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Written by Vanya
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Sunday, 23 December 2007 |
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The current Pacific Northwest Ballet repetoire comprises four works, spanning thirty years. It opened with the oldest of these, George Balanchine's Agon, set, as were so many of Balanchine's works, to music from Igor Stravinsky. Unusually, there was not a stager from the Balanchine Trust on hand to teach the work- but instead former PNB Creative Director Francia Russell- for the excellent reason that she was in the premiere cast when New York City Ballet performed it 1 December, 1957.
Stravinsky's music is incredibly complex, featuring polyrhythms and unusual structures. Balanchine, not to be outdone, adds another series of layers of complexity by varying the counts for the dancers. At points, this piece is very pretty, but because of its highly irregular structures and complexity, it came off as a sterile, almost academic pursuit.
Following an intermission, the programme shifted to a pair of works which stretch the conventional images of what ballet comprises- Susan Marshall's Kiss, to music by Estonian minimalist Avro Pärt and David Parsons' Caught to a piece by Robert Tripp. The former uses suspension to add elements outside the customary ballet vocabulary, the latter strobe lighting to freeze the dancer in the air.
Kari Brunson and Casey Herd were phenomenal in Kiss. This isn't a new piece to the PNB- it was featured last year in the "Valentine" repetoire, but the pairing of Brunson and Herd managed to bring both an erotic tension and a langorous, romantic feeling to the work, which will stand in my mind as one of the most memorable moments i've seen from PNB.
Following Kiss, Olivier Wevers sparkled in Caught. This piece lets the soloist trigger a strobe light at various points during the five-minute performance, and captures him 'walking' in mid air amongst several other spectacularly coordinated leaps covering the entire stage.
After a second intermission, the evening closed with Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room, set to music specifically written for it by Phillip Glass. This is a fusion of modern dance and ballet, in which some of the cast start in each 'school', and come to blend their styles by the end of the performance. It makes for a fitting cap to an evening such as this which blended the conventional and unconventional.  Be first to comment this article |  Add as favourites (32) |  Quote this article on your site | Views: 1418
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