Jessica Lang's Pages Presents us With a Perfect Ballet in a very Imperfect Age, And Balanchine is Pretty Good, Too!

Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers in Serenade, choreographed by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust. PNB presents Serenade on a triple-bill with a ballet by Alexei Ratmansky, and a world premiere by Jessica Lang, onstage at Seattle Center’s McCaw Hall September 25 – October 4, 2026. For tickets and info, contact the PNB Box Office, 206.441.2424 or PNB.org. Photo © Angela Sterling.

The PNB is back! And with it's season opening program comes three spectacular dances by three of the biggest names in both historic and contemporary Ballet--Balanchine (of course!,) Russian, contemporary choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, and features a wonderful world premiere by our own, recent artist-in-residence Jessica Lang. 

Serenade, the season opener, which continues through October 4th, begins with the eponymous Balanchine choreography created in 1934 for an American audience. This otherworldly, romantic ballet, with music by legend Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is credited as being Balanchine's first full-length ballet made in America and was created to inaugurate the opening of Balanchine's School of American Ballet. Partially because this was meant to be a teaching ballet, partially because he used his students to put together the dances and partially because it was meant for Americans who might not have been "as widely exposed to ballet before," what we get is an awesomely streamlined and stripped-down Balanchine in what is often called non-narrative or "plotless" ballet--which was something that Balanchine would go on to perfect in his later years.

Here, chosen, I believe, as a herald to Jessica Lang's conceptual Pages, this amazing set of dances, teeters on the edge of thrilling abstraction and is a side of Balanchine that is very easy to forget since he is so often presented to us as the epitome of narrative ballet--basically cornering the market as the "Walt Disney" of classical ballet. In fact, Balanchine truly influences and may be extremely responsible for inspiring, if not directly creating many of the tropes that we now expect and accept in our modern-day family-safe fairy tales in all formats.  

But this is different, this is the Balanchine that was aware that Ballet was also a complex, theoretical, growing and changing art-form, one that could be so many more things than just a way to tell a compelling fairy tale story. Here we see Balanchine layering dance upon dance and dancer upon dancer, in movement upon movement, signaling the works of contemporary choreographers. Here, Balanchine puts his stress on the corps de ballet, rather than on the superstar, the prima ballerina or the narrative hero--or, in fact upon the idea of narrative--at all! 

This is an important shift that decenters the entire affair--not always consistently, not always effectively--this is an excellent ballet--but it is far from perfect. However, this is Balanchine stretching the form, creating dances that make you think, questioning a form that was already becoming more and more self-aware and which would not stop contemplating itself ever again. This was the birth of modern ballet.  

Now that is not to say that Serenade does not have its narrative moments and certainly there are nods to many of his earlier works here, while the addition of male dancers cannot help but force narrative into the dance; and one can almost feel Balanchine pushing and pulling against the inclination to tell a story--and it is, in fact this push-and-pull that makes Serenade such a compelling Ballet.  

This is Balanchine at his most ethereal and wonderfully abstract, theoretical and conceptual and it is the perfect lead into the piece that follows--Jessica Lang's Pages.    

 Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Dylan Wald with PNB company dancers in the world premiere of Jessica Lang’s Pages. PNB presents Pages on a triple-bill with works by George Balanchine and Alexei Ratmansky, onstage at Seattle Center’s McCaw Hall September 25 – October 4, 2026. For tickets and info, contact the PNB Box Office, 206.441.2424 or PNB.org. Photo © Angela Sterling.

To begin talking about Jessica Lang and her choreography, I have to say that I am not one of those art critics, ballet critics or people really, who are unwilling to admit when they're wrong. And while I wasn't actually, completely wrong in my critique of last season's Jessica Lang dances, I really do have to admit that Jessica Lang's season opening premier, Pages, puts away all of my concerns about her work and answers nearly every question that I was left with at the end of last season. Pages answers for me why there was so much hub-bub centered around her residency, and why there was all the excitement about it. This set of dances shows clearly what Jessica Lang has to offer to the current balletic world.  Here, the choreographer becomes the author of her own oeuvre, gone is the overt sense of looking back with a nostalgic eye to the ballets of the past and what they have already given us. Instead we are given a work that while it does look back it does so with a confrontational eye/I that is placed firmly in the current world and looks unflinchingly forward to the future.  

