An Idiomatic Balanchine, Walking the Walk in Seattle

<First published online in the New York Times on September 25, 2007>

SEATTLE, Sept. 23 — Since the death of George Balanchine in 1983, his choreography has become the lingua franca of international ballet. Companies that pride themselves on having a “Giselle” or a “Nutcracker” unlike, in major or minor ways, those of other companies have acquired from the Balanchine Trust versions of “Serenade” or “The Four Temperaments” that are, in costume, décor and dance text, virtually identical to those being danced by other companies around the world. What is true around the globe is more intensely true within the United States, where Balanchine lived and worked from 1934 on.

This is cause for applause. The sheer danciness of most Balanchine ballets gives audiences a basically exhilarating time. And then there are the deeper pleasures of the dances’ multilayered response to music, their brilliance of construction in space and time, their power of drama and expression, and the way their all-exposing style makes the difference between one dancer and another a fascinating matter.

Pacific Northwest Ballet, starting its 2007-8 home season in Seattle with an all-Balanchine triple bill, is an example of how the generations are changing. For decades the company was run by Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, who both had studied with and danced for Balanchine. (Ms. Russell became one of the most noted stagers of his ballets during his lifetime.) It is now directed by Peter Boal, whose first season as a professional dancer at New York City Ballet was in the year of Balanchine’s death.

Mr. Boal and his City Ballet generation, which includes Damian Woetzel (now artistic director of the Vail International Dance Festival) and Nikolaj Hübbe (starting in 2008, artistic director of the Royal Danish Ballet), may be expected to help shape our view of Balanchine.

So it’s good that Pacific Northwest’s all-Balanchine program of “Square Dance,” “Prodigal Son” and “Ballet Imperial,” which I saw on Saturday afternoon and evening, was entirely idiomatic. Even when a few performers looked unready, the dancing had the extra quality of utterance that can occur when, say, an opera is sung by artists in their own language.

The orchestra, alternately conducted by Allan Dameron and Stewart Kershaw, is excellent (though Mark Salman, when playing the concerto’s solo part in “Ballet Imperial” for the second time in a day, had a few blurs). A number of New York City Ballet dancers, with yet more Balanchine experience, have recently joined the company: these include Carla Körbes, Miranda Weese and Seth Orza.

But Pacific Northwest has other dancers with the allegro technique for “Ballet Imperial” and “Square Dance,” whose lead ballerina roles are among the most arduous in the repertory. No, neither Kaori Nakamura (matinee) nor Noelani Pantastico (evening) can efface memories of Merrill Ashley in her prime in “Square Dance.” (Twenty-eight years after I last saw her dance this, her image still shines across the decades like a beacon.) But their brio, relishing the strong pulse and musical thrill of this Vivaldi-Corelli ballet, provided the most irresistible moments of the triple bill.

The company recently presented “Square Dance” at the Vail festival, at one performance with a traditional square-dance caller (as in Balanchine’s original 1957 production, “See those feet go wickety-whack!”), at another without (as in his 1976 revision). These Seattle performances did without.

Though the New York City Ballet “Square Dance” I saw in April had in some respects more technical polish at corps level (and, from Mr. Hübbe, a surpassingly eloquent interpretation of the lead male role), these Seattle performances were delivered with much more of the needed vitality. Ms. Nakamura danced with a tingling glow of excitement and challenge, Ms. Pantastico with a more relaxed delight.

@New York Times, 2007