This time in 2008, choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot changed the course of history for Pacific Northwest Ballet. With Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette in PNB’s repertoire, the company now had the perfect Valentine’s Day ballet to go with The Nutcracker at Christmas. Its bold infusion of frank sensuality with gorgeous pas de deux left mouths agape — one moment Juliette was arcing backward, held aloft by her Roméo, the next, hands were everywhere!
Five years later, the stars of that fiery ’08 production, who dance now with the Maillot-led Ballets de Monte-Carlo, are returning for a one-night-only reprise on February 9, and tickets are already scarce.
The show runs through February 10 at McCaw Hall, and PNB is fielding three sets of Roméos and Juliettes of its own: Kaori Nakamura and (freshly minted principal dancer) James Moore, Carla Körbes and Seth Orza, and Lesley Rausch and Jerome Tisserand. Nakamura and Moore danced opening night last Friday, with Moore playing Roméo as a kid from the neighborhood rather than a romantic icon. This could happen to anyone, he suggests. Nakamura’s Juliette, pixieish, light as a butterfly, is his uptown girl.
At the ball where they meet, against the ponderous menace of Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” — conductor Emil de Cou and the orchestra conjuring up a weightily mailed fist — Maillot develops the home life that Juliette is escaping from: an authoritarian Lady Capulet (Lindsi Dec) who’s molded Tybalt (Batkhurel Bold) into an adopted enforcer, the son she’d have preferred to have had. Juliette, you get the sense, was left to her nurse (Rachel Foster). In her “mad” scene, as Lady Capulet swirls, limbs shooting out, hair whipping (Dec somehow remains in one piece), it’s less about a wounded Tybalt as it is wounded narcissism.
Seen a second time, more and more of Maillot’s choreography falls into place, deepening the relationships between characters. The concept for the production is summed up in an anguished Friar Laurence’s (Karel Cruz) dance with a möbius strip — no matter how he tries to nudge the couple’s path away from disaster, his good intentions are warped by some balancing influence that pushes back. It’s in the nature of things; when Roméo and Juliette dance, palm to palm, their hands oscillate.
You also see Lady Capulet’s imprint on Juliette — where her mother annexes space with a hyper-extended goose step, Juliette tests the air before her as she goes, trying to tread grandly but still young and uncertain. When Nakamura, in a slip of glittering gold gown (the ravishing costumes from Jérôme Kaplan still take your breath away), steps out, it’s winsome and fragile.
Jonathan Porretta once again steals a large chunk of the show with his irrepressible, boundlessly energetic Mercutio, for whom Batkhurel’s stolid Tybalt makes a perfect foil. Porretta literally dances circles around him, while executing high-spirited little kicks. Porretta’s randy run-in with Rachel Foster’s Nurse (happily, Foster doesn’t try to play an old fossil) is another comic highlight. Kylee Kitchens pulls off the feat of being a memorable Rosaline — the girl Roméo adores before he’s met Juliette.
The set, costumes (PNB made their own, updated versions for this production), and lighting are integral to this Roméo et Juliette‘s impact. That gold dress is beautiful, but it also reminds you of gold wrapping paper, with Juliette as a present for some lucky, eligible suitor. Things ceaselessly pivot in identity: a love bed’s sheet becomes a shroud, the love bed itself, a catafalque. Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s set, a series of curved blank panels and a descending slash of walkway-balcony, is painted and transformed by Dominique Drillot’s lighting — stark, abstract bars appear on Juliette’s room’s wall, underscoring her bird in a gilded cage existence.
Choreographer Marie Chouinard performed her own work solo for twelve years before forming her Compagnie Marie Chouinard, developing her highly original style. It’s no surprise, then, that in both works she presented on the UW World Series at Meany Theater Thursday night (repeated tonight and Saturday; tickets), dancers performed individually much of the time, though often not alone on stage.