According to Lang herself, Pages began its conceptual life as an extended metaphor comparing the choreographer to a writer contemplating her own creative process. The ballet, with music by David Lang, reminds the viewer of such postmodern classics as Einstein on the Beach and 1000 Airplanes on the Roof and definitely has the repetition, and especially the layering of spoken words found in the best of Philip Glass' operas. But there is also a stance here, a very important difference between what Jessica Lang does and what Post Moderns like Philip Glass, and in fact, most other Post Moderns affect.  This icy cold distance is for me in fact the difference and the break between high postmodernism and what we have now--and that is the positionality of the artist. The I/eye of the artist, which was seemingly missing from last season's Lang premieres.    

As some of you may know, I wear many hats, as the Director of On the Edge: International Latinx Performance Art Festivals, and I am a sculptor/painter and performance artist in my own right. Recently I was helping a friend put up a show and the conversation turned to an article they had read about the current state of the arts which said that identity art was very much dead. That we should stick a fork in it and move on--the arts were now done with identity focused artwork and it had nothing more to say to us and that in fact the American art world was now closed off to any artist, writer, choreographer, etc., who wanted to speak in identity terms.  

Now, I can tell you that this was a stunning pronouncement to this writer, critic and practicing artist.  I mean, it was as though the ground had shifted and I was left dumbfounded, was this true? Was this the current state of the arts--was the world now one in which artists, choreographers, nonbinary theorists and pro-feminist performers were now forced to go back into their own personal closets and to shut up because the doors had been locked behind them?   

This, going back to my critique of the works in PNB's last season ender--was perhaps where my greatest worry about the shape, form and substance of Lang's work lay. When all was said and done, in that program I saw irony, I saw humor, I saw many of the things that one expects to see in contemporary dance--but I did not see the artist. That bewildered me, and it worried me. I felt as though Lang was hiding--that she had pulled up and gone inside, shutting the blinds, and was presenting us with a facade in the hope that we would not ask too many questions, that we would not get too curious, that we would not force the artist to get too personal. It felt as though Jessica Lang was worried that we would ask her to show too much, that we would ask her to show her work, so to speak!

I am happy to say that in Pages, Lang has responded to my concerns--in fact, she does so in what almost feels like a direct and personal response--to me, which, of course is not possible, but I am proud of the fact that Lang is seen here taking a stand--taking a stand as a person, as an individual, as a woman, as an artist, and as the center locus of her own work. Pages puts the "I" at the center of an oeuvre at a time when taking a position is almost dangerous, almost fearsome and requires a certain amount of bravery. Lang's Pages is unflinchingly, unapologetically personal and all about identity--her own identity and in today's messed up world--that is important!

Now, I was going to write about how Lang, here, seems more comfortable this time around, playing in a conceptual sandbox that while birthed in identity, includes a little bit of irony, pastiche, and even visual references she also embraces and possibly critiques the language of conceptual art history. Here, Lang using layer upon layer of dance, of language, but also by hanging the masculine image of conceptual art and placing a Joseph Kosuth inspired chair that has come to be the essentialist symbol of high, masculinist conceptuality in the heavens of the stage--she takes a clear shot at that bit of masculine history and tells the boys of the past that she is making a statement and taking her own place in this world--but honestly none of that is as important as I once thought it might be. Instead, Lang has made a perfect ballet, perfect for this day and age and that is all that matters here.  

 

Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers in Alexei Ratmansky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. PNB presents Pictures at an Exhibition on a triple-bill with works by George Balanchine and Jessica Lang, onstage at Seattle Center’s McCaw Hall September 25 – October 4, 2026. For tickets and info, contact the PNB Box Office, 206.441.2424 or PNB.org. Photo © Angela Sterling.

As a coda, the only thing that I felt kind of let down the night was Alexei Ratmansky's Pictures at an Exhibition, which on any other night would have been a perfectly lovely choice to end the night with, but here was just out of place and worse--it was unnecessary.  In comparison to the otherworldly, ethereal, near abstraction of Serenade and the conceptual brilliance of Jessica Lang's Pages--Ratmansky just lacked gravitas.  It just didn't hold up against these two juggernauts and lasted far too long.  I suppose on a night like this one, you needed to be another giant just to get a seat on this ride, to completely mix a metaphor as far as it can go.   

Still, you should go to this wonderful night of ballet and see if you agree.