ByGD
Rep 4 of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 2021-2022 season is Plot Points, a mixed rep program of four pieces that play with the concept of storytelling. I’m a little late to the party because I attended on the second weekend. There’s a world premiere and a PNB premiere by choreographers who are already well-loved by PNB audiences. The (almost) title piece, Plot Point, is already an audience favorite.
ByGD
PNB dancers in Crystal Pite’s Emergence, 2018. Photo © Angela Sterling.
Emergence, the ballet by Crystal Pite that lends its name to the mixed rep program wrapping up at Pacific Northwest Ballet this weekend, is one of my favorite ballets of all time. Like everyone else who saw its premiere at PNB in 2013, I fell in love with immediately. I was surprised when I rewatched it last weekend that it seemed almost completely different from what I remembered. But I still loved every minute of it. Read More
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The ballet has left me breathless before, but breathless and speechless? That’s new. There is so much to say about the current mixed rep at Pacific Northwest Ballet, Emergence, that I’m paralyzed before I begin. The title comes from the final piece in the rep, Crystal Pite’s Emergence. It’s an audience favorite capping off Little Mortal Jump and the Seattle premiere of RakU. I always go on about how Director’s Choice is the best rep of the season, but this one is so powerful. I wanted to go to the artist Q&A after the performance, but I was too wiped out and had to go straight home. Emergence left me exhausted and wrung out, like I had been through something. But in a good way. Mostly. Anyway, it felt more like an experience than a performance. Read More
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“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. Read More
ByGD
“I love tickets!” squeals Cameron Diaz’s character in the first Charlie’s Angels movie. (And why has no one ever made a gif of that?) It’s supposed to illustrate what an eccentric character she is, but I understand completely. I love tickets. And spring is ticket season. Season-ticket season, to be precise. All of the arts organizations announce their upcoming seasons, tickets go on sale, and I spend hours each spring planning what I will be doing on Saturday nights all next winter. I’ve already written about next season’s offerings at Seattle Opera. Now let’s talk about ballet. Read More