Results tagged “pnb”

         

Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Director’s Choice premiered last weekend with a program that showcases Artistic Director Peter Boal’s devotion to keeping his company on their toes. The second repertory of the season, hot on the heels of Jean-Christophe Maillot’s widely praised modern re-imagining of Roméo et Juliet, maintains the company's innovative works impetus, fulfilling Boal’s vision to increase the versatility of not just his dancers, but also PNB’s orchestra, costume and production teams.

After twenty-five seasons as Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Music Director, Stewart Kershaw tendered his resignation Tuesday in a letter to the company, effective immediately. In his announcement, Kershaw stated, “Please understand that I am now 68, have been a professional ballet conductor for the last 43 years, and recently completed 25 seasons as PNB's Music Director. It is also exactly 20 years since my efforts to create the PNB Orchestra were rewarded in October 1989.”

We have come late to the Nadeau appreciation society--after 17 years, that bandwagon has left the station and steamed from the harbor--but it struck us that there was something extraordinary in a 45-year-old ballerina pulling Forsythe's Urlicht out of the hat for a retirement program.

We had to choose just one night of PNB's Swan Lake, and so we went with retiring Louise Nadeau's Odette/Odile--as did as many other people as it takes to fill McCaw Hall. Nadeau and Karel Cruz were everything we wanted: love at first sight's boundary-blurring union of echoing gestures, and then, in a little black dress, Odile's "You want this?" rampage. We ran into a friend, though, who was back for a fourth time, and told us how Jonathan Porretta kept his Jester's schtick evolving from night to night. Check the casting combinations for the six shows left, tonight through Sunday.

   

ONE WEEKEND ONLY

For ballerinas, Swan Lake is a sought-after, tough, and rewarding double role: Odette the good swan and Odile the evil swan. But it all began with the music. In 1875 Tchaikovsky got the commission from the Bolshoi for a full-length ballet based on the Russian folk-tale of an enchanted swan and the handsome prince who falls in love with her; he composed a lush symphonic score that offers choreographers both languid melodic lines and lively melodies. (Familiar plot: boy meets swan, boy betrays and loses swan, swan commits suicide, boy despairs.) The Swan Lake we know today--indeed, the whole notion of ballerina-as-swan (one speaks of "a ballet of swans")--evolved from this specific piece of theater, grounded in the 19th century conventions of classical ballet, with its reliance on a rigid sequence of dances (waltz-solo-march-action scene).

OPENINGS

We said Pacific Northwest Ballet's Broadway Festival was an enormous amount of fun, and it sounds like plenty of you figured that out for yourselves. Artistic director Peter Boal just sent out this "Next round's on me!" email: "With 5,250 tickets purchased to date, we have broken the old record for single tickets sold for a mixed repertory program. It is also the highest grossing mixed repertory program in our company's history, surpassing the old record set by Valentine in 2006." Two shows left: Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m.

    

ONE WEEKEND ONLY

       

PNB's exuberant festival hits you with what you've been missing--the panache of feeling good and knowing it. Before each ballet in its Broadway Festival (through March 22, tickets $25-$160), Pacific Northwest Ballet rolls a clip--for Jerome Robbins' West Side Story Suite it was a trailer for the West Side Story movie. As the Jets began snapping their fingers, the audience in McCaw Hall snapped theirs right back. No laughter, just snap...snap...snap.

ZIPCAR OPEN HOUSE: Drop in at the grand opening of an actual downtown office for Zipcar--in the old Dept. of Licensing location at 3rd and Union. The open house runs until 5 p.m., and if you stop in and join Zipcar today, there's no annual fee for your first year. We're told there's also a prize wheel where you can win driving credits and other goodies, plus free snacks. We use the Zipcar ourselves, and we're happy to hear that the City of Seattle is joining them in a car-sharing arrangement for city employees.

ACT kicked off their annual production of playing up at Annex Theatre.

The moon always seems to be full in Maurice Sendak's illustrations. He's done some 90 children's books, two of them cherished icons (Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen), along with one ballet. As it happens, Seattle is the beneficiary of this unique venture into set-and-costume design: the wildly popular Nutcracker, which celebrates its 25th season this year.

      

There is nary a tutu to be seen on Pacific Northwest Ballet's New Works program (through November 16, tickets $25-$155), which is an eclectic collection of dance pieces by Mark Morris, PNB's Kiyon Gaines, Benjamin Millepied, and William Forsythe. Not that we have anything against tutus. In fact, some of our best friends...but that's neither here nor there. We bring it up only to emphasize the leap that Peter Boal is making with PNB, in integrating so many kinds of new works into the company's repertoire.

John's band, in light of America's financial misfortunes, will be returning to the home-made recording studio to use our economic meltdown as inspiration for new songwriting material.

Pacific Northwest Ballet has been putting on a terrific series of educational events the last few weeks: there was the Twyla Tharp-narrated rehearsal of her two new works, and then Doug Fullington gave us firsthand foreign policy experience by showing us real Russian choreography.

WAMU'S KRAUSS PLANT: Tonight's the night: some old dude named Robert Plant is appearing with the angelically voiced Alison Krauss. They're touring for the album Raising Sand, which Rolling Stone praised for its "relaxed, smoky harmonies and reverbed midtempo rockabilly." All ages. Or you could go see Great Big Sea with all these people.

Tomorrow night the "All Tharp" program begins at Pacific Northwest Ballet (and runs through October 5--tickets here).

Rudolph Valentino. Ray Charles. Jerry Lee Lewis dancing on pianos, for God's sake! Dance in Seattle had anything but a boring 20th century. We were prowling around the internet this morning and discovered that today is the anniversary of the date the city banned a really bizarre but popular 1920s and '30s fad called "dance marathons" within its city limits. That was enough to pique our interest, and we've spent the day researching what was happening in the world of dance during the 20th century. Here are some of the highlights, thanks in large part to our favorite local history website: HistoryLink.org.

       

Macho, moody, and whimsical, PNB's All Robbins program is a stand-up triple, if not a home run (at McCaw Hall through June 8; tickets: $20-$150). Actually the Mariners could learn a lot from the raw athleticism, discipline, and teamwork on display. Opening night's Fancy Free sparked and fizzed erratically; conductor Stewart Kershaw, swinging the baton sans panache, kept Bernstein's charged score sounding off-kilter. But PNB rallied during In the Night, and by the time The Concert wrapped up, even the golf-clappers in the audience were on their feet cheering.

Depending on how quickly we post this, there are two more showings of the Pacific Northwest Ballet Laugh Out Loud Festival's Program B today, at 1 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $20-$80. We don't know about you, but with all the sleet and snow this weekend, we've been craving some silly indoor festivities. This fills the bill to a T.

    

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.

    

"Ah, this is ballet," sighed one white-haired woman to another. And then, for emphasis, "This is ballet." Originally choreographed by George Balanchine, this is Francia Russell's staging of the master's A Midsummer Night's Dream (at McCaw Hall through April 13, tickets $20-$150). It's "real" ballet in the way that a Cheever short story signifies the New Yorker. But we're not here to beat up on oldsters, according to our parole officer--and neither is the Peter Boal-led Pacific Northwest Ballet, which approached the work with a captivating intensity, driving straight for its muscular, passionate heart.

PNB's Director's Choice opened last night (through March 22 at McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St; tickets: $20-$150) with a mixed program that seemed designed to rouse sleepers and ruffle feathers. Seattle is not really a walk-out-in-a-huff town--it's more likely to seethe-silently-and-save-up-catty-comments. But still, we did see two separate people march out of William Forsythe's One Flat Thing, reproduced, secure in the knowledge that it was the last piece on the bill.