PNB Pleases with "All Balanchine" Program
Not surprisingly, Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “All Balanchine” program premiered Thursday night to a packed auditorium at McCaw Hall. ‘Balanchine’ is a heavy name in the world of dance - his ballets are guaranteed crowd pleasers - and PNB has always been known as a Balanchine company. PNB founders Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, as well as current artistic director Peter Boal, all danced for Balanchine, and to date the company has performed thirty-four of his ballets (with the addition of Coppelia this summer). Boal’s job, as we see it, is to aggressively push the artistic boundaries of his company with regular presentations of new work, while leaving plenty of Balanchine behind as homage to the company’s heritage. Make new friends, but keep the old.
Let us also remind you that in order to license a ballet from The George Balanchine Trust, you must hire a “Balanchine approved repetiteur to stage the work and see it through to the premiere.” You screw it up, your license is revoked. A Balanchine ballet is a promise to the man that his ballets will not die, a commitment to carry out his legacy.
The point being: you know that the “All Balanchine” program at PNB is going to be good.
The program begins with Serenade, the first Balanchine ballet ever set on American dancers, and one of his most loved. When the curtain opened to reveal the stark placement of seventeen women - that famously odd number - the audience gasped. Henceforth commences a visual study of the female body stretched to perfection. PNB supplies the ranks with an army of supple, long-limbed beauties and Francia Russell, fittingly, returns to stage the piece with a lovely lilt and harmony.
How unfortunate that this serene pictorial of beauty and grace is rudely interrupted by the entrance of the male form, limbs straining and muscles bulging. Blah! Blah! (Maybe it was the blue unitards). Overwhelmingly though, Serenade shows Balanchine’s unique mastery of women en pointe; the visual patterns woven by their bodies to Tchaikovsky’s score; how something so simple can be so achingly beautiful.
With Square Dance the program shifts gears into a fast-paced presentation of technical virtuosity. Square Dance was conceived to present the American dancer’s powerful “invention, its superb preparation for risks and its high spirits” - the corporal equivalent of flooring a 300-horsepower engine at a green light. Square Dance isn’t as visually stunning as Serenade, but it’s interesting to watch as the dancers begin to tire. They’re all working hard, with Carrie Imler forefront in the female solo, and the cast powers through the challenging piece with aplomb. But in direct contrast to the piece before it, we found Square Dance to be, well, forgettable.
Next up is The Four Temperaments, one of Balanchine’s famous “black-and-white” ballets, and here come the Balanchine hip-thrusts! High kicks! This is a theme & variation piece, with each of four themes dominated by a solo. It has the loveliness of Serenade with the energy of Square Dance. With Christina Siemens at the piano, Russell's dancers slice across the stage to culminate in Balanchine's original tableau, and the curtain zips closed to thunderous applause.
Each of these ballets has been in the PNB repertory for close to 30 years. They must have been seen multiple times by many in attendance that night, yet still there resonated a sense of pleasure and wonder - not unusual for any cherished work of art, but this time we really felt it. For us, this program was a reaffirmation of why we love to watch ballet, particularly women dancing ballet. (With these creatures as his medium, it’s understandable why Balanchine was always in love with one ballerina or another.) With austere set and costuming; the clean, energetic movements, it's the dance you see, or as Balanchine strove to show, the timing of the music.
PNB has brought in a different conductor for each piece in the program, continuing the quest to permanently fill the Music Director position vacated by Stewart Kershaw last fall. Also of note: during the “All Balanchine” run, PNB will be actively raising money for its Second Stage career transition program for the company's retiring members. On opening night, each dancer in the company generously donated their salary to Second Stage, an annual tradition. Later we saw ballerinas stuffing wads of donated cash into a manila envelope. You can help too.
Runs through April 25 // McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St. // tickets here
