Recent Stories with tag ariana lallone

I haven't read that he was socked in the jaw very often, but I have to think that in dancers' dreams at least, George Balanchine was as much abused as adored.

I'm thinking of the moment in Serenade when Ariana Lallone pivots en pointe, one leg languorously outstretched, as a male dancer kneels behind her and, unseen, ever so slowly rotates her. Lallone's face is a perfect mask, her wrists, her fingers, not too tense, she's a living sculpture--and her body's weight shoots down through a single trembling, balancing ankle to a toe shoe.

My ankle sprained in sympathy.

PNB's "All Balanchine" (through April 25) may be the strongest of their celebrations of the celebrated choreographer's work that I've seen. The program of Serenade, Square Dance, and The Four Temperaments shows off Balanchine's remarkable ability to marry that Balanchine aesthetic to music. In each case, it's not a shotgun wedding, it's a love match. The audience on Saturday afternoon arrived head over heels, and applauded the curtain going up.

Serenade (from 1934) is a romantic vision set to Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings, the stage loaded with ballerinas in long tutus. When it was new, audiences reacted to it the way PNB audiences respond to William Forsythe. At one point, heedless of symmetry, Balanchine has everyone crowd into the far corner of the stage and crouch, while a soloist performs downstage. Oh, the humanity!

If there's a trained expectation he doesn't leave unsatisfied, I'm not sure what it is. Instead, there are chords of dancers, patterns and intersections drawn from the music, and contrasts between steps and rhythm. A few themes cut across each piece: Balanchine's regard for stillness, the way he uses it as a dash rather than a period at the end of a series. Those challenging one-legged landings from a leap. Extension that, even flat-footed, creates a sense of elevation....

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If you've only ever seen Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare's tragedy, bathing in the incandescence of its lyrical fireworks, you've seen only half the story that could be told. Pacific Northwest Ballet's Roméo & Juliette (at McCaw Hall through October 4, tickets $25-$160) takes the black-and-white of words, words, words, and transforms it into the technicolor of bodies in motion. That PNB can field the likes of Carla Körbes, Lucien Postlewaite, Olivier Wevers, Jonathan Porretta, and Ariana Lallone moves us into metaphorical HD territory.

Jean-Christophe Maillot's choreography would be arresting if you weren't so engrossed in simply watching it unfold the story of our two doomed lovers. As in the best musicals, when it feels somehow inevitable for a character to burst into song, with Maillot you feel flashes of recognition as ballet is reconstituted to mean something again.

When I first saw this production, I set aside Maillot's reworking of the role of Friar Laurence. On second viewing, I have to admit I was too caught up in the feverish spectacle the first time to see what Maillot is up to. His ballet, after all, begins with Friar Laurence, who will spend the intervening time until the tomb aiding and abetting love's course, and impotently trying to forestall tragedy.

He's a counterpart to the score by Prokofiev, in which every unchained melody hovers over an ominous, rumbling murmur from the pit. He's a counterpart to us, the audience. Opening the evening as he does, he returns with us to the scene of the trauma Western civilization can't seem to escape (we've been retelling the story for over 500 years). If you think about it, there's complicity embedded in the desire to hear the story one more time.

Perhaps that's why Maillot has given Friar Laurence (and the fiendishly talented Olivier Wevers) a modern dance vocabulary--attired like a Jerome Robbins escapee, Wevers ties himself in knots of conflicted aims. He floats in and out, darts between the two lovers like an interfering ghost, spirits Juliette away into a pas de deux of abnegation. In the play, a vial of poison sounds like a plan--in dance, it's a seduction.

It's hardly possible to make too much of the teenage heat thrown off by Maillot's Roméo and Juliette. It's not the airbrushed trapped-in-TV-amber artifact of the CW's 90210 retread (Future Anthropologist: "They fetishized a fantasy of recycled adolescence"), but is full of stumbles, stolen kisses, awkward strainings, and blind gropings. I did not stop to count the number of feels copped in the ballet, but you almost expect to see a separate grab-ass choreography listing. The crudeness is refreshing....

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