Seattle When it Sizzles
By Marcie Sillman
Seattle’s dance scene has been sizzling. From world premieres that tackled topical subjects like immigration and the pandemic shutdown to a site-specific work created for the city’s historic monorail, artists and their presenters served up an array of intriguing new dances over the last few months.
Olivier Wevers’ contemporary company Whim W’Him shook audiences out of their late-January doldrums with a trio of premieres by Wevers (a former Pacific Northwest ballet principal dancer), New York-based artist and teacher Mike Esperanza, and internationally in-demand choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, whose Yemaya’s Embrace was the program highlight.
Set to a poem by Eduardo Vilaro (Ballet Hispanico’s artistic director), which was skillfully mixed with composer Jimmy Garver’s score, Yemaya’s Embrace was a tender response to the global flood of human migrants fleeing war, climate change, and other crises.
The curtain rose on seven dancers lying prone on the floor. Slowly, to the sound of gently undulating waves, the bodies rolled from side to side, like jetsam washing ashore. Almost imperceptibly, a steady beat took over; the dancers rose to their feet, moving in unison across the stage, a group of people desperate to emerge safely from the ocean onto dry land.
Lopez Ochoa’s dance tackled a pressing contemporary issue with subtlety, displaying this choreographer’s mastery of her craft. Seattle audiences saw another master on March 1, when British Columbia native Crystal Pite