Recent Stories with tag mccaw

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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In preparation for multiple screenings of the Hulot masterpiece, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, in a newly restored version, SIFF Cinema is giving us one-night-only chances at Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967), and Trafic (1971) this weekend, at McCaw Hall.

For some, the comedy of Jacques Tati is evidence of why the French took to Jerry Lewis with open arms--they were desperate. For others, the wry, stork-like, unsinkable Hulot, meeting the world not head-on, but in a series of gentle collisions, echoed the comedic pathos of Charlie Chaplin.

But it's also true that Hulot is just a keyhole, a way of seeing the world. MoMA's site puts it like this: "through long-take, deep-focus, all-over tableaux, a Babel of languages, and the burbling eruptions of machines gone haywire, he creates an entire cosmos, a meticulously choreographed chaos in a Cartesian world...."