The only question about Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Modern Masterpieces program (at McCaw Hall through March 24) is at which point your soul may incandesce. My instinct is that this is likely to occur in the second half, during Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven or Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room, with its spectacular use of the “fog of minimalism.” Continue reading PNB’s Modern Masterpieces Lives Up to the Hype
Where Apollo is restrained asceticism, Carmina Burana, by contrast, is on the other end of the spectrum. As the curtain opens, audience members gasped at the sight of the Seattle Choral Company suspended upstage above the stage, as set designer Ming Cho Lee’s ginormous “wheel of fortune” looms above the rest of the stage. Continue reading O Fortuna! PNB’s Pits Apollo vs. Carmina Burana at McCaw Hall
Robbins places the action in a ballet studio, and another Jerome, last name Tisserand, who has been in the corps at PNB since 2007, danced the faun, a male dancer alone in the studio who rests on the floor, then begins to practice, watching himself in the mirror (actually the audience). Tisserand embodied the vanity of the faun, enamoured of his own beauty. Continue reading PNB’s “Love Stories” Catches Two Dancers in Bloom
