Ballet at the End of the World. 2025 NEXT STEP Choreographer's Showcase at PNB

Pacific Northwest Ballet School Professional Division students in Lily Wills’ As If Apart, presented during the 2025 NEXT STEP choreographers’ showcase. Photo © Lindsay Thomas.

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That's great!
It starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes.
An aeroplane.
Lenny Bruce is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn.
World serves its own needs, don't misserve your own needs.
Speed it up a notch, speak, grunt, no strength
The ladders start to clatter with fear fight, down, height
Wire in a fire, representing seven games.
And a government for hire and a combat site.
Left of west and coming in a hurry with the Furies
Breathing down your neck.
Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped.
Look at that low plane, fine, then!
Uh-oh, overflow, population, common food
But it'll do, save yourself, serve yourself
World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed
Tell me with the rapture and the reverent in the right, right
You, vitriolic, patriotic, slam fight, bright light
Feeling pretty psyched
 
[Chorus]
It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine.

Songwriters: John Michael Stipe / Michael E. Mills / Peter Lawrence Buck / William Thomas Berry

It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine) lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

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It's been a hell of a week, and I definitely need to begin this set of reviews of Pacific Northwest Ballet's NEXT STEP: 2025 Choreographers' Showcase, with a bit of an apology--I don't normally turn in my reviews quite this late, but as I was saying--this really has been a crazy week--for all of us. A lot has happened and I'm not going to say that any of this is any harder for me than it has been for anyone else, but I am going to share a little bit of insight, a little background into your author's life--especially as a child and pre-teen growing up with parents whose own chosen primary goal was to pave the way for the Second Coming. Yes, that Second Coming--the big one, the one which may or may not be going on right now, as I write this and you read this. 

One day, when we were kids--I think I was 12 and my siblings were both much younger--my parents pulled us off to the side of the road.  "How would you kids like to be Jedi Knights for the Lord!" my dad wheezed excitedly.

We had just watched "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back," and for those that haven't seen it--"Jedi's" are these mythical beings who wield all sorts of powers like levitating things and carrying swords called "Light Sabers." No kids, in their right minds would have turned this opportunity down.  But, still, I couldn't help having some definite concerns about my parent's grip on reality.

What happened next was about ten years of madcap craziness as we followed my loony-tune parents from state-to-state, city-to-city, school-to-school--never finishing a school year, never having long-term friends and always worrying that the end of the world could happen at any moment. We were brought up in a state of almost constant loss. We were brought up believing that all of this was temporary--that all of my friends, girlfriends, pets, all of the beautiful forests, gorgeous sunsets, twisting rivers, a really good hot dog, Marx Brothers movies, Beatles music, Goth women, all of it--all of it was temporary, none of it even mattered--the only thing that mattered was the rapture--the second coming.  The end of all of this. Everything else was just window dressing. 

But, what does that all mean? Well basically, it means that I have been the walking triggered--well, for a bit longer than just this week, but definitely triggered.  Life, at the end of the world--well, it's not all it's cracked up to be! I know. We're not supposed to talk about it.  We're not supposed to admit that there are tons of people frothing at the mouth over the idea of a final battle to end all battles--an armageddon, but then what is art, if not talking about the things that we are not supposed to. 

What is art if not turning trauma into something beautiful. Right? Right! What is art, if it is not about taking damage and turning it into magic. Expressing our dreams and putting them on a canvas, into a sculpture, or in the case of ballet in the form of performance on a stage. 

Pacific Northwest Ballet School Professional Division students in Amanda Morgan’s Ether, presented during the 2025 NEXT STEP choreographers’ showcase. Photo © Lindsay Thomas.

Last Friday, May 13th was the 2025 NEXT STEP choreographers' showcase, which is a culmination of PNB's NEXT STEP program, a choreographic workshop where Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) company dancers create new works for PNB School's Professional Division students. It serves as a platform for emerging choreographic talent, providing opportunities for PNB dancers to develop their skills and for Professional Division students to participate in the creation of new ballets. Each year, the program ends in a night of performance featuring all-premiere works created for the students.