The two works couldn’t be more different in atmosphere: 24 Preludes by Chopin, and The Rite of Spring, music by Stravinsky. Again, it’s no surprise that Chouinard calls these works by the titles of the music, because for her the music comes first. Her dancers recreate the music in bodily form. If you could hear nothing at all through your ears, you could sense the music through the the way they move, not just the the rhythm but the emotions the music conjures.
Thus, in 24 Preludes, she mirrors each brief prelude as contrastingly as did Chopin.
The dancers are clad in black swim suits, trunks for the four men, one-piece for the six women, with a black strap around each foot which is otherwise bare, and with some fantastical hairstyles including several mohawks. Chouinard uses hands, wrists and fingers frequently and effectively here, sometimes sharply angled, sometimes fluttering, suggesting flight. One prelude has arms raising Heil-Hitler style then going beyond and dissipating the memory, another has the dancers kicking a soccer ball around. Impressions like joy, toughness, ghostliness, athletes, humor, being imprisoned, spasticity all enter the mind.
Superbly trained athletes the dancers are, undeniably. There is huge energy here, as Chouinard uses the whole body in movements fluid or jerky, seemingly easy but requiring great flexibility. At the same time the dancers need to be closely attuned to the music as so much of what they do is dictated by the phrasing, the mood, the rhythms of each prelude. With considerable courage, given the needs of the dance, the company agreed to use live music provided by, in 24 Preludes, UW doctoral student in piano Brooks Tran.
The same courage applied for Rite, where the company used the UW Symphony Orchestra led by its music director Jonathan Pasternack. While the dancers are often performing alone in individual pools of light, there is still a feeling of primitive tribal dance, enhanced when they all come together as a group.
There’s cohesiveness of feeling here but each one is dancing to a personal vision, and above all it’s the music which drives the dance rising out of it. The vigor, the energy, the sexuality inherent without being sexy because it doesn’t seem to be directed at another person, all embody Rite’s music, which shocked the audience 100 years ago this year, and can still take us aback now. It’s merely an unemphasized part of the whole that the female dancers, like the men, wear only black swimming trunks, naked from the waist up.
One prop is used, sparingly. Five curved spikes like fingernails, about a foot long, sprout from a dancer’s hands, elbows and thighs, later from another dancer also. As as they move together, they undulate like jellyfish tendrils. Another time a group of dancers has only has one spike on each hand, a unicorn horn, a penis, a pair of horns.
The originality of Chouinard’s choreography shows starkly in there is one and only one movement, a leap, which appears to derive from classical ballet. Her lighting for Rites is equally imaginative, while for 24 Preludes, it’s achieved by the gifted Axel Morgenthaler.
I must, by now, have been to the Kent Stowell/Maurice Sendak Nutcracker at Pacific Northwest Ballet (at McCaw Hall until December 29 this year; tickets) at least twenty times, and each time I find something else to enjoy. Sunday’s performance was no different. I found myself watching the children in the cast, from the very young (who looked hardly more than four years old) to the teens, and marveling at the poise and acting skills they exhibited.
223 children participate each year, in several casts, so no one is on for all thirty performances. The care and training they receive is phenomenal. This is not a school performance. These kids are performing like professionals. When they are on stage they are totally on, acting their roles with seeming naturalness, from the six little boys’ bored attitude when the ballerina doll is dancing in the first act, to the Chinese girls who do not get mixed up in their long ribbons attached to the Chinese Tiger in the last.
The small boy sitting behind me exclaimed how much he liked the swords and the cannon in the battle between mice and toys. I wondered how he would feel if anyone pointed out the soldiers operating the cannon were all girls! Those children who dance are equally polished: the young Clara and her friends among them.
(This annual Nutcracker says a lot for the PNB School from which they all come, some through DanceChance, the PNB program which encourages gifted children from area public schools who might never have discovered their dancing ability without it.)
