Cover photo: Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Lesley Rausch in Twyla Tharp’s “Brief Fling” (Photo © Angela Sterling)
One of the pleasures of repertory programs at Pacific Northwest Ballet is the opportunity to see a variety of dancers, often from the corps, showing what they can do in different types of ballet.
In the current offering of “Brief Fling,” titled after Twyla Tharp’s work of the same name, the three ballets are totally different and what’s required of the dancers is different. Tharp’s “Brief Fling” is a showing off by several Scottish clans, each with its own color, overtly or subtly plaid: thus red, blue, green, and white. Jiri Kylian’s “Forgotten Land” is an allegory based on an Edvard Munch painting which shows on the backdrop. And to finish, Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto is pure classicism.
None of these are new to PNB, but the Balanchine has not been seen here since 2001. The other two works were both performed here in the fall of 2013, but this production of “Brief Fling” has live music for the first time, ever which adds immeasurably to its ebb and flow. The cheerful upbeat melodies of early-20th-century British composer Percy Grainger are juxtaposed with much darker electronic music by Michel Colombier, but somehow it all meshed together without a feeling of dislocation.
Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Rachel Foster (with James Moore) in Twyla Tharp’s ‘Brief Fling’ (Photo © Angela Sterling)
Lead dancers Lesley Rausch and Jerome Tisserand didn’t get into their groove right away, but redeemed themselves later in the work with some fine pas de deux work with Rausch’s excellent balance and Tisserand’s amazing leaps as highlights. Four rowdy young punks, danced with furious energy by Steven Loch, Jonathan Porretta, Ezra Thomson, and Leta Biasucci added the funny side of things, while Porretta and the feather-light Biasucci showed such speed in their turns as to make them almost a blur. Benjamin Griffiths as usual distinguished himself with his line and flow.
Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Elizabeth Murphy and Seth Orza in Jiri Kylian’s ‘Forgotten Land’ (Photo © Angela Sterling)
“Forgotten Land” is an odd piece. The painting is of a lowering sky over the sea and the work is said to be about land gradually sinking into the sea set to music from Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, but it is hard to connect this thought with the dance itself. Six pairs of dancers move in concert and separately, often slow but with sudden fast moves delineating disturbance, anguish, fear, who knows? Elizabeth Murphy and Seth Orza shone in the long pas de deux. They came into a beautiful merged flow of movement together which grew and changed along with the music.
Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Seth Orza and Noelani Pantastico in Stravinsky Violin Concerto, choreographed by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust (Photo © Angela Sterling)
As so often with Balanchine, it’s his use of the space which is always absorbing, and his refusal to let the stage be cluttered. As equally often in his works the men wore black tights and white T-shirts, the women black leotards and white tights, with the lead women in black tights. The backdrop is pure blue. So simple but it concentrates the attention on the dance.
With eight men and eight women as the corps, there were two lead couples Rausch and Tisserand again, and Noelani Pantastico and Seth Orza. It was the latter couple who held all the attention when on stage. Pantastico’s every movement is finished exquisitely like a phrase of music coming to an appropriate end, while Orza gave her total support. The orchestra, under Emil de Cou for the first and last piece and Alastair Willis for “Forgotten Land,” showed why the PNB orchestra is the envy of other ballet companies. Concertmaster Michael Jinsoo Lim was the able soloist in the Stravinsky.
