2022 Pacific Northwest Ballet Season Encore! Thinking of Dualities!

Pacific Northwest Ballet soloist Ezra Thomson with company dancers in Alejandro Cerrudo’s Little mortal jump, which PNB will present as part of its Season Encore Performance, one night only, June 12, 2022. Photo © Angela Sterling.
 

June has me thinking about the dual concepts of identity and gender, and especially, since June is the month of Gemini--it has me thinking about the idea of duality--especially in the sense of the outer and inner spaces that we all carry with us.  We are made of two very different worlds.  We exist and move through an exteriorized/exteriorizing labyrinth of things and ideas; but it is one that is not always exactly what we expect.  Even our internal dialogues are suspect--is there magic afoot? What is magic and where are the magicians we seek?  While sitting in the audience at PNB, after having spent some amazing moments listening to the orchestra warming up--always my favorite part of any night with a life orchestra--I began to think about the fact that the ballet--that dance in general--is one of my favorite art-forms because it is silent.  It is mute and confined and restrained by its own limitations.  For the most part--aside from special instances--it must communicate by way of movement--which means that at its worst it can become mime and there were moments of mimesis on this night--as when, I believe it was during Little Mortal Jump, that one of the dancers motions to us that she is pregnant--reminding the audience that the literalness of narrative is not always our friend.  It can be too literal, it can break the subtlety of the language, it can easily dispel the magic--something that even Balanchine, who ends the night was fully aware of.    

As I was saying, Pacific Northwest Ballet's Season Encore begins with Alejandro Cerrudo's Little Mortal Jump, a jocular, friendly, gymnastic catalogue of narrative, eliding movements, briskly moving through the high points of generic lives lived.  A bit of a prop ballet, "Jump," is mostly just a whole lot of fun, mixing figures in motion and large boxes and even Velcro suits!  It is light, simplistic fare--attempting to be heavier, but never quite getting there.  It attempts to speak of a darker, more meaningful underscore of meaning, but because of its own lyrical literality, it can never quite get out of a comedic sense that comes from an almost pop sensitivity.  This is ballet for the masses, where everything is handed to the audience with an open-hand, but also given too easily, too readily--like a pop song. You know the one.  The one about love and how you should have known better! 

 

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancers Sarah Pasch and Dammiel Cruz-Garrido in Ulysses Dove’s Red Angels. PNB will present Red Angels as part of its Season Encore Performance, one night only, June 12, 2022. Photo © Lindsay Thomas.

With Season Encore, the 2022 Pacific Northwest Ballet draws to a close and I wonder if this is how Sports fans must feel at the end of their sports-ball seasons, responding with a heady mixture of elation and loss.  I suppose that I’ll never truly know.  I just don't do sports--any of them.  And you know what?  I’m quite okay with that.  I never quite caught the sports bug, for me as a child, sports just got in the way of favorite things—their games were always cutting into my cartoons!  But moreover, sports always involved this unnecessary interplay of roughness, competitiveness and meanness that just never appealed to me in anyway.  It was never poetic or complex--there was no place for emotions or feelings.  In fact everything about these games seemed to be bottled up and held trapped in a container called "masculinity,"  which always seemed angry, simplistic and ready to boil over in an explosion of irredeemable, self-absorbed resentment of its own masculinist existence.  To make matters worse, I remember, personally that whenever I was called upon to play on any team sports—either at recess or during Physical Education classes I could always be counted on to do the wrong thing—run the wrong direction—or worse (according to the jeering taunts of the "others")!  I ran “like a girl!”  I caught balls “like a girl!”  That time that that the baseball came right at me and hit me “right where it counts,” you guessed it!  I cried just like whatever mythical "girl" that Coach Gringohoffer held in his imagination in order to terrorize us little, oversensitive boys!  That guy definitely had some issues with the opposite sex. That's for darned sure!  And he took them all out on me!

