of the letter “s”. But The Calling is transcendent. When I was a student in Catholic school, I used to laugh at liturgical dance (and what I saw of it was pretty cringey). The Calling feels like something sacred, a ritual performed in ancient temples.

Usually there’s a particular performance that brings a dancer to my attention, and after that I always notice them. But I sort of gradually became aware of Dylan Wald over the last couple seasons, especially after he joined Seattle Dance Collective with a bunch of my favorite dancers. After watching him in Home I remember thinking, “Why haven’t I paid more attention to him before? He’s a really good dancer.” In The Calling he looked like a god on a Grecian urn brought to life. I feel like from now on, anything he dances in will have a touch of the divine.

The Trees The Trees

Filmed October 2020
Pas de Deux
Choreographer: Robyn Mineko Williams
Composer: Kyle Vegter
Dancers: Elle Macy & Dylan Wald

So here’s a thing you won’t see live – a dancer in a lead role in back-to-back pieces in a mixed rep. Usually, mixed reps are cast to let people catch their breath, but filmed pieces can be recorded whenever and played back-to-back. So here’s a chance to test my theory Dylan the Divine. Did I find The Trees The Trees holy? Not really, but I did enjoy it better than the first time I saw it. That time I loved all the ideas, but I didn’t really feel it. This time it was much easier to just enjoy the beauty of the movement and the connections between the dancers.

There’s always a temptation to attribute a good performance to real life romance. K-drama fans are constantly shipping their favorite drama stars. And Americans have a hard time acknowledging types of physical intimacy besides that one. But there are a lot of couples in PNB, and most of the time, they aren’t partnered with each other on stage. A lot of the pairs who are most frequently partnered on stage are in relationships with different dancers (or nondancers) offstage.

But during quarantine, dancers who live together dance together, and fortunately Dylan Wald and Elle Macy really do move beautifully together.  

Red Angels

Filmed October 2020
Final Movement
Choreographer: Ulysses Dove
Composer: Richard Einhorn

Ugh. I love Red Angels so much. It’s as nasty as The Calling is nice, and just as far outside the mundane world. Those two ballets could perch on your shoulders and vie for power. Mopey would be the result. Even with just the final movement, Red Angels is captivating and unsettling. From Vivaldi to Charlie Daniels, there’s no better example of the demonic side of violin music than “Maxwell’s Demon.” As with Mopey, the video version could hardly keep up with the dancers, creating visual artifacts of sweeping arcs, especially of Amanda Morgan’s infinite limbs. Dance is often transcendent, but it’s a rare performance that can travel from heaven to hell and make the viewer glad to be left there.

Community

Live performance is a form of communication – you might even say communion. A recording can never truly capture the dancers’ energy the way it is felt by an audience. Dancers in an empty auditorium don’t get the immediate feedback of a live audience and viewers at home will never share a collective gasp at a breathtaking life or break into spontaneous applause as Odile reaches her 32^nd fouetté. I thought that lack of community was just what you traded for a comfy couch instead of auditorium seats.

But this program ended with a violin solo performed by PNB Orchestra concertmaster Michael Jinsoo Lim. The piece composed by his wife, violist Melia Watras in homage to the music of Swan Lake, performed earlier in this program. It was a powerful piece that also, to me, evoked the music of Red Angels and the Bach Chaconne I heard in American Gods on the same screen the night before. The inhouseness of the work reminded me of the community that is connected through this art while the referential nature of it reminded me of the bigger community of all of us who are alone in this garbage fire of a year together. Listening to it as the credits rolled, I felt like I was part something a little bit bigger than a stampede for the parking lot.  

Details

Rep 1 is available through full-season subscriptions ($190) and individual tickets ($29-$39) exclusively through the PNB Box Office only through Monday, October 19. Rep 2 will post November 12.

{I purchased season tickets for access to PNB’s virtual programming, and after watching the Rep 1, I highly recommend that you do, too. You can do that here.}