Art and Life as Pacific Northwest Ballet Celebrates 50 Years of Pushing the Envelope!

 

Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers in Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon. PNB presents The Seasons’ Canon on a triple-bill with works by Dwight Rhoden and George Balanchine, onstage at Seattle Center’s McCaw Hall November 4 – 13, 2022 (and streaming November 17 – 21.) For tickets and information, contact the PNB Box Office, 206.441.2424 or PNB.org. Photo © Angela Sterling.

It’s that time of year again, Nutcracker is on its way and Christmas is almost here.  Everyone is excited that the mid-terms are over and I’m just relieved that Patty Murray gets to serve another term!  There is magic in the air and Seattle’s best place for magic since 1972 has consistently been the Pacific Northwest Ballet.  2022’s season ends with Crystal Pite’s The Season's Canon, part of Pacific Northwest Ballet's 50^th Anniversary Celebration and this is quite possibly the most amazing, magical night of ballet that I have experienced in a very long time in my nearly ten years writing reviews of this fabulous organization. Pite’s choreography for the piece, working with Max Richter's recomposition of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, is exciting, important and vibrantly new—despite having premiered 6 years ago at the Palais Garnier for the Paris Opera Ballet. If you get a chance to see this work, in fact, this whole night of ballet, do it—because simply put, this is a night of ballet that you do not want to miss.

Consisting of the work of three choreographers the night begins with Dwight Roden's world premiere of Catching Feelings, an experimental, theoretical piece that is absolutely and irrevocably overshadowed by the genius of Crystal Pite's The Season's Canon.  Between these two, we have a coy, silly, little set by PNB stalwart George Balanchine, a performance, which is thwarted by nonperformative elements that absolutely miss much of the meaning of the piece, showing that sometimes, even the best direction can miss its mark and that as Derrida has pointed out much of the most important information often comes from off the stage, off the screen, in the wings so to speak and out of frame.  Each of these works to varying degrees of success, investigates the distance between life and art, life and dance, between the real and reality—and even the inchoate void. 

As we all instinctively recognize, life is always in motion, every move we make, every breath and every cell in our bodies is always in motion in a continuous dance choreographed by the seemingly abstract, chaotic, indeterminate nature of a deep syncopation—but ballet isn’t always ready to break the fine line between art and artifice—between art and reality—between the stage and… well, us.

Pacific Northwest Ballet soloist Amanda Morgan (center) with company dancers in Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon. PNB presents The Seasons’ Canon on a triple-bill with works by Dwight Rhoden and George Balanchine, onstage at Seattle Center’s McCaw Hall November 4 – 13, 2022 (and streaming November 17 – 21.) For tickets and information, contact the PNB Box Office, 206.441.2424 or PNB.org. Photo © Angela Sterling.

Beginning the night we have the world premiere of Dwight Roden’s Catching Feelings, this is a terrific piece, engaging and experimental, and on any other night, with any other group of performances “Feelings” would, at the very least, raise a few eyebrows, and back in the days of classical Russian ballet, it might have even caused a riot!  Rhodes, with an expert subtlety that causes one to question whether this is even done on purpose, or whether the dancers simply did not have the proper time to prepare, turns the most important and basic of balletic conventions on their collective heads.  Clearly, Roden has instructed his dancers to dance as loosely as possible, missing marks and moving out of time, creating a kind of casual abstraction which mimics the individualization, the movement and even the “feelings” that he speaks of in the title of this piece.  It seems to me that Roden, here, is attempting to gain a greater sense of the real world. This has an amazing effect that disorients everything and puts the audience on the edge, (are we being pranked?) while, at the same time creating a heightened level of reality that arises from these overlaid, repeating imperfections and the inexactness of the dancers.  In doing so, Roden begins to give his dancers personality and individuality—in a way that counterpoints Pite’s “esprit de corps,” which we will talk about later. This indivualization, is something that I hope Roden continues to work with as it might be interesting to see representations of different states of being and even differing abilities shown on the stage.