A cast member who gets plenty of laughs is Herr Drosselmeier, the mysterious patch-eyed godfather who brings the Nutcracker to Clara and encourages mischief in the small boys, but think of the fleshing out of this character which retired PNB dancer Uko Gorter achieved so fully Sunday. With this role — which he made one of his own during his career and now comes back to play — it is easy to miss many details of the performance (so much else is going on), but his expressions as Drosselmeier, his efforts at dancing with Clara, his glee at persuading the boys to tease, and the old man’s aging body are all there every moment.
Then, or course, there are the dancers themselves. The Nutcracker is an opportunity for many members of the company, and also of the preprofessional students in the school, to shine in the dozen and more solo roles, from Masque dancers and Sword dancer doll in the first act to the many who provide the entertainment for Clara and the Prince in the last. Among my favorites are the three Dervishes whirling about and the commedia trio with poor Pierrot never quite able to gain the total attention of either Pierette.
Then there are the two big roles taken by senior company dancers, those of Clara and the Prince.
Kaori Nakamura danced Clara Sunday in one of her finest performances yet. She has been a PNB principal for fourteen years now and before that was a principal with Royal Winnipeg Ballet, but she still dances like a feather, as light as thistledown in her movements and intensely musical and expressive in her phrasing.
Her Prince Sunday was Jonathan Porretta, whose impish timing has often had him playing jester-type roles, but is now showing his ability as a more straightforward male lead. A wonderful dancer, he partnered Nakamura well, though there were occasions when he held her slightly off balance in turns.
Tchaikovsky’s music, played with finesse at every performance by the PNB Orchestra, was conducted Sunday by Allan Dameron.
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in Violet Kid, Matthew Rich. center
(Photo: Julieta Cervantes)
Next up in the UW World Dance 2012/2013 season: Compagnie: Marie Chouinard (January 24–26, 2013, at Meany Hall).
Mark Morris recently said in The Stranger that “world class” is a “horrible term” to apply to the arts. I agree with him. Somehow the phrase cheapens art.
Still, I like world-class art. And after I watched the world-class Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet dancers perform world-class choreography under world-class lighting at Meany Hall on Thursday, I wondered:
What makes something world class?
How—apart from the high you get when you see it—can you tell that something is world class?
What would it be like to live in a city like New York, where I imagine you can see world-class dancers any day of the week?
What would it be like if these world-class Cedar Lake movers were “ours”? Would we love them like we love our world-class Seattle dancers Amy O’Neal, Jim Kent, Vincent Lopez, Carla Körbes, Kaori Nakamura, Jonathan Porretta, et cetera?
What about the dancers we love who aren’t world class?
How does experimentation fit into world-class dance?
I’m not the only dance writer in town who misses (and misses out on!) a good chunk of local experimental work because it can sometimes be boring. Don’t say it’s our job, because most of us don’t get paid to watch and write. Do say “boring” is subjective and biased, because it is. Laugh when we miss it and we hear tantalizing reports from people who bet on the right horse. Cry when it robs dance companies of the reviews and the public record that could help them get grants to grow on. I’ll cry too.
Experimentation is key. In a perfect world, there would be a place where experimentation and process is honored and enjoyed, regardless of the outcome. And there’d be a place, too, where forking over $50 for a ticket and carving an evening out of your busy schedule would guarantee you awesome world-class dance.
Guarantee? Why on earth would anyone want a guarantee in art? Guarantees kill art.
In writing these questions, I see that what I dislike about non-world-class works can be easily applied to this very article: Inner musings, personal explorations aren’t always interesting to an audience. They have to—what?!?! There has to be something else for them to be interesting art. A curtain speech this long is self-indulgent. I will stop. I will. Stop.
Cedar Lake’s first piece, Violet Kid, is—and not in a cheap way—world-class.
