After years of cajoling, Pacific Northwest Ballet’s artistic director Peter Boal has succeeded in getting a new work from choreographer Christopher Wheeldon for the company: Tide Harmonic, which is receiving its world premiere in the run of the Director’s Choice program (through June 9 at McCaw Hall). It’s an immediately engrossing work, fueled by a kinetic score from Joby Talbot of almost limitless orchestral colors, which flow seamlessly from one to the next. Emil de Cou and the orchestra have never sounded better, both roaring and limpid.
Tide Harmonic opens with its eight dancers in silhouette (Randall G. Chiarelli’s lighting) against a luminous upstage screen (it will close with them again in silhouette, pulsing as if stirred by currents). Talbot’s score leans on percussion, generating a motoric force that sends the dancers flying around the stage, shoulders torquing. They link hands and arms and eddy about; in pas de deux, one will hook a leg, suddenly and briefly, around the other’s calf.
On opening night, Jerome Tisserand and James Moore looked almost like tumblers, while Carla Körbes and Joshua Grant unspooled a ravishing and eerie pas de deux, underlaid by the bass harmonics of tidal suction. It’s not Balanchine underwater; for all the manipulations and placements of limbs, there was also Körbes’ fainting falling-away and soft curlings in contradistinction to specific articulations elsewhere, say, of the wrist. It’s a brief work, but crammed with visuals, and it’s clear it will reward repeat viewings.
Cannily, Boal leads off with Balanchine’s Agon, which gives you context for some of what Wheeldon is up to — not simply in terms of movement vocabulary, but also in how a choreographer listens to music (for that matter, Holly Hynes’ aquatic costumes for Tide Harmonic rhyme a bit with those for Agon as well). Agon had its premiere in 1957, and New York Times reviewer John Martin mentioned that it was “about as difficult a work that has yet been produced”; it remains a knotty work for dancers, especially in some tricky trios that could literally result in knots.
Where Wheeldon reaches back to classical ballet, and more specifically Balanchine, as firmaments from which to macht neues, Mr. B and Stravinsky were extrapolating from (claimed Stravinsky) a 17th-century manual of French court dances. Stravinsky’s cool critique of courtliness remained, if not the steps themselves; Jonathan Poretta falls so far back on his heel, then delivers an oversized codpiece of a kick in front — it’s ungainly, meant to attract attention to itself.
In the second pas de trois, Jerome Tisserand and Andrew Bartee toss Maria Chapman between them off-handedly — there’s no great lead-up, it’s just “here you go,” with the stakes raised the second time, as Chapman is executing a mid-air leap and is that much more of a handful. It’s fun to watch the elastic Bartee snap into Balanchine’s prescribed angularities with the speed of a green twig.
With Karel Cruz out because of injury on opening night, Batkhurel Bold partnered with Lesley Rausch for the pas de deux. The willowy Rausch looked even moreso, against Bold’s granite-slab physique, but that pas deux’s sometimes agonizingly leisurely positions and manipulations, exposed arabesques and heel-to-ear combinations, showed off Rausch’s steeliness, too.
The program offers Diamonds for dessert, not one of my favorite Balanchine pieces: It opens with a crowd onstage in Karinska’s glittery costumes, dancing to languid Tchaikovsky, and you are reminded that you meant to watch Behind the Candelabra the other night.
However, it has its moments and on opening night Kaori Nakamura and Seth Orza (filling in for Körbes/Cruz) made the most of them. Nakamura looks almost doll-like as the towering Orza lifts her skyward, she’s frozen in exquisite place, but during their pas de deux, as she exits some partnering work, she takes the time to glance back lingeringly at Orza once, flash him a small half-smile later, and give this glinting work a hidden heart. The quiet delicacy of her performance was matched by by a bravura display of turns and jumps from Orza, who launched himself offstage after a phenomenal series of leaps, seeming ready to take the ballet down Mercer.
Two other partnerings caught my eye, Lindsi Dec and Kiyon Gaines, and Elizabeth Murphy and Jerome Tisserand; and the look of the corps that floods the stage, would, I think, have gladdened Balanchine himself.
Updated to correct Seth Orza’s name, which I mistyped as Stanko Milov. Guess it’s time for that EEG.
