Tarantella and the Moor’s Pavane

The final program of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 2018/2019 season is Themes and Variations, a mixed repertory of four short ballets broken up by two intermissions. In writing, people often talk about the messy middle. You know what you need to make a strong beginning and a dramatic ending, but how do you connect the two? In Themes and Variations, that’s not a problem. Seeming unrelated at first glance, Tarantella and The Moor’s Pavane are the two strong links connecting Price Suddarth’s Signature to Balanchine’s Theme & Variations.

Tarantella

Music: Louis Moreau Gottschalk (Grande Tarantelle, Op. 67, c.1866), reconstructed and orchestrated by Hershy Kay
Choreography: George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust
Staging: Peter Boal
Costume Design: Mark Zappone
Lighting Design: Randall G. Chiarelli
Running Time: 8 minutes
Premiere: January 7, 1964, New York City Ballet
PNB Premiere: January 31, 1985

As I wrote before, I’m a little prejudiced against folk dance in ballet, even though it’s ubiquitous and I love high/low juxtapositions in other contexts. So Tarantella is never going to be my favorite ballet. But in this program, it’s a fun follow up to the more elegant celebration in Signature, and a good way to transition from that dance’s expressive movements to the more academic styles that will follow. And for the record, everyone else loves Tarantella – my 15-year-old especially, but also the rest of the dance world.

The Music

There’s some history to the music. According to the program, Gottschalk’s Grande Tarantelle, written about 100 years before the ballet’s premiere, was probably the first work for piano and orchestra ever written in the U.S.  In an interesting twist, the New Orleans-born composer did most of his work outside of the U.S., while the choreographer who used his music came from Russia to compose quintessentially American ballets.

The Characters

Without going so far as to tell a story, there’s a sort of premise about Tarantella that the two dancers are street performers from the region of Naples, drawing a crowd with their dancing chops. Like street performers, the dancers have to have big personalities, with as much humor and charm as dancing skill. Balanchine supposedly wrote this ballet for specific dancers. I don’t know who they were, but if the dance wasn’t dated 1964, I could easily believe he wrote Tarantella for Angelica Generosa and Kyle Davis, who performed it on the day I attended.

Virtuosic Camp

So I love this Balanchine quote from the program:

It [the music] is a dazzling display piece, full of speed and high spirits. So, I hope, is the dance, which is ‘Neapolitan,’ if you like, and ‘demi-caractèr’. The costumes are inspired by Italy, anyhow, and there are tambourines.”

George Balanchine, Balanchine’s Stories of the Great Ballets

Throw in a bit with a dog and you’ve got a hit, right? Anyhow, Tarantella is classic Balanchine – virtuosic technique with a dash of sass. If you’ve ever wanted to see a ballerina en pointe, hitting a tambourine with her other heel, now is your chance. You can watch it ironically if you want, but it’s all in good fun.

The Moor’s Pavane

(Variations on the theme of Othello)

Music: Henry Purcell (The Gordian Knot Untied, Abdelazer, or The Moor’s Revenge), arranged by Simon Sadoff
Choreography: José Limón
Direction and Staging: Alice Condodina
Costume Design: Pauline Lawrence
Lighting Design: Randall G. Chiarelli
Running Time: 24 minutes
Premiere: August 17, 1949, José Limón Dance Company
PNB Premiere: November 12, 1986

No humor here, even though it looks kind of funny at first. It’s quite the counterpoint to the Tarantella, which is fitting, I guess, because the choreography is all about equal and opposite reactions. A distillation of Othello told through the courtly dance (hence, pavane) and the choreographer’s own “Limón technique,” it really doesn’t look like anything else you’ll see on a ballet stage. It might sound pretentious to say so, but if Balanchine’s choreography bookending it was academic, The Moor’s Pavane was intellectual.

Then and Now

Even though I love Shakespeare adaptations and I’m usually all about the new and unusual in dance, I really didn’t like Moor’s Pavane the first time I saw it. I don’t remember who the dancers were, but “His Friend” (the Iago to “The Moor’s” Othello) was genuinely creepy. And I found the gravity-driven movement off-putting.

Today I have very little patience for tragedies about men driven to jealous murder, especially when they hinge on the irony of false accusations (because murder is okay if she’s guilty?!) Those stories can only succeed when you accept the underlying assumption that women are cherished material objects rather than, you know, actual human beings with agency and a right to live.

But I have a lot more patience for learning about dance that doesn’t fit my expectations than I used to. Even learning a little bit about the Limón technique helped me make sense of the dance. And the weird movements, alternately jerky and pendulous, reminded me of medieval puppet shows (much like the one in Hamlet). Even though the ballet was written in 1949, the elaborate costumes, 17^th century music, and puppet-like quality of the music dovetailed into a beautifully coherent interpretation of a centuries-old story that, for better or for worse, still has modern relevance.

Cast I Saw

The Moor                         Joshua Grant
His Friend                         Steven Loch
His Friend’s Wife             Lindsi Dec
The Moor’s Wife             Elizabeth Murphy

All four dancers were performing these roles for the first time.  

Details

Remaining performances: June 6 – 8 at 7:30 pm and June 9 at 1:00 pm

Tickets ($30-$187) are on sale online, by phone – 206.441.2424, or in person at 301 Mercer Street at Seattle Center. Subject to availability, tickets are also available 90 minutes prior to show times at McCaw Hall.

{I attended Themes & Variations courtesy of Pacific Northwest Ballet. The tickets were theirs, but the opinions are mine.}