This frenzied works starts with stillness. Choreographer Hofesh Schechter’s confessional monologue wanders around as the 14 dancers stay still in a tight line at the front of a darkish stage: “Do I talk too much? Maybe if I didn’t talk so much, I’d have more friends. … In the first 15 seconds, you already make up your mind about a show. [pregnant pause] Fuck.”
That’s the only funny moment of this work. The program notes say it’s about “man’s struggle for harmony within a complex and sometimes horrifying universe.” Sure, whatever. What amazes in this piece is not its bleak, spastic interpretation of a theme. What amazes is the layering of rhythms, rhythms that come from layered steps, layered movement qualities, layered music (percussive), layered lighting (architectural), and layered, constantly shifting group sizes. What amazes is the way these individual dancers, each with his/her own essence, move as one.
Video clips online do not convey the flavor of this work, but they do show some of the movements that Schechter has the dancers repeat over and over again, ad delirium. There’s oozing and convulsing, a up-and-down jig, a militaristic pogo dance, ape arms and boxer arms and protester arms. There’s a dash of Fiddler on the Roof traditional dance and a pinch of West Side Story jazz. While the dancers often switch between movement styles in split-second precise shifts, there is a feeling that the overall movement is unstoppable and continuous. “Dancer onslaught” my friend called one move; we loved the anticipation of watching the organic invasion gather upstage left and then spilled out across the stage.
Violet Kid starts quietly but builds quickly into an intriguing noisiness; its 40-or-so minutes include well-timed pauses and blackouts so we can rest. The dancers don’t get to rest much, though. During one of those pauses, they stand balanced on one leg, right up front near the audience, seemingly for eons. When, toward the end, we see a single dancer balanced this way, he seems so alone—and yet, not alone, as I felt the clear memory of the earlier line-up hanging in the air around him.
When the curtain dropped, I was ready for a break. There is so much going on in Violet Kid. But I would have been happy to see it several more times that night. I wanted to know who the dancers were, to follow each dancer’s thread through the fray, to connect names with these amazing artists who seemed to be able to move every inch of their bodies.
It’s hard to know who’s who from the ultra-cropped headshots in the program. And so it was a pleasure to find out that part of the second piece, Alexander Ekman’s Tuplet, played off the names of six of the dancers; we got to know their names. I found out that the “kid in the striped shirt” from the first piece, is Jon Bond, although from the way he rolled onto the stage during the second piece, he might have been named Ninja Cat Tumbleweed, so soft, and light, and fast was he.
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in Tuplet (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)
Tuplet was more relaxing for the audience. The program notes indicate that Tuplet endeavors to understand a small fragment of the question, “What is rhythm?” Since, as the voice-over tells us, “nothing isn’t rhythm,” there are a lot of possible answers. Ekman explores many of those answers through a series of vignettes, using six dancers, the white square material they dance on/with, and a background of split-screen projections. It was like a really good, fun lecture, which, seeing as how we were at the University of Washington, is fitting.
The problem with pieces that use multiple vignettes is that some vignettes pass too quickly. At one point, the group plays patty-cake with the floor, creating compelling rhythms—rhythm in sound, rhythm in movement, and rhythm in line. How frustrating to have it end just as it was building up to some kind of answer. The vignette that followed cracked up the audience, though. The rhythm explored here was ballet photos: hit the pose, smile, flash of light from the camera, rest, repeat.
I know the projections in Tuplet were a key element, but for the most part I missed the point of them. Some of the images were of folks who were endearingly jovial in their creation of rhythm (band players, people laughing, etc.) but surely there was more to it. Just as I was getting really annoyed at how the projections upstaged the dancers, though, I found one projection that worked for me. The right screen showed a woman from the hands-up playing the piano and the left screen showed (her?) feet working the piano pedals: two hands, ten flying fingers, two sensible shoes—so many different rhythms from one person playing one song!
