Recent Stories with tag kent stowell

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancer Kylee Kitchens as Fairy Godmother and soloist Rachel Foster as Cinderella with PNB School students and Company dancers in Kent Stowell’s "Cinderella" (Photo © Angela Sterling)

This is a ballet that draws adorable little moppets like nothing else. They may fade a little at an evening performance; I saw a few fathers heading out at second intermission with daughters deep in slumber over their shoulders. That's all right: They've seen the stepsisters carrying on, the carriage trip and ball's extravagant romance, by then.

Pacific Northwest Ballet's Cinderella (at McCaw Hall through Feb. 13) is like a hyper-elaborate dessert menu option, just slightly piquant, unfailing sweet, and technically impressive. Now, as a child-free curmudgeon, I don't really go in for this sort of thing, but it is actually a remarkable production. The combination of Martin Pakledinaz's glittering array of form-fitting, flowing, and wedding-cake-fantasy costumes, Tony Straiges' cinematic projections and gauzy scrims (plus the fairytale carriage), and Randall G. Chiarelli's warm-glow lighting pile on top of each other like layers of fruit and icing on a Prokofiev and Stowell cake. 

If there's a weakness to Kent Stowell's on-the-bright-side telling, it's that nothing all that bad happens, people just like to dance. Cinderella has fond, beyond-a-scrim memories of her parents in former days to compensate for being ordered around like a servant, and she's so good-natured that even being skipped over for the ball doesn't really get her down. She's still playful with her stepsisters.

The dramatic stakes are just not very high--and as if to get downplay that by searching out extremes, Stowell's choreography gives some scene-stealing dancing to characters who have little dramatic reason for being (coughs, looks at jester), and explodes your head with the cute of little bug/fairy kids and clock/pumpkin children dancing like the most sincere pumpkin patch ever come to life. The little ones have real choreography to perform, and their applause is well-earned.... (more)

Seattle Dance Project's "Project 3" opens tonight, January 29, and will have seven performances this weekend and next at ACT. Tickets are $25. Here is a conversation with choreographer Edwaard Liang, whose work is having its premiere.

Pacific Northwest Ballet was bustling with bunheads when I met up with Seattle Dance Project co-founder Julie Tobiason in a conference room there, before rehearsal started on Edwaard Liang's new work. It's their third season performing as part of ACT's Central Heating Lab, but they gather their rehearsal studio time while--and where--they may. Julie had her third baby with her--she's part of a maternity explosion that's hit the group, and is sitting this set of performances out.

Tell me about starting the group.

SDP founders Tim Lynch and Julie Tobiason (Photo: Angela Sterling)

For us, it was like now or never. We had this great group of dancers around, and if you're going to say, "I'm going to fundraise for the next three years..." You don't know who'll be around. You just don't know. We were awarded two grants, and so that's why we started when we did. It just felt like if we wait, it's not going to happen. We're grassroots, if we realize our budget is going to be $5,000 off, we look to see what we can cut. It so bare bones anyway, but that's what we're all doing.

We started in 2007, rehearsing and getting pieces going. Our debut was with "Project 1" in January 2008. In our second year we did "Project Orpheus" in the fall, and then January 2009 was "Project 2." This season we did a collaboration with the chamber music group Simple Measures in November '09. Our idea in building repertory is to have a mix of collaborative productions and our own self-produced repertory productions.

Is everyone from PNB?

We're PNB heavy, that's part of the reason why we started. When I left I did some work with Donald Byrd over at Spectrum, I did some work with Maureen Whiting; I wanted to explore other modern and contemporary works. The ballet career--forty weeks a year, thirty to forty hours a week--I had done that since I was sixteen years old. So I wanted to do some things I felt I was motivated to do.

Timothy Lynch had retired the year after me from PNB, and I knew he wanted to continue dancing. You know, retiring from PNB doesn't mean your dance career ends, unless you decide that. We were talking about Maureen's work, and how much we loved contemporary and new works, and other dancers--Alexandra Dixon, Oleg Gorboulev was here teaching and doing some guesting, and Dana Hanson. We just had a great group of people hanging around with similar interests, so that's why we started it, really. Kory [Perigo] and Betsy [Cooper], they're from modern dance, though they trained in ballet.... (more)

Seattle Dance Project's "Project 3" opens this Friday, January 29, and will have seven performances this weekend and next at ACT. Tickets are $25.

Choreographer Edwaard Liang used to dance himself (Nederlands Dans Theater, NYCB, and for contrast, Fosse on Broadway), and demonstrating movements in rehearsal reveals himself still as buttery-jointed as a yogi. His background in dance is "all over the place," he says, and credits Buddhist and tai chi practice for the "meditative, flowy, seamless" movement aesthetic that's his hallmark, whether the piece is ballet or modern.

Like many Buddhists I've known, he admits to being a control freak, and this may be why he tells me that he loves the process of creating in the studio most. "It's not so much the pose," he says, "but how you get there." His as-yet-untitled piece for SDP is for six dancers, four male and two female. It's ballet-infused modern dance--in Michael Upchurch's story he says it's inspired by conversation, how people talk with, to, or past each other.... (more)