Turning 50 With Wit and Youthful Vigor to Spare (So Who Needs Gimmicks?)

<First published online in the New York Times on November 5, 2007>

SEATTLE, Nov. 3 — The Pacific Northwest Ballet’s new quadruple bill, “Contemporary Classics,” features one ballet that relies entirely on the use of ropes (Susan Marshall’s “Kiss”). Another depends wholly on spotlights and strobe lighting (David Parsons’ “Caught”). A third work makes a greatly diminished effect if performed without billowing clouds of vapor from dry ice (Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room”). Though McCaw Hall here is not the best place for dry ice, and though the last two pieces were performed to taped music, these devices all helped the pieces win big applause.

So it was good to see that the Balanchine-Stravinsky “Agon,” which opens the program, held its own with no effects more special than live music and brilliant dancing. There was little doubt that this was still the one true classic presented, also the most difficult, the most timeless and the most rewatchable. I saw the program twice.

On Thursday, even though the company has been performing the work since 1993, it was good to hear gasps and murmurs at several of its feats. On Friday the ballet looked so witty that those sounds were also accompanied by laughs, some at moments (like the woman’s silent exit after her balancing act in the second pas de trois) when I hadn’t heard them in more than 20 years.

Agon” reaches its 50th anniversary on Dec. 1 — as they say in birthday cards, nifty at 50.

This year has brought vivid individual performances of the work by the company that originated it, New York City Ballet: notably Sean Suozzi in the first pas de trois, Teresa Reichlen in the second, Maria Kowroski in the pas de deux. But there are textual and stylistic moments when their roles and the rest of the ballet could use at least some fine-tuning. Today both Miami City Ballet (whose “Agon” I saw earlier in the week) and Pacific Northwest Ballet exemplify this kind of fine-tuning. There is a galvanizing suspense to both and an objective cool that keep the ballet young.

Pacific Northwest’s “Agon” is coached by Francia Russell, a member of the original 1957 cast and a former co-artistic director of the Seattle ballet company. The troupe’s strong point work and fluent line are also especially suited to the work. Stuart Kershaw’s conducting — even when one section briefly ran amok on Friday — proved why “Agon” needs live music, bowstring tight.

At Friday’s performance Noelani Pantastico, in the second pas de trois, and especially, Carla Körbes, in the pas de deux, brought it a high-wire drama and high-style definition that were the most momentous I’ve seen in years. (Ms. Körbes, a Pacific Northwest principal dancer since last year, was a New York City Ballet soloist until 2005.) And in both performances, thanks to the strict but calm delivery of the entire company (12 different dancers each time), I kept spotting new details and connections in the choreography.

There are passages in Ms. Marshall’s “Kiss” (1987) when I like to think that its two performers, suspended from the same spot on ropes, are versions of the Paolo and Francesca of Dante’s “Inferno,” doomed by their adulterous love to spin for eternity, always in each other’s embrace and always recalling a time more innocent and blessed. Really, however, it’s Arvo’s Pärt’s score, the 1977 “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten,” that confers this poetic and eternal scale upon this little episode. Its enactments of devotion, doom, despair and death are highly prosaic, literally swinging. (Imagine “Tarzan” as tragedy.)

In the most memorable sequences of Mr. Parsons’s “Caught” (1982) you see the solo dancer seeming to travel above the floor in a series of strobe-lighted images, and you assume a clever lighting technician is synchronizing the on-off lighting in exact coordination with the dancer’s jumps. In fact it’s the dancer, clicking the strobe, who synchronizes light and jump. Yet once you know, the fun doesn’t diminish. The second-cast Ms. Pastastico was the first woman I had seen dance this solo; with her gazellelike jump, she was also the most exciting since Mr Parsons himself in the 1980s.

Both “Caught” and Ms. Tharp’s “In the Upper Room” (1986) are new to Pacific Northwest repertory, and whereas “Kiss” and “Caught” are slight and divertissementlike, “In the Upper Room” is an ensemble blockbuster. The final section of Philip Glass’s score, with its mix of drums, solo soprano voice and ritual repetitions, always works its audience up into a lather. The McCaw Hall audience gave the same standing ovation the piece always seems to win.

But not from me. You could see how well the Pacific Northwest dancers work; I singled out Miranda Weese’s fastidious attention to points of style. But in this slick concoction, precision counts for less than nonstop energy. Dancers in this work function as hardworking cogs in the Tharp machine, and this is my chief objection to it.

@New York Times, 2007