This year's NEXT STEP consisted of five excellent works, by some of ballet's best working choreographers. As a group, there were several similarities, including the use of contemporary recorded musicians, like Delia Derbyshire, Chris Cohen and the music of Nine Inch Nails. Derbyshire, for those that do not know is a feminist icon and an early synthesizer music pioneer who is best known for creating the haunting instrumental theme from BBC's Dr. Who television series--the original version--the really spooky one! 

The opener, Amanda Morgan's Ether, which features Delia Derbyshire's multilayered spoken word and music piece The Afterlife sets up a beautiful melodrama that forces us to confront the nature of life and death--and perhaps our need to rationalize away all of our fears. For Morgan--the Ether is a kind of gateway between us and the loss of those that have passed on, where we have access to our long lost ones. 

Visually, Morgan's ballet is lush and beautiful, filled with imagery that is both universal and mundane coming from our everyday world, it gains power from this mundanity.  Shirts on hangers become spirits, and bodies in motion represent the human desire to make sense of the uncanny--alongside the pitiable sense of confidence of the disembodied voices as they attempt to convince us of their assuredness over something they, like all of us, know nothing about--the afterlife.  What we get is a fragile blending of several texts--each one delicately and powerfully blending into the other--but none of them having any sense of verity.  This is one of the strongest works that this viewer has seen in a long time.  It is a success on every level--and there are, indeed many levels. 

Pacific Northwest Ballet School Professional Division students in Jonathan Batista’s Suddenly, O FIM (The End), presented during the 2025 NEXT STEP choreographers’ showcase. Photo © Lindsay Thomas.

If I had been the one to curate this night of dance--I would have placed Ether further on into the night, at the very least building on the second piece, Suddenly, O Fim (The End), by Jonathan Batista.  The first two dances of  the night share a great deal in common and one almost feels like the second half of the other, in each, a lead dancer appears to be moving through a narrative filled with an ensemble of dancers in the foreground or background of each dance. 
Of the two, Amanda Morgan's Ether is, ultimately the more memorable, seemingly more focused and more visually exciting, narrating the trauma of death.  It seems almost a bit of a disservice to have these two so closely together--Suddenly needed a bit more space to show its strengths--in a way, it is the subtler of the two. 
Jonathan Batista, Pacific Northwest Ballet's first Black principle dancer, presents us with a compelling ballet, if not overly exciting.  Covering similar ground to Ether, Suddenly was created in honor of the passing of Lynn Lindsay– a devoted PNB supporter and a dear friend of Batista’s. In this way, Suddenly continues the theme of building beauty from trauma.  At the same time, this ballet builds upon a beautifully, gothic soundtrack by Leandro Albuquerque created especially for this work.  Albuquerque keeps the work moving at a dynamic pace as soloists and duets fill the stage--while the author and his dancers reflect upon a life lived and a soul passed on, through bodies in motion and the power of dance.

   

Pacific Northwest Ballet School Professional Division students McKenzie Wilson and Luke Gutierrez in Kyle Davis and Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan’s Pas de Deux from an Unnamed Story, presented during the 2025 NEXT STEP choreographers’ showcase. Photo © Lindsay Thomas.

At first glimpse, Pas de Deux from an Unnamed Story, appears to be just your average, even basic, traditional Pas de Deux complete with a basic, traditional, yet evocative score and two dancers pulling from a fairly traditional grab-bag of dance moves. I am not suggesting that Pas, itself is basic--in fact it is very nice, interesting and even engaging. The rhetoric behind this dance is narrative and bold and talks of history, identity and of a grandiose reclamation of the past--basically, the same sort of modernist talk that we are used to from hundreds of years of dance. 

But as I have been noticing over a great deal of media in the last few years--something has changed.  We have changed. We no longer look at the universe in exactly the same way that we used to.  We, and I do mean we as a culture of humans, no longer interact with nostalgia in exactly the same way that we used to.  A door has closed--and it is us that have closed it. 

