The Intermission Project at PNB

As if I needed another reason to love my favorite local arts institutions, the way groups like Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet have responded to the pandemic has been amazing. Not only have they managed to survive without their normal revenue streams in a time when live theater performances are banned, but they have produced new, creative work that would not have been possible – even conceivable – in normal times. The most recent example is Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Intermission Project, a midseason collection of short filmed ballets.

Intermission

At the midpoint in the season, PNB presents The Intermission Project, a new work conceived and created by PNB Soloist Price Suddarth. The Intermission Project is a nine-part film project presented in three acts, that aims to capture the emotional and mental journey of this past year, which has often felt like an intermission between our pre-COVID and post-pandemic lives. Designed to be viewed at one’s own pace, the nine short pieces (between 4 and 12 minutes each) are broken into three acts. You can watch one at a time in any order. Hit play on any of them and YouTube’s algorithm will serve up the rest of the act. Or, if you want to view the entire 35-minute project at once, use the playlist.

Choreography

Price Suddharth has choreographed new work for PNB twice before. I haven’t seen his piece Silent Resonance, but I have seen Signature, (probably twice) and enjoyed it. His choreography is not the type to smash expectations and blow minds, which can make it easy to overlook. But he uses familiar contemporary ballet movements in ways that are pretty and emotionally satisfying.  

Although the work I’ve seen so far this season has been excellent, circumstances preclude use of the full corps de ballet, and with no more than a handful of dancers in any piece (usually only one or two) it has meant that many of dancers haven’t had a public outlet this year. Suddharth helps remedy that by including 20 PNB dancers in these nine pieces. And yes, James Moore and Noelani Pantastico are of course included, but so are entire pods of less well-known dancers we haven’t seen in a while. Welcome back everyone, we missed you!   

The Intermission Project

Like Seattle Dance Collective’s pandemic summer season, Suddharth’s Intermission dances are mostly outdoors, often in recognizable and iconic Seattle waterfront locations – Golden Gardens, Discovery Park, Gasworks. More than just an expression of local pride, these locations factor into the film as our fickle sunshine sometimes complements and sometimes contrasts with the emotional tone of each film. Dancers movements don’t always look like they do on stage while they respond to the real-world conditions, (Is he sweating or did it rain before takes?) like sandy surfaces and tree roots. Kites and kayakers sometimes fill out the background behind the dancers in their monochromatic normcore costumes.  

Good ballet films are not afraid to use the camera like an extra dancer, or at least a creative element instead of a documentation device. Suddharth did almost all the filming for The Intermission Project (other PNB dancers filmed his parts). Sometimes letting the dancers escape the frame, other times lingering on the scenery or a single clump of grass, occasionally shaky, his filming had an eccentric naivete somewhere between home movies and hidden cameras. That doesn’t sound like a positive description, but it worked in practice. It all fit together to give the impression of a bunch of friends (who happen to be world-class professionals) getting together to make something while on an enforced hiatus from life as usual. Which I guess is exactly what it is.

Details

The Intermission Project is available free of charge/pay what you can on YouTube through March 21, 2021
World Premiere
Music: Alfonso Peduto, Nils Frahm, Olafur Arnalds, Carly Comando, Dustin O’Halloran, Goldmund
Conception, Choreography and Videography: Price Suddarth
Costume Design: Elizabeth Murphy
Lighting Design: Reed Nakamura

Cast

 Act I

Leta Biasucci
Jerome Tisserand

Seth Orza

Emma Love Suddarth
Price Suddarth

Act II

James Yoichi Moore

Noelani Pantastico

Sarah Pasch
Ryan Cardea
Luther DeMyer
Connor Horton
Noah Martzall

Act III

Leta Biasucci
Cecilia Iliesiu
Juliet Prine
Genevieve Waldorf

Angelica Generosa
Joshua Grant

Sarah Pasch
Emma Love Suddarth
Leah Terada
Miles Pertl
Price Suddarth
Ezra Thomson

I purchased season tickets for access to all of PNB’s virtual programming, and I highly recommend that you do, too. You can do that here.}