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Pacific Northwest Ballet's Annual Choreographer's Showcase by Dean Speer April 21, 2010 -- McCaw Hall, Seattle, Washington Honing craft takes time. It takes knowledge. It takes talent. It takes nurturing and encouraging. It takes courage. Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Annual Choreographer’s Showcase provides a package for all this and more. This year’s edition featured five choreographers presenting four works, one composed by two as a collaboration.
“Shatter” was jointly made by Andrew Bartee and Margaret Mullin and was a very strong entry. They had the women off pointe, explaining during their video clip that they felt the movement might be too dangerous – slides, slips, and pulls; big weight shifts in one fell swoop.
Choreographers’ Showcase at first blush is an opportunity for experience. But also it gives PNB’s student dancers – typically drawn from their Professional Division – another chance to perform, and importantly, to experiment, succeed or fail (or maybe land somewhere in between), and for art to continue to flourish in a climate of welcome and calm.
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Showcasing Tomorrow's Talent Today
Jonathan Porretta’s “Spring Waltz” was short and light – a buoyant piece, that needs a third movement to really round it out. Ironically named only because, while the music selections he used each had the word “waltz” in their respective titles, both were clearly duple meter and not waltzes at all. Nevertheless, Porretta gave us a good, solid opener. My only choreographic fuss would be that the second piece should have had the dancers remain on the stage, rather than going off, which inadvertently suggested to us that the piece was going to continue rather than conclude, which is one of the reasons why it could have used a concluding third movement.
If he was at all anxious over making his first ballet, Barry Kerollis’ “The Anxiety Variations” didn’t show it. Partly based on movement motifs drawn from respiratory difficulties, I was impressed that Kerollis deployed a handy compositional tool to conclude his five section work: retrograde. This is the visual equivalent of taking the phrase “My dog ate my homework” and making it “Homework my ate dog my.” It’s used all the time in musical composition and dance creators could use it more, tending to use too much repetition and unison, which while used here, was not overused. A strong work that was, as creative works tend to be, autobiographical – it told us as much about its creator as the creation.
As did Seth Orza’s “Fragment.” In a video clip dropped down in front of us, during an interview and peek into his rehearsal process he showed us his natural good nature and humor, and also that there was truth in his observation that he was more comfortable with how men move – “guy” stuff such as large jumping sequences -- and less so with women’s movements. Although the women’s sections were good, the sections for the men in his piece did seem to be stronger choreographically and were more relaxed than what he created for the women. As he moves into subsequent dance making, my only suggestion would be to continue to collaborate with his female colleagues to try to understand how they like and enjoy moving, and to build upon that.
Each work on the program was just about right – the right length from each choreographer, the right temperament for the dancers’ audience, and the right fit for an audience that eagerly and justly awaited each work.