World Stage, Local Pride in the Pacific Northwest

First published in the New York Times, April 23, 2007

SEATTLE, April 21 — “It’s great to be home,” Trisha Brown said at the start of a pre-performance talk. Ms. Brown has been a leading light of New York postmodern dance since the 1960s, but the “home” she meant was Washington State, where she grew up. When you consider that Merce Cunningham, Robert Joffrey and Mark Morris were also born here, and first studied dance here, you can’t help wondering if some dance-friendly ingredient flows in the air. You wonder the same again when you recall that Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet has been among America’s foremost ballet companies since the 1980s, reaching international stature in the 1990s.

Until this month these and other Northwestern dance strands felt unconnected, and a local complaint about Pacific Northwest Ballet has been that it isn’t Northwestern enough. Now, however, Peter Boal, its artistic director since 2005, has made more local connections than one would have imagined possible, in a “Celebrate Seattle!” festival, from April 17 to 22. His company danced works by Mr. Cunningham, Joffrey, Ms. Brown and Mr. Morris; the Cunningham and Morris works drew on local inspiration (with music by John Cage and Lou Harrison, respectively). It also danced works by Kent Stowell and his son Christopher, played host to other local dance companies and presented world premieres by its own choreographers. Before each performance Mr. Boal came out before the red curtain to honor three different local dance artists: to read the whole list of honorees (from Todd Bolender and Ruthanna Boris to Lila York) was to get a sense of the rich “Dance and the Northwest” book that has yet to be written.

As thousands will recall Mr. Boal was an adornment to New York City Ballet for more than 20 years. (I recall his first Sugar Plum cavalier in a 1983-84 season Balanchine “Nutcracker.”) A dancer of unfailing lyricism, devoid of affectation, he exemplified to an exceptional degree the courtesy and chivalry crucial to the ethos of classical ballet. It seems that he exemplifies those virtues still. His friendly manner before the curtain each night made the audience feel like family.

His festival’s sum was larger than its parts, though some of these were definitely considerable. Though it didn’t sell out McCaw Hall at the three programs I attended (I regret that I couldn’t catch the one that included Mr. Morris’s “Pacific” and Kent Stowell’s “Carmina Burana”), its audiences eagerly lapped up everything, new or old, barefoot or on point or in heels, onstage or on a foyer platform. They followed the stillness and hush of Mr. Cunningham’s “Inlets 2” with audible-pin-drop silence, and laughed in glee at Ms. Brown’s pile-ups of women in “Spanish Dance.”

Several individual offerings, going back to a revival of Joffrey’s “Reminiscences” pas de deux (1972), were agreeable without being seriously distinctive. Yet the dancing was such that even formulaic works became satisfying. And Mr. Boal’s programming was such that each work, appearing in sharp contrast, looked absolutely individual.

“Remembrances” became a vehicle for the rare delicacy of Kari Nakamura’s dancing; Toni Pimble’s “Two’s Company” (created for New York City Ballet’s first Diamond Project in 1992) showcased the expressive authority of Pacific Northwest’s foremost dancer, Patricia Barker. Though “Sense of Doubt,” Paul Gibson’s ballet to Philip Glass music, recalls other ballets to big-scale minimalist scores, and though Val Caniparoli’s “Torque,” to a Michael Torke score, recalled other clever, hard-hitting Torke ballets, there was a plush, enthusiastic lyricism to the company’s dancing that made both appealing, with a richness of texture I do not recall from my previous views of the company. And Kiyon Gaines’s “Schwa” (2006) went farther in the playful delight it took from its individual dancers and its Piazzolla score. Least interesting in its larger ensembles, best in the delicious effects of tango-style rubato in solos, “Schwa” suggests that Mr. Gaines, himself a Pacific Northwest Ballet dancer, sets out to celebrate the dancerly virtues he loves in other dancers, and succeeds.

Of the visiting companies I shall remember best Ballet British Columbia as seen in John Alleyne’s “Schubert.” Here it’s easier to say what’s wrong than what’s right: Mr. Alleyne, who uses only the first three movements of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E flat, has an eccentric response to the structure and phrasing of the music, and does too little — his lighting designer does less — to help his dancers project into the theater.

Yet one hears Schubert better while watching, and Mr. Alleyne’s dance proves attractive, eloquent, singular. The body language of the women, sometimes standing legs apart while stretching or bending this way or that, has a frank openness out of which moments of ballet expansiveness occur with affecting spontaneity.

There are several more layers of Cunningham style for Pacific Northwest Ballet’s dancers yet to discover in his “Inlets 2.” It worked, though: Even when the dancers didn’t “get” some of his articulation of the torso or foot, they were focused, never casual or superior, so that the work, which suggests fauna active in quiet zones untouched by man, cast a spell. Ms. Brown’s three Spanish dances, two to music from Bizet’s “Carmen” and a third to Bob Dylan’s singing of “Early Morning Rain,” are a marvelously absurd example of how she can use the same simple, single step (a slow forward tread with slow-rising arms, all in Spanish style) and the same deployment of stage space (dancers crossing the front area from right to left) in different combinations and musical associations, to riveting effect.

In the Dylan “Spanish Dance” the five women — all piling into one another like trolleys — make that tread seem sexy, delectable. In “Carmen Entr’acte” (the overture to the opera’s Act IV), that same tread becomes one woman’s relentless advance into both love and death. Arriving into the arms of her awaiting hombre, she keeps treading away as slowly he lowers her to the floor, where finally she ends.

The Pacific Northwest artists here were led by Miranda Weese, a guest artist recently retired from New York City Ballet. In a way that I had not seen in her City Ballet dancing, Ms. Weese glowed. And glow was what the company did throughout this festival: a fine omen for Mr. Boal’s regime.