If we learned anything at Pacific Northwest Ballet's Laugh Out Loud Spring Festival last night, it was that pointing your fingers while dancing en pointe is hee-larious. Ba-dum-ching. We'll be here all week. The fest, another genre-busting divergence from the norm by director Peter Boal, aims to celebrate all that is wacky and funny about ballet. They mean funny "ha-ha" but there's some funny "strange" thrown in as well.

We caught Program A (there's a Program B at other nights/times and a Best of Fest, with backstage party, on Saturday the 19th). The night's triumph came last, which makes sense. We were not sure we were ready for the predicted run-time (37 minutes), but ended up relishing nearly every second of Christopher Wheedon's "Variations Sérieuses." Set to Mendehlson's Op. 54, the set design is an inherent part of the genius of this work. The curtain rises to give the audience a side-view of a theater: stage left behind the wings. And we don't just see the backstage set, we're given an insider's view on the drama and intrigue of a professional ballet company (albeit with a side-serving of soap-opera melodrama).

The primary male dancer spies early on a talented young corps member, but he is beholden to the drama-queen principal soloist, played pitch-perfectly by Louise Nadeau, replete with tantrums, hand-to-forehead angst, and some surprisingly, comically bad performance skillz. During a botched rehearsal, she blames her poor performance on the pianist, at one point marching over and slowly slapping her hand on the piano to illustrate for the poor sap just how off he was--our guffaws rang out through the theater. Thank you, PNB, for truly making us laugh out loud. Shortly after, she makes a surprise entrance...into the orchestra pit.

The show must go on, and our young ingenue takes the prima donna's place, delivering a glorious performance (along with a corps outfitted in all pink with butterfly wings, and a male troupe in what can only be described as Shakespearean puffy water wings--pure visual comedy in action) while we soaked in the behind-the-scenes shenanigans. If you've ever performed on a stage, this work was piercing in its accuracy and comedy, but its true genius was how even non-performers could relate, and laugh along, while watching the melodrama unfold.

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancer Kari Brunson in the world premiere of Susan Stroman’s TAKE FIVE … More or Less, presented as part of PNB’s LAUGH OUT LOUD! Spring Dance Festival (April 17 through 20, 2008). (© Angela Sterling)

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In "Take Five ... More or Less," veteran Broadway choreographer Susan Stroman crafted a delightful, charming work that mixes well-placed, light-hearted humor with lively, jazzed-up choreography (it's set to Brubeck's legendary piece) that caused us to turn to our friend afterwards and simply state: "Wow, that was just really fun!" Helmed by Noelani Pantastico (!!!), this swingy piece leads with four women in brightly-colored flowing cocktail dresses, deftly demonstrating the extent of their leggy extension and high-flying jetés.

Soon joined by a group of three men in black, a slightly competitive dynamic develops, leaving Pantastico un-partnered, and she soon runs offstage, distraught with hand on forehead. What follows is a blizzard of partnering, until soloist Lesley Rauch appears in sultry purple, only to demolish all previous expectations of leggy extension. My god, they just go on for miles, we thought, and the remaining men on stage clearly thought the same, abandoning their partners.

And so on it went, with partners switching around and additional brightly-colored dresses added to the mix, highlighted by a seductive solo by Kari Brunson clad in all-red (pictured below). Brunson seemed a bit nervous, but we suspect when the jitters subside, this will be one of the knock-out moments of the entire piece. Stroman's acrobatic choreography allowed for moments of cheeky humor to pop through, mostly via slightly sexy cameos in the vein of "Did I just do that?" with hand coyly placed over mouth. We loved it, as did the rest of the audience.

Trisha Brown's "Spanish Dance," was an example of the brevity and witticism we'd wish
"The Lost Language of the Flight Attendant" had evoked. That, and restraint, an often-rare but hallowed trait of excellent humor. A line of women clad in all white line the stage in front of the curtain, slowly progressing from right to left to Bob Dylan's "Early Mornin' Rain." Hips wiggling, each dancer bumps into the one in front of her, pushing the next one along until they all fold like an accordion into the wall at the end of the stage. We really don't know why it's funny, but it is.

Which leaves us with the first performance of the night, "The Lost Language of the Flight Attendant." Rich subject matter you'd think, a vein of amusing body language and personality quirks just waiting to be mined. But it never materialized as we'd expected. Choreographer Brian Reeder's light, lilting movements relied heavily on thematic repetition, but very little of it was truly relevant to the high-flying attendant lifestyle (except the eventually over-used meme of the two-finger point). It was cutesy, which in our book is definitely not the same as funny. That mixed with ballet-lite choreography that hardly stands out in our memory left us wishing this piece (also a long one at 27 minutes) had been more amuse bouche than first course.