OBT Shines in Program C @ PNB

Celebrate Seattle Festival @ PNB
Program A: Sunday 1pm; Program C: Sunday 7pm
McCaw Hall, tickets $20-$80

Pacific Northwest Ballet's Celebrate Seattle Festival gave Artistic Director Peter Boal a chance to invite a number of companies to share the stage with PNB, and while it seemed like a nice gesture to invite Christopher Stowell's Oregon Ballet Theatre, it turned out to be a canny artistic one, too. "Adin," to music by Rachmaninoff, is both beautifully performed and moving, even troubling. The image of the ballerina en pointe, pushed here and there in fading light made us wonder if we'd been too engaged in the prettiness of the preceding scenes. The rhetoric was problematized, as they say. (You know how "they" are.)

Boal was genuinely touched to report that Trisha Brown had prefaced her remarks at a pre-dance talk by saying, "It's good to be home" -- maybe it seemed like one kind of validation for him to have gone out on a limb with the production of a dance festival. Brown's pieces -- "Carmen Overture," "Carmen Entre'Acte," and "Spanish Dance" -- were sprinkled throughout the program; the first two are lighter in spirit, tweaking Carmen's femme fatale music with half-step marches that remind you of mindless persistence of little wind-up toys, with stylized arm gestures that made us think of animated, bendy pipe stems or friendly insects, but either way, completing the serving of irony. "Spanish Dance" suffered from elaborating a similar visual joke as the "Entre'Acte" but no one seemed to mind.

At first intermission, a crowd gathered in the lobby, lurked on the stairs, bent over the balconies to catch the "One Tiny Dance" of the evening, "Dogs of Love" performed by the Crispin Spaeth Dance Group. Chay Norton and Kathy Lawson were the dancers; we'd seen them do this piece at the official Ten Tiny Dances back in February, but it was very different seeing it in the lobby of McCaw Hall. We were a little surprised the ballet crowd was so into it, but they were.

The Scott/Powell work "Locate" was a world premiere, and was, we'll admit, too much for us to take in in one sitting -- the tone is modern, but not aggressively, more rarefied. Powell's austere music employs white noise, single tones, and provokes uneasiness. The Scott/Powell Performance dancers, strikingly HWP in this evening's context, were costumed in white active wear ensembles (and changed into red). The single most memorable impression we walked away with was the bustling groups of two or three dancers almost continually running on or off the stage -- it was like watching some strange community at work.

The world premiere of Paul Gibson's "Sense of Doubt" was unusual in that it uses music by Philip Glass -- under-rehearsed music, according to our musician seatmate -- for contrast with classical ballet's discipline, and it works. The minimalist repetition suits the repetition of gesture, while seeing the dance accompaniment humanizes the music. The costumes and lighting had a slightly eerie, edgy quality -- we'd go back to see this again, partly to hear if the orchestra was still doing battle with the polyrhythms, but partly to see how Gibson pulled this off. It was weirdly entrancing.

Photos Angela Sterling: Oregon Ballet Theatre company dancers in Christopher Stowell’s “Adin,”and Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers in Paul Gibson’s “Sense of Doubt.”