At the same time, my parents were very worried about their little boy and his love of sewing and making outfits for his “dolls” as my father referred to my G.I. Joes and Mego superhero action figures.  Nevermind that these dolls would one day come to be known as “Action Figures,” I was bringing shame, to the family, especially my father—whose homophobia was compounded by the fact that my favorite uncle in the whole wild world was a semi-closeted gay Chicano man in an era when that was not at all acceptable to Latino, cum-Catholic families at the time. He was a dancer, a singer and for all intents and purposes--he was one of the people that I admired most and to whom I looked to for cues on how to navigate this world without the simplistic markers of an angry, self-limiting, self-hating masculinity.

From the beginning, my gender identity has always been complex, defined in opposition to the very simplistic, essentialist and essentializing dogmatic ideals of my mother and father and to a certain extent—their entire generation.  My gender identity, best described as non-binary, but for a very long time--only known as "queer"—in the catchall wasteland term of the 80’s and 90’s—has always been a magpie affair of desire, fashion, and the effects of Unisex, David Bowie and Martin Gore of the band Depeche Mode.  It has also always been by all standards a complex affair—one that, I am not even sure that I understand entirely.  So, what is my point?  Do I even have a point?  How does this, in any way have anything to do with the Ballet and the 2022 Pacific Encore Performance?  Well, it does, and it doesn’t, really.  In a way, with respect to the fact that it is June, this is a bit of a coming out.  But identity is a complex thing and mine is doubly so.  

I remember wanting a barbie and because I was a very mischievous child, (not mischieveeeous as some people would have you say!) I lied to my uncle and said it was okay with my parents that he buy me a fake barbie doll!  Of course, it was anything but! 

Now, as you can imagine this did not go over at all well.  Like, not at all.  Like loud yelling and gnashing of Mexican teeth and screaming and throwing things and me hiding under the table and ultimately being sent to my room with no beans and rice and tortillas to fill my tummy—after my mom caught me playing with my new doll.  After this, a lot of things happened in very quick succession. First, my uncle was no longer allowed to hang out with us kids--like not at all!  He became very distant and withdrawn--but lastly--and most devastatingly of all, he suddenly announced that he would be marrying a woman from Nayarit, Mexico.  Even then, I knew that something was wrong.  I had no idea that what had happened was that there had been a good, old-fashioned, Mexican/Catholic interventioning--but after this, nothing was the same. My uncle had been forced to subsume who he was on the inside for something that he could present to the outside world--but he and I knew that what he was presenting to the world as truth was only half the story--or worse--a complete fabrication.

 

Pacific Northwest Ballet soloist James Kirby Rogers with corps de ballet dancer Christopher D’Ariano in Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, which PNB will present as part of its Season Encore Performance, one night only, June 12, 2022. Photo © Angela Sterling.

Back to the Ballet.  This night's festivities speak of the different forces at play in contemporary ballet.  In essence, the exterior and the interiors of dance and even the sometimes embarrassing melding of the two--as in Red Angels and "Jump!"  However, in Ulysses Dove's Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, we have a dance that speaks to Ballet's conceptual, internalized space--my favorite space in any form of artwork.  I am a devotee to the conceptual--no matter the form--essentially the space that was opened up to us by Marcel Duchamp--the space where the retinal gives way to the conceptual--where the pleasure of the eye is replaced by the pleasure of the mind.  Heaven is exactly that, narrativity, here is replaced by the language of ideas and the result is amazing!  Heaven, here used in a dual sense--like everything else in this article!

That being said--PNB knows its audience too well.  Even me--the lover of the conceptual lost it to the grandeur and absolute beauty of the Tchaikovsky/Balanchine extravaganza Diamonds. Living up to the promise of its name--the Corps de Ballet here, was decked out in their Sunday finest glittering in diamonds that reflected the lights with an amazing brilliance that reminded this reviewer that magic still trumps everything else!  We come to the ballet, not to just engage the heart or the mind--ultimately we come to the ballet for magic!  And Balanchine and Tchaikovsky are the absolute magicians of the form. They are the wizards that we were looking for all along to take us out of the mundanity of mere existence and transport us into the magical kingdom of the ballet!