First Look @ PNB: Worth A Second Look

Saturday night, Pacific Northwest Ballet's season sampler began with Balanchine and ended with Robbins but cannily included fresher works in the middle. It was their gala night, and the lobby was filled with suspiciously tanned women of a certain age in demi-haute couture. Our coverage is going to be bloggily breezy, but if you're interested in a more substantial take, check out Richard Campbell at the P-I.

Ballet Imperial: it's tutus and tights and corps-de-ballet clockwork, but Balanchine's choreography is nothing to sneeze at. Maybe just that one scissor-kicky thing we secretly call "the Snoopy Dance," and therefore have trouble taking seriously. Otherwise, if the dancers were wearing skis, it'd be a black diamond run. This one shows up in the All Balanchine program that starts this weekend.

Für Alina: Edwaard Liang's 2006 pas de deux features a couple in high modernist gray; the dance is an unsettling combination seething desire and cool restraint, all on top of Arvo Pärt's bare-wire piano piece. Very much like a Lexus commercial. We kid, we kid. It's understated yet high-voltage stuff. It shows up in March's Director's Choice program.

Caught: David Parson's fun-with-strobe-lights solo still leaves audiences ecstatic. Finally a dance that satisfies the unconscious need of an audience to get a dancer to hold still. In this case, it was Olivier Wevers seeming to levitate across the stage in freeze frames. "He's jumping so fast!" screamed the girls behind us. And he was. Catch Caught in the November Contemporary Classics.

Roméo et Juliette: The balcony pas de deux may be the hottest bit of ballet we've ever seen. Noelani Pantastico (pictured) and Lucien Postlewaite dance Jean-Christophe Maillot's choreography like...like...GAH!...out of similes. It's flirty, shy, lascivious, come-hither, enraptured, hands-everywhere teen-aged attraction. This arrives in January, and if you don't fall in love with it instantly, call your cardiologist.

The Concert: This 1956 Jerome Robbins piece treads unusual choreographic ground. It's a good-humored tweaking of "Art" and its audience. Part of the spring Laugh Out Loud! festival, it may not actually make you laugh out loud, but it's snootily amusing, like if a New Yorker cartoon came to life. Louise Nadeau, Jonathan Porretta, and Carrie Imler displayed an aptitude for for this kind of thing that made us glad there's going to be a festival's worth.

Photos: Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Olivier Wevers rehearses for David Parsons’ Caught (photographer Bill Mohn superimposed multiple images to create this photograph) – © Bill Mohn; Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Noelani Pantastico and soloist Lucien Postlewaite in Jean-Christophe Maillot’s Roméo et Juliette – © Angela Sterling