But something else is going on here as well, this specific dance begins to deconstruct itself--and while one hopes that the author's know what is happening here--one is not completely certain of this.  As the ballet continues--the dancers begin to be out of tune, they begin to miss each other's movements--like slowing tops they have become out-of-synch. It is as if the authors Davis and Ryan are also telling us that as hard as we may try--we simply cannot go back to a classic style--something will always get in the way.  The past, complete with all of its traumas, complete with all of its ghosts is very simply no longer there. It is gone, and is now, possibly forever, out of our reach.  

Here, what might have looked like a traditional ballet, full of all the traditional entrapments and embellishments can no longer hold.  

The past does not, cannot cohere to the present no matter how hard we try to bring it forward--it lacks the cogency to exist in this day and time. It has become a ghost of the desire that it be real. It lacks the irony that we need in order to engage with it.

We simply cannot see the past in the same way that we once did. It does not exist in the same way that it once had. We do not exist in the same way that we once did.  Perhaps it is trauma again, raising its ugly head--this time in the form of entropy--but the pendulum does not swing at the same speed as it did in the 1800s Veracruz, Mexico, that is meant to be depicted in the narrative of this ballet.  As it always does--when nostalgia is the guiding force of our aspirations--nostalgia tends to trip us up.  It softens our vision and leaves us vulnerable--but moreover as a Lacan would say--it forces the zombies, the aches and pains of past trauma to seep out of narrative pores and to haunt us--with the things that we have attempted to keep from ourselves--in this case, the narrative nostalgia of the void.  

This dance, perhaps despite itself, perhaps despite its narrative intentionality, ultimately is the most haunted ballet of the night. There are, in fact, more ghosts in this work than the first two combined.  

Pacific Northwest Ballet School Professional Division students in Samuel Portillo’s Tomorrow, presented during the 2025 NEXT

 STEP choreographers’ showcase. Photo © Lindsay Thomas.

The last two pieces of the night end things on a note of power, Samuel Portillo's Tomorrow, scored with Nine Inch Nails evocative piece "Together" is both meditative and forceful.  Blending strong lighting and the corps de ballet into a cohesive whole.  Once again, we have the solo, solitary lead dancer bracketed by the corps de ballet, seemingly acting as memories, as thoughts, and trauma, as life moving around a pensive centralized figure.  

Perhaps this entire night says something about where we are as humans, as humanity. Perhaps this is a collective moment in which we are taking a kind of "time out," in which we are reflective.  Perhaps this is what ballet at the end of the world looks like.  Perhaps this is what we need--perhaps we are seeing ourselves as the collective solo dancer--reflecting on death, reflecting on our own lives, on those that have passed on and have become the ghosts that dance around us--haunting us, perhaps.  But at the same time, these ghosts are part of us and they love us as much as we love them--or perhaps it is something else entirely.  History can be a trickster and just as we are contemplating our untimely deaths--the future is always being built up at the same time. 

On this night, strangely--just as we are ready to slit our throats after so much contemplation of death and our own mortalities--Lily Wills comes out of left field and reminds us all that life is worth living!  As If Apart, jumps in and pours itself over us like rain after a long drought--and she brings with her what may end up being my new favourite musician! Sounding like a cross between Damon Albarn of Blur, a happier Radiohead and the French band Air--this was the antidote that the night needed.  

In 4 fantastic movements--Wills presents us with something that feels new and exciting, not immediately obviously quotational (Though, I'm sure I'll find out if I am wrong about this,) but most of all she presents us with something fun! Mixing elements of sports, wonderfully colorful outfits and choreography that is so enjoyable to watch that this reviewer actually forgot about what a mess the world is in. Suddenly the world felt less armagedonny. Hope seemed possible, but more important somewhere in the fun--there was just a slight bit of zeitgeist.  A shift had occurred. That ineffable something that I am always looking for--that collection of bits that make something different and new has arrived!

 As If Apart, the last work of the night feels important, like something on the verge of happening.  Like putting your finger on something, when you don't quite know what it is.  And that is a good thing--even on the edge of the end of the world. 

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