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PNB (and Pite!!!)

2/27/2016

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Picture
Emergence, photo by Angela Sterling
Picture
Emergence, photo by Angela Sterling
Last night I caught the second program offered by the Pacific Northwest Ballet at City Center this week. It was a contemporary bill anchored by William Forsythe’s 1996 classic The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, which was made for Ballet Frankfurt and joined PNB's rep last year. Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt was the evening’s common denominator, for David Dawson and Crystal Pite, the other choreographers represented on the program, both danced there under his directorship.

I must first write about the closing piece on the program, Crystal Pite’s Emergence, because it was one of the best ballets I’ve seen in a while and I am really excited about it.  Emergence, Pite explains in some of the most thought-provoking and cogent program notes I’ve come across, is about the parallels between the complex hierarchies of the ballet world and species like bees and ants in the natural world.  Pite cites semiotician Steven Johnson and biologist Thomas D. Seeley, but Emergence made me think most of the works of myrmecologist E.O. Wilson. Wilson is one of my favorite authors, and his application of ant behavior to the understanding of human civilization is fascinating. Pite seemed to me to be working some of his theories out onstage. Emergence was also evocative of Jerome Robbins’s The Cage, about a tribe of matriarchal insects who eat their mates after copulation. It is a tremendous work, and if you had told me that someone was making another bug ballet I would have said good luck; but Emergence was as compelling as The Cage without feeling at all derivative.   

Emergence, which was choreographed for National Ballet of Canada in 2009 (PNB acquired it 2013), opens similarly to The Cage with a woman—a wonderful Rachel Foster—writhing spasmodically in a spotlight on an otherwise dark stage.  She is attended by Joshua Grant, also excellent, who peels her off of the floor.  The two perform a twitchy, eerie pas de deux before disappearing through a hole in the center of the backdrop.  The scenery, by Jay Gower Taylor, resembled a hive or a nest, and the central hole from which dancers continually emerged or retreated was a long tube with honeycomb lights at its core.

A swarm of men in black pants with tattooed backs and black headdresses then floods the stage and commences pulsating, sharp movements to the distorted, mechanical score by Owen Belton. With their faces covered in black netting they indeed resembled bees, but the headgear also 

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TROY'S GUEST POST: The Mozartiana Gigue

2/5/2016

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Picture
Anthony Huxley in the Gigue, photo by Paul Kolnik
When we dancers learn roles, any part really, there are steps, musicality, patterns, formations, style, and often character to master. Last night, I had the opportunity to debut in the special role of the Gigue in George Balanchine’s Mozartiana, set to Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 4. A little bit of backstory: Balanchine choreographed this ballet in 1981, less than two years before he died. Many consider it to be his last masterpiece. Fascinatingly enough, Balanchine first choreographed a ballet to the Mozartiana music in 1933 for his short-lived company Les Ballets 1933, which seems to have only been performed for a few years following. (It had its American premiere in 1935, only a few months after Serenade.) This is especially fascinating to me, because that’s nearly fifty years! No tapes, no videos, no Vimeo. We know the Gigue originally had multiple dancers in it, but I’ve never seen any footage—if it exists—of any elements from this production. Was it completely different, or did certain things stick with him for most of his life? Balanchine was my age when he first choreographed to this music. He had really only just begun his choreographic career in America. Did he know what was in store for him? I can barely wonder what I’ll be doing in 50 years.

But back to the Gigue as we know it today: you run out to center stage, the conductor makes eye contact with you and beats one measure for nothing with her baton, two triplet beats of 6/8, and it begins simply enough with three poses on the one beat of each triplet. A second voice enters and you begin dancing to each beat. The third voice joins and the syncopation begins, one two one two one two one two three one, before you join back up to the swing of the triplets for a nice balancé step. Then before you know it, you’re flying around the stage in a vaudevillian, topsy-turvy step, 

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    Faye Arthurs
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