NEXT STEP: IN at Pacific Northwest Ballet

NEXT STEP is Pacific Northwest Ballet’s annual choreographers showcase. NEXT STEP is a one-night-only, all-premiere event with choreography by company dancers, dancing by the PNB School’s Professional Division students, and music by the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra. This year called NEXT STEP: OUTSIDE/IN, the evening began OUTSIDE, with three free performances. The ticketed second part took place IN McCaw Hall.

Prelusion

The IN portion of the evening continued to blur the edges of performance, thanks to collaborations with other dance companies. I missed the note in the program that said,

A work by Bruno Roque for Cornish College of the Arts dance students and 2018 graduates starts the show.

As a result, I was a little confused by the line of dancers entering the auditorium from the side doors. They slowly progressed in front of the orchestra pit and moved about halfway up the aisles before retreating, equally slowly, the way they came. The music, when it started, was a Beethoven-ish harpsichord-y thing.

Even if the cropped hair and shaved heads weren’t a clue that these were not PNB dancers, more than just bare feet stood between these muscular grounded dancers and the bony length of a ballerina. I loved similar “there’s a bug in my shirt” jerky movements in Mopey but in this case it seemed completely divorced from the music. A deliberate choice but I didn’t love it.

Intermission

I was more prepared for the intermission but got confused anyway. Young and fit in matching track pants, white tops and dancer face, the group in the lobby stood out even as they stood still. People of color in a predominantly white crowd, their stony faces looked equal parts protest and performance. A white guy in a polo shirt walked through them (reminiscent of Cardea’s entrance in Picnic) then stopped to talk. They turned and walked away in almost military precision. Was that the performance?

A few minutes later they were back in their original positions, and this time a blast of electronic music instantly transformed stone faces into smiles to impress RuPaul. For a few short minutes the lobby was transformed into disco balls and sunbeams with the contagious, celebratory energy of a dance that seemed to share nothing in common with ballet. Everyone ignored the intermission bell. Then the Purple Lemonade Collective dancers put the lid back on and walked single file through the roaring crowd. I think their performance was delayed due to a technical issue with the sound, but the false start could have been part of the show. I think my favorite thing about NEXT STEP was the feeling that art can appear anywhere, and may actually be everywhere.

On Stage – First Half

I started to write up each dance individually and hit 1,000 words before I reached the intermission. Nobody wants to read that many words about a performance they can’t attend, so I’ll try to sum up.

Looking Through Wonderland by PNB dancer Guillaume Basso was probably my favorite. (I will never not love a bookish ballet.) Even though my misreading of the program confused me at first, you couldn’t fail to recognize Lewis Carroll’s characters. As with Balanchine or Twyla Tharpe, you felt the story even without a true narrative. Every minute of Wonderland was fun and beautiful and I really hope I see it on the main season stage again soon.

Dancer Cecilia Iliesiu’s elegant, graceful pas de deux A Meditation is the fantasy that plays in every little girl’s head when she winds up her musical jewelry box and watches the tiny plastic dancer spin. Like the perfect éclair, it showcases the creator’s technical skill within the bounds of tradition and leaves the recipient sighing in satisfaction, but already dreaming of the next time.

Minutes after performing Donald Byrd’s solo piece as part of the OUTSIDE program, apprentice Christopher D’Ariano watched the world premiere of his own choreography in Youthquake. The Skittles rainbow of costumes evoked the 60’s counterculture that inspired the piece; ongoing Pride Week celebrations; and Appassionata, that we saw in Love and Ballet. PNB student Marie Millard had a huge role as the protagonist, navigating emotion and happenings both alone and as part of the crowd.

On Stage – Second Half

New PNB dancer Amanda Morgan stands out as much for her dancing as for being the only African-American woman in the company. If you wonder what that feels like, she shows us in her premiere, Pages. A tribute to the underdog, the dance ended with a poem penned by Morgan herself. It reminded me of a favorite song from when I was her age, but her take is perhaps a bit more hopeful.

Dancer Dylan Wald choreographed For Now for three women and one man. Osvaldo Golijov’s score was performed by the same number of musicians. Both the dancers and the SYSO musicians demonstrated impressive technical skill. playfully completed the on-stage performances. In dancer Nancy Casciano’s playful dance about learning to dance, When We Were Little, soloists became kids showing off shakey pointework while their classmates watch from the walls. You could imagine the performers signing yearbooks after the curtain fell. It was the perfect end to a performance of dancers taking their professional next steps.

Post-Performance

There was a DJ set up in the lobby for a dance party. But I love dance because I’m so bad at it, and besides, my kids were yearning for bed. Not everyone shared our reserve. My last image of the night was a toddler in the pink Easter dress we passed in the lobby. Her face split by a smile, she was shaking her diaper-clad booty like a boss.

In Conclusion

I was really impressed with NEXT STEP. Sometimes you could sense the youth of the choreographers. Everything was deeply felt and a couple of pieces, like this post, would be more effective with some editing. Certain movements were overused like, “Look what I just learned in class.” The ‘Lady in Red’ trope appeared a lot. They used more props than usual – from a cool thing with cups that added to the soundtrack to some very pretty, if slightly overused rose petals, to titular pages literally falling from the sky.

But themes emerge for any mixed rep, and for every element that felt naïve, there was a counterpoint – creative, unexpected lifts; unusual pairings; grouping dancers on the stage in ways that expressed meaning or emotion, rather than simple geometry. Individually, every one of these pieces felt like professional work, and none of them would be out of place on the main season stage. This was the first time I attended NEXT STEP, but it won’t be the last.

{I attended NEXTSTEP:IN compliments of PNB. All opinions are my own.}