Some of the vignettes went over my head, too. Was there a rhythm to my understanding some and not understanding others? (Yes, I think so. My brain and heart were saying: got it, don’t get it, got it, got it, don’t get it, don’t get it, got it…”)
I think a second viewing would have clarified some vignettes for me. There were enough to enjoy on first viewing, however. One of my favorites incorporated the self-talk that dancers do—the onomatopoetic sounds they make or think as they’re memorizing a new piece. In Tuplet, we hear recordings of these intimate, individual rhythms as the dancers run the same dance phrase multiple times. In Bond’s solo, there’s an added punch line: each time he ends the phrase, he takes a moment to check where his feet are. That look down is yet one more rhythm, and I thank Professor Ekman for helping me to see/hear/feel that.
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in Grace Engine (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)
The third piece of the evening, Crystal Pite’s Grace Engine, was a huge disappointment to me. I’ve missed every single one of her much-acclaimed shows in Seattle (not on purpose) and so I was particularly eager to experience her work. This was the wrong one to start with. It was beautifully polished and specific, which I appreciate, but it reminded me of an improv class I watched last summer. This is not to say anything negative about improv classes. It’s just to say that when I touch your shoulder, you move your leg, the assignment is to stay connected and flowing, so now I’ll put my head in the arch of your foot, and then I’ll put my head in the arch of your knee doesn’t touch me. And do we really need so much crying and slow motion?
The interesting lighting and the cool subway rumble score and those gorgeous, intense dancers couldn’t help me over the hump with this piece. This, I thought at one point, is what happens when theater workshop and yoga take over the dance studio. Of course, I don’t know that for sure. I do know that at least one critic this year thought Grace Engine was the strongest piece of the night. That’s comfort for Pite, who perhaps is growing something important here. Comforting for me, though, is that my Crystal-Pite-fan friends assured me that her other work has a different feel. I hope to get to see that other work.
This was Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s first trip to Seattle. They’ll be 10 years old in 2013. I hope they come back so we can celebrate their anniversary. In the meantime, we have online videos and can glimpse the company on their home turf in the movie The Adjustment Bureau. I admire and appreciate Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s skill, flexibility, specificity, musicality, strength, and stamina. They have, as the Tuplet voice-over said when describing rhythm that works, “a sense of heart.”
It’s hard to say what is the most delectable part of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s production of Coppélia (through June 10 at McCaw Hall; tickets): the sets, the costumes (both by Roberta Guidi di Bagno for the 2010 production here) or the music–or of course the dancing.
From the first notes, conductor Emil de Cou keeps a vibrant, lively pace in Leo Delibes’ music, its charm flowing out to the audience and multiplied by the set of houses painted with sprays of blue flowers, and the heroine Swanilda’s cottage reminiscent of a sturdy little teapot.
We are already beguiled by this when the cottage door opens and Kaori Nakamura as Swanilda appears to tiptoe and dance across the stage in one of the prettiest costumes any ballerina has a chance to wear. Not just hers, but every costume for the entire ballet is fairytale attractive, and at the end one is left with not only the dancing and music to savor, but what you’ve seen stays in the mind like the lingering taste of a delicious bonbon.
I first saw Nakamura dance Coppélia at PNB in 1997. She was entrancing in the role then, opening a whole new aspect of a dancer I had previous respected as having wonderful technique but regarded somewhat as a steel magnolia. Now she had an impish sparkle and lightness as well.
Fast forward to Friday night’s opening performance and Nakamura had that same impish sparkle only more so, a willful, fun-loving, charming teen. Nakamura has never ceased to grow as a dancer, and when she was on stage Thursday it was hard to take the eyes off her. Her technique is impeccable, her footwork exquisite and always in tempo, light as a feather when she touches the ground. You almost feel she doesn’t touch the ground.
Swanilda has a hefty role in Coppélia. She dances throughout the first long act, then is the central figure in the second, acting all the while. She does get a break in the third before the final traditional pas de deux with some very difficult steps which Nakamura floated through with apparent ease, particularly hard at the end of a full-length ballet.
