PNB Director's Choice 29109
Mar. 21st, 2019 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOmaha and I attended the Pacific Northwest Ballet Director's Choice, and I think I had a much better time here than at the season premier. There were three pieces, and all of them were quite fun.
Bacchus was the opening piece, and it was a lot of fun. The point of the piece was to use dance to show the emotional energy of wine, merriment, and abundance. It wasn't a hugely complex bit of choreography, and there was no particular set. The costumes were gorgeous, the dancing precise and well-timed, and the forms of joy being displayed by athletically powerful bodies were various and engaging. Boys kissed boys, girls kissed girls, there were hints of a triad, and the whole thing came off as just a very pretty piece.
The Trees The Trees was a much more involved piece, and at first I worried it was going to be another disaster along the lines of Dark and Lonely Space from last year. It was much better. It has its pretensions; for one, one of the people on stage is a vocalist, striding across the stage and reading a poem aloud in a somewhat operatic fashion as the dancers act out around her. The poem, of the same name by Heather Christie, is a series of vignettes about 20-somethings trying to figure out how their lives are supposed to work. "I am the sort of handbag everyone weeps into because we have no jobs and no health insurance so also we can't have any babies and I want to talk about the future of my peer group..." The dancing is emotionally affective as it follows three couples interacting, coming together, falling apart, having their difficulties, all in a small, modernist apartment setting with only a couch. I liked it a lot, and it worked well for me. Omaha thought it was only passable.
The vocalist was Alicia Walter, who has her own fascinating history, and I'd love to hear the story about how she ended up on the Ballet stage.
In the Countenance of Kings was a dance about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, so I joked recently that I have now seen actual and somewhat successful "dancing about architecture." It's actually more than that; it's a very energetic piece about the kinds of people who live along that stretch of road. The music was The BQE by Sufjan Stevens, and is very listenable in its own right, but when joined by 18 dancers in costumes that reflected a kind of 70's inflected athleticwear, the rhythms and force of the piece was wonderful.
Bacchus was the opening piece, and it was a lot of fun. The point of the piece was to use dance to show the emotional energy of wine, merriment, and abundance. It wasn't a hugely complex bit of choreography, and there was no particular set. The costumes were gorgeous, the dancing precise and well-timed, and the forms of joy being displayed by athletically powerful bodies were various and engaging. Boys kissed boys, girls kissed girls, there were hints of a triad, and the whole thing came off as just a very pretty piece.
The Trees The Trees was a much more involved piece, and at first I worried it was going to be another disaster along the lines of Dark and Lonely Space from last year. It was much better. It has its pretensions; for one, one of the people on stage is a vocalist, striding across the stage and reading a poem aloud in a somewhat operatic fashion as the dancers act out around her. The poem, of the same name by Heather Christie, is a series of vignettes about 20-somethings trying to figure out how their lives are supposed to work. "I am the sort of handbag everyone weeps into because we have no jobs and no health insurance so also we can't have any babies and I want to talk about the future of my peer group..." The dancing is emotionally affective as it follows three couples interacting, coming together, falling apart, having their difficulties, all in a small, modernist apartment setting with only a couch. I liked it a lot, and it worked well for me. Omaha thought it was only passable.
The vocalist was Alicia Walter, who has her own fascinating history, and I'd love to hear the story about how she ended up on the Ballet stage.
In the Countenance of Kings was a dance about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, so I joked recently that I have now seen actual and somewhat successful "dancing about architecture." It's actually more than that; it's a very energetic piece about the kinds of people who live along that stretch of road. The music was The BQE by Sufjan Stevens, and is very listenable in its own right, but when joined by 18 dancers in costumes that reflected a kind of 70's inflected athleticwear, the rhythms and force of the piece was wonderful.
