Pacific Northwest Ballet's Love Stories is not to be missed, as it showcases some of PNB’s finest dancers, the full breadth of their mastery of the form and leaves the audience members with a lot of places to identify themselves in the artistry. There’s a lot to love here. more ›

Pacific Northwest Ballet opened their 2011-2012 season with a showcase of the work of contemporary darling choreographer Christopher Wheeldon. The company, now under its 6th year with Artistic Director Peter Boal, solidly executed four of the complex pieces, a testament to the strength of Wheeldon's choreography and the precise beauty of the PNB dancers. more ›

In an emotional and powerful evening PNB showcased of a dozen short pieces and highlighted the careers of eight parting dancers. more ›

Alex reviews "A Midsummer Night's Dream," decides that it is, in fact, dreamy. more ›

If you are coming to Pacific Northwest Ballet's Cinderella for spectacular dancing or jaw-dropping choreography, you're probably going to wish upon a different star. But the ballet is right up the alley of the "Once Upon a Time" set, and is sure to delight children and lovers (if not dance fiends). more ›

News on the A.W.A.R.D. Show! $10,000 grand prize winner, Oscar nominations with local ties, the Fleet Foxes sophomore album release and the Mary Poppins musical. more ›

It was with bated breath that a sold-out crowd waited for the curtain to open at Intiman Theatre last weekend. The buzz about this new dance company has been building for the past year, starting with Whim W’him’s sold-out premiere at On the Boards last January and culminating with the December announcement that Whim W’him would become Intiman’s first Resident Dance Company, a five-year partnership beginning in January 2011. more ›

That headline is a mouthful, eh? Here's what's happening: This weekend, New York's Guggenheim Museum is hosting three sold-out Giselle Revisited programs, which feature select PNB dancers performing excerpts from Artistic Director Peter Boal’s new staging of Giselle. more ›

Pacific Northwest Ballet's ALL THARP performance may be your one shot to see a ballerina footing it across the stage of McCaw Hall in daisy dukes. We suggest you check it out. Not only because of the aforementioned denim booty shorts, although that's a boon, but because Twyla Tharp's showcase highlights one of the most famous examples of crossover ballet, the intermixing of classical and modern, and for us, a nice bridge between the streets and the marquee. A chance to see how hip-hop, folk, contemporary and traditional movement all combine into a night of physical ephemeralness, it's an absolutely wonderful way to spend an evening. more ›

It's dance season again in Seattle, and you'll have no shortage of events to choose from this month. Of particular interest is the upcoming 8th Men in Dance festival, which has again brought together a range of dance styles and choreographic talent to showcase local men dancing together - without a single woman onstage. more ›

It's been six years since Peter Boal took the artistic reins at Pacific Northwest Ballet, and this year he's made the Director's Choice program PNB's 2010-2011 season opener. The wacky Sechs Tänze (Six Dances) - from former Nederlands Dans Theater Artistic Director and choreographer Jirí Kylián - is a new aquisition for the company, as is Jerome Robbins' three-part Glass Pieces. Kylián's Petite Mort premiered in last season's Director's Choice program; you'll get the chance to see it again here. Jardí Tancat, from Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato, is an audience favorite, resurrected. Created within a decade of each other, the works in this program present a world-wide slice of dance innovation in the mid-to-late eighties. more ›

"It all starts over here, with the Bible," says Theige Hascall, as she leads us over to view a triple-ring binder full of watercolor sketches from Italian fashion designer and set and costume expert, Roberta Guidi di Bagno, fabric swatches and hundreds of pages of character descriptions and wardrobe reference notes of the Balanchine version (1974) of Coppélia. (Seattle Times interview with di Bagno here). more ›

Last night Pacific Northwest Ballet premiered George Balanchine’s Coppélia to great fanfare, as their last repertory program of the 2009-10 season. Balanchine’s foray into storybook ballet, rarely seen outside of New York, here has been freshly reupholstered, drawing out the youth and charm at the heart of the ballet “comedy.” Planning on the production began two-and-a-half years ago, with the scenic and costume departments spending nearly a year building the ballet’s new, original pieces. With a budget of $1.3 million, Coppélia is PNB’s first full-length design commission in seven years. more ›

It was admittedly with some reservation that we headed to the PNB opening night performance of The Sleeping Beauty last week. We love classical ballet, but we’ve seen the boundary-pushing, über-engaging side of PNB and its offsets, and the full-length storybook ballets are usually classically vanilla, plumped with pomp and circumstance, and several hours long. more ›

Nutcracker season is again upon us. It’s a Christmas tradition for many, and the Pacific Northwest Ballet production--even with forty-five performances this season--is always well attended. The cherished fairy tale of Clara and her Nutcracker has a plot so familiar to audiences that there is simply a large-scale passive acceptance when hordes of mice suddenly start romping around the Stahlbaum living room (more on that later). more ›

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. more ›

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.” more ›

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. more ›

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. more ›

ONE WEEKEND ONLY more ›

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). more ›

OPENINGS more ›

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. more ›

ONE WEEKEND ONLY more ›

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. more ›

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. more ›

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

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. more ›

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. more ›

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.
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