Her Franz, the boyfriend who has been mesmerized by the unattainable and unresponsive doll Coppélia, was danced by Jonathan Porretta, another whose technique is superb and who always brings an individual character to his roles. The two, particularly in that last pas de deux together, were sheer pleasure to watch.
Among other fine performances, Jeffrey Stanton returned from retirement to fill the role of the creaky old inventor, Dr. Coppelius, and four other principals or soloists took the brief spotlight: Rachel Foster in the Waltz of the Golden Hours, a role which didn’t suit this excellent dancer, plus Lesley Rausch as Dawn, Lindsi Dec as Prayer and Maria Chapman as Spinner, all of whom did well. Carrie Imler and Batkhurel Bold as Discord and War and their warriors in armor and helmets felt heavy next to the lightness of everything prior to this, and I spent their entire divertissement worrying that someone was going to get stabbed by a waving spear.
The corps de ballet has a huge role in Coppélia, as villagers, as friends of Swanilda or Franz, as warriors, brides and grooms, and left one proud that PNB’s corps dancers are of of such high caliber, but it was the twenty-four well-trained little ballerinas in pink tutus who enchanted everyone.
All in all, this is a don’t-miss production, to savor, to go see again, to take the kids and grandkids or neighbor kids. Anything for an excuse to go back!
In their U.S. debut—the only other stop their trip was the Joyce Theater in New York—Introdans made a terrific impression with its dancers Thursday night at UW’s Meany Theater (performances through May 12; tickets).
The Dutch company was founded in 1971 by Hans Focking and Tom Wiggers. Wiggers is still there and since 2005 has been general director, the same year another longtime company member, Roel Voorenholt, took over the role of artistic director. Since then there has been a huge turnover in the dancers. Only two were in the company before the directorships changed over, and the rest joined in 2008 or later. Their extraordinary caliber as a company seems all the more astonishing, given their current youth, relatively, as a group.
The company describes its programs as “thematically designed modern ballet,” and the balletic background is clear in performance, the training of the very best.
The program at Meany, titled Heavenly, included works of three choreographers: Nils Christe’s Fuenf Gedichte (Five Poems), Gisela Rocha’s Paradise?, and Ed Wubbe’s Messiah.
The highlight of the performance, Christe’s Fuenf Gedichte, presented a seamless connection between the music (Wagner’s Wesendonk Lieder with the ravishing voice of Jard van Nes), the projected backdrop (roiling clouds in a blue sky), the costumes (simple body-hugging leotards or tights in dark or jewel colors and, for one dancer, brief nude-colored shorts) and of course the movement.
The choreography celebrated the beautiful fluidity of the bodies.The five sections each flowed as poems should, across the stage and in each individual, while Christe created unexpected and unusual moves within a balletic language. These required enormous strength and stamina from all the dancers, in order to keep the fluid forward motion continuing.
The other two works were less successful choreographically, though both have had success in the Netherlands. Paradise?, which appeared at first glance to be a bunch of aimless kids showing off on a foggy night in the ‘hood, under rows of glare lights, continued too long without adequate structure, though there were moments of interest. One dancer sang her way through the group with a microphone before handing it over and dancing with the rest, and a fine tap dancer arrived toward the end. The music seemed as fragmented and aimless as the kids. Certainly not paradise, but perhaps that was the interrogative point.
Wubbe’s Messiah, from 1988, felt a bit dated. The choreography, beautiful as the moves were, seemed conventional in comparison to Christe’s Gedichte, and the use of billowing, brilliant white skirts being swirled in huge figure-eights across the back gave one a distinct feel of Martha Graham. The rest danced in severe black. Somehow, the music from Messiah felt like a disconnect. There seemed no relevance in the dance to either words of great joy or great sorrow.
Yet, throughout the performance, the pleasure derived simply in watching these superb dancers overcame shortcomings in the choreography. I hope to see them return.