Balanchine’s Duo Concertant, which purports to break down the walls between music and dance, in the end, ultimately reifies those same walls and reminds us that dance—in ballet—is paramount.  As I was saying earlier, Jacques Derrida, who alongside his white supremacist friend created “Deconstruction,” a theoretical practice in which any text can be used against itself to find the weaknesses in its own argument—something which “Duo” does very nicely.  But more importantly, in this case anyway, Derrida pointed in “Beyond Painting,” (if my memory serves,) that often it is the spaces that exist immediately outside of the text, beyond the frame and in the margins—the spaces where control is often not exerted, that have the most to say.  That is what happens here, in a piece that is meant to be respectful of/to musicians and to show that the musicians are equal to the dancers—it does exactly the opposite—after all is said and done--that is!  During the performance, we can clearly see that the musicians are presented to us as also being dancers.  That their movements should be seen as being the same as the ballerinas and ballerinos, each going through their movements they are imparting information and the dancers are presented as being reverent and interested in these movements.  Everything is perfect and God is in his heaven.  The piece has proven that dance is everywhere and that life is dance—right! Right? Wrong.  In the end—outside of the text, outside of the performance—everything has become deconstructed--destabilized.  As the two groups go to take their bows—the musicians stand behind the dancers, like battered wives, not daring to be in line with the ballet dancers—and once the curtains went down, it was only the two dancers that came out from behind the curtains—all smiles, taking their bows and receiving ovations, while one assumes, that the musicians simply exited the stage behind the curtains--their heads as bowed as their violins.  They are presented as secondary to the dancers.   

 

Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers in Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon. PNB presents The Seasons’ Canon on a triple-bill with works by Dwight Rhoden and George Balanchine, onstage at Seattle Center’s McCaw Hall November 4 – 13, 2022 (and streaming November 17 – 21.) For tickets and information, contact the PNB Box Office, 206.441.2424 or PNB.org. Photo © Angela Sterling.

The night is closed out by Crystal Pite, whose choreographic body of work, taken as a whole, is a bit like reading Moby Dick, some of her dances/chapters are narrative wherein we watch the interactions of humans in settings that are easily recognized as referring to our world—then there are chapters that are more informational, more abstract and which owe their language to something perhaps a little bit different.  In these, her work is not unlike pie charts and graphs, alongside dancing encyclopedia entries.  But one thing is always true of Pite's work and that is that she draws with great acuity  inspiration from wherever she may find it, whether that be a birthday party, the Andromeda Galaxy or the ocean. Pite has been experimenting her whole career, building and growing, honing her craft and expanding her vocabulary—and it is a joy to see her work go back and forth into various forms of communication.

Crystal Pite's choreography has always been about bodies in motion and especially about how those bodies work together and against each other. Over the years in her balletic work shown at PNB, Pite’s work has often been somewhat narrative, a term that I tend to use as a pejorative, and at the beginning of “Canon,” I was somewhat worried that we were going to get a mimesis of a National Geographic Special—and in fact there was a little bit of that, with elements that invoked crabs walking on the sand and fish in the sea. But where Pite’s collage work is best is when she steps away from quoting living things and instead finds her inspiration in the artificial,  the mechanical and creates dance that is more abstract and less biomorphic and happily, she does this throughout much of Canon.

Interestingly, it is when Pite moves away from quoting life that the work actually takes on a much larger life of its own.  As a reviewer and viewer of PNB for the last ten years it has been my extreme pleasure to watch Pite’s evolution and the last several years of her work has been amazing to watch from Emergence performed at PNB in 2009 and Body and Soul, performed at the Palais Garnier for the National Ballet in 2021/22 to last night’s performance we have seen Pite’s evolution jumping leaps and bounds and it was absolutely mesmerizing watching last night, it is very hard to describe just how amazing, hopeful and dynamic this work is during a period of civilization in which, most of what we see is quotational, and derivative, a reiterative process that repeats and repeats without opening up new avenues for creation.  At the very least, this work teems with the promise of the future and that is huge. And while, it is impossible not to see in Pite’s work, hip-hop's influence and the influence of many other, especially multicolored, queer and aboriginal artistic and performative movements—one of Pite’s strengths is that she has never claimed any type of purity or feigned any respect for any perceived rules of the game. In fact, Pite has always taken liberally, stolen like an artist, as they say, and in the end has always created something of her own, a summation and culmination that is bigger than the parts.  It is generative, like the work of her teachers—it gives artists, viewers and choreographers as much as it creates.

This is dance as art.  This is dance as performance art. Mixing elements of hip-hoppery, machine-movement and nature, Pite takes us into a sensory world where narrative is only a distant memory and where we enter into the polymorphously perverse—while the mind attempts to hold onto the shreds of identity as it slips away into the void. But Pite’s void is not merely black,  rather, it is a teeming, swirling, inchoate morass of generative, jouissance, promising something that is much bigger and exciting than any limitations we attempt to put on it. For we are just visitors in Pite’s growing landscape.  And I for one, am happy to be here!