Kylie Lewallen in Olivier Wever's piece for L'Edition Française
UPDATE: L’Edition Française is back at the Triple Door this weekend, Thursday May 26 through Saturday May 28. They say they’ve added some new things, so even if you caught the “old” show, you might want to pop in again. Honestly, if you saw the old show, you wanted to pop in again anyway. This burlesque show is eye-popping for its artistry and production value, besides the usual reasons.
Here’s my little thumbnail of the previous encounter:
It was a one-night-only show, so I brought my camera in case you didn’t make it. “L’Edition Française,” for Bastille Day at the Triple Door, presented new work by Lily Verlaine (The Burlesque Nutcracker), Kitten LaRue (The Atomic Bombshells), and Olivier Wevers (Whim W’Him).
The three choreographers dug into the catalogues of artists such as Serge Gainsbourg, Francoise Hardy, France Gall, Brigitte Bardot, and others, to create an evening of burlesque that ranged in tone from the campy music video, to something like “forgotten” orgy scenes from An American in Paris, to sweaty, oiled-up erotica. That, in conjunction with the Triple Door barman conjuring up a Fernet Branca Negroni (out with the Campari, in with the Fernet!) made for a satisfactorily full-figured evening.
It’s a different Dream every night at Pacific Northwest Ballet’s production of the Balanchine work–the casting options must be driving balletomanes wild. Midsummer Night’s Dream (through April 17; tickets) has just one more weekend ahead of it at McCaw Hall and then, like so many dreams, it’ll be gone.
With eight dancers leaving PNB at the end of this season, the stakes are high. So are the leaps. Of course you have to see Olivier Wevers and Kaori Nakamura in the Divertissement–but then there’s Carla Körbes and Jeffrey Stanton, too! How to choose between Postlewaite, Porretta, or Griffiths as Oberon?
If it seems like Balanchine’s Dream was “just” here–it was, in 2008–you really can’t fault PNB for bringing it back. For one, the iconic production is gorgeous and blessed with an eternal youth. The scenic and costume design by Martin Pakledinaz is superb. The set has a pop-up book aesthetic that nonetheless contains enough reality (in the right light, from Randall G. Chiarelli) so that the forest is both moon-dappled, forbidding, and wild. Huge flowers and roses overhang the fairy kingdom, and an outsized frog lurks above Oberon and Puck’s heads. That’s not getting into the costumes–Oberon and Titania’s fabulous trains, Helena and Hermia’s long tutus, which emphasize the line of their arabesques. Knowing what I was in for, I rented opera glasses in the lobby ($5) to better take in the details.
For two, you have Francia Russell to restage it. And for three, you have Allan Dameron in the pit, leading the orchestra through Felix Mendlessohn’s lush, eerie, and joyful score. Over on The Gathering Note, Richard Campbell says, “the orchestra has to be one of the best in the country,” and from an early chord, a whistling treble atop thrumming bass, you hear an extraordinary clarity out of the pit.
In Balanchine’s hands, Shakespeare’s midsummer entertainment becomes an exploration of the attitudes and movements of love and desire, from the pride and possessiveness that distances fairy king Oberon and his queen Titania, to the courtly reserve of Theseus contrasted with fierce self-sufficiency of Hippolyta, and the muddled-up amours of Helena, Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius.
I saw Lucien Postlewaite as Oberon–Postlewaite makes for a young fairy king, which works in his favor so far as preternatural youth and fairies go, but it will be a while before the role looks lived in. Postlewaite can soar above the stage, hanging there, dismissively touching down, but he briefly lost his footing after a tricky series, and unintentionally injected an extra thrill into his performance. He was assisted by Jonathan Porretta as Puck, who embodied a startling energy, his legs kicking as if galvanized by electric shock, and always communicated a cocksure insouciance.
Postlewaite’s Titania was Carla Körbes, who–perhaps it isn’t in her–was less of a preening narcissist than you sometimes see. Körbes gave her steps a martial precision, knees sharply up, as she danced with her Cavalier (Seth Orza), and barely deigned to notice him. Her Titania is locked up in regimented feeling. When Körbes melts, then, for the donkey-headed Bottom, it feels like summer has arrived, if somewhat crazily. My night’s Bottom was Ezra Thomson (which, go ahead, laugh! Let it out!), who made Pakledinaz’s donkey mask into a living thing: woebegone, nonplussed, drawn to the scent of fresh hay, and (peering down into Titania’s decolletage) randy.
This isn’t a question of talent, so much as where your attention settles, but for me the evening held two revelations: Lesley Rausch as Hermia, and Olivier Wevers and Kaori Nakamura’s Divertissement. Rausch’s line unspooled like silk as she sought to gain Lysander’s (Jerome Tisserand) attention, while ducking Jeffrey Stanton’s overly persistent Demetrius. But she also, after Puck has dosed everyone with a magic flower, wandered lost, slipping into an arms-outstretched sleepwalker’s trance and jolting awake as if from a nightmare. It’s difficult to play “lost” onstage, because it’s the one thing you can never be, as a performer, but Rausch’s pained distraction looked real, even from the first balcony.
With Wevers and Nakamura, the whole auditorium knew we were watching something unfold. The Divertissement comes in Act II, which is devoted to dance, rather than story. Everything wrapped up, Balanchine comes forth with a coda that illustrates that “competition has no place, and restraint, mutuality and trust define the mature ideal of love.” PNB’s Peter Boal describes it like so:
Here Balanchine offers reserve when other might have offered more steps. A diagonal of bourrées with delicate rising arms floats like soft wind. How wise to know that we would want to see it twice! A final endless arc arrests time with beauty.
Nakamura was both weightless and deliberate, rotating slowly, elegantly in her series of pirouettes as if she had worked out a new deal with gravity and the coefficient of friction. Wevers lightly guided, adjusted, turned–always anticipating. And then there came that impossible fall and catch, her arms back, back…. You didn’t need to know the first thing about dance to feel that moment run up your spine, but having seen it, you left the hall clutching an honorary degree.
Kaori Nakamura of Whim W’Him. Photo by Marc von Borstel.
It feels completely redundant to heap more praise on Olivier Wevers at this point, since nearly everyone else has been in a full-blown love-fest since his new company Whim W’Him‘s sold-out debut this last weekend at On the Boards. But as much as I’d love to be the odd man out in this orgy of praise, I just can’t: Wevers & co. delivered a pretty stunning evening of dance that was at once accessible and charming as well as subtle and thoughtful.
The evening was split between two shorter works that have been presented before—X stasis, part of PNB’s 2006 Choreographer’s Showcase, and FRAGMENTS, created for Spectrum’s Studio Series in 2007—and the premiere of 3Seasons, a new work set to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with a bit of pure chance thrown in: each night, one of the seasons was swapped for an original composition, based on Vivaldi’s structures, by local composer Byron Au Yong.
The word most frequently used to describe Wevers’ choreography is “whimsical” (hence the company name, I assume), and that’s definitely true. His vocabulary is primarily balletic, but looser and informed by contemporary dance, and lets the personality of the dancers shine through. Half the charm comes from the expressions on the dancers’ faces, which isn’t something you normally associate with ballet, not least because PNB’s house is too large for the audience to see them. Comparatively, OtB’s mainstage was downright intimate.
For instance, FRAGMENTS opens with a duet between Kelly Ann Barton and Vincent Lopez, both in tutus, lip-syncing to opera. Largely they perform the same movements, but Lopez, exaggerating a coquettish expression, comes off as aping the (sometimes) more serious Barton. But FRAGMENTS also shows off Wevers’ ability to create powerful drama. The fourth suite, a solo by Lopez set to Mozart’s Requiem, ends with the dancer contorted on the ground, back arched, caught somewhere between agony and ecstasy. The finely sculptured tableau is a powerful and beautiful image, achieved with neither the humor nor the light, athletic movements that are generally associated with Wevers’ work.
But the main event of the night was, of course, 3Seasons, the longest, most ambitious work by Wevers to date. The thematic through-line is an exploration of our consumer culture’s cycle of desire to possess that which we nevertheless consider disposable. In one sequence that seems inspired by Steve Martin’s The Jerk, dancer Jim Kent rushes around the stage desperately collecting objects dropped off by other dancers—a pillow, a lamp, a pair of women’s shoes, a water bottle, and even a revolver. All of them eventually wind up in a garbage can, though, and Kent spends the rest of the show with a bird cage on his head (even when pulling double-duty playing violin during the extra section with music by Byron Au Yong, which was performed live).
In another segment, three couples come onstage, the women wearing wire-frame hoop skirts covered in plastic grocery bags. One by one, the bags are pulled off and dropped to the floor, until finally the women go into a mad dash collecting them all and stuffing them into their bras to give themselves bigger breasts.
What 3Seasons shows, in particular, is that there’s a similarity between Wevers’ approach to dance and the way writers like Dave Eggers or Aleksandar Hemon approach a novel: in both cases, the themes are wrapped tightly inside works that propel themselves forward by dint of their virtuosic execution, and while they experiment and play, they never become an empty act of formalism, experimentation for its own sake. And like an Eggers or a Hemon, Wevers peppers his work with rich little details—an errant breast grope, a deadpan joke—that reward the audience’s engagement with the piece while adding to the overall effect.
Whim W’Him has been generating excitement in Seattle since the group was announced, and the performances were sold-out with waiting lists. It’s great to see a dance artist and a burgeoning company find that much support (including financial support, in an economic downturn) in the community, and speaks to Seattle’s ability to cultivate and support world-class talent. It’ll be interesting to see where Wevers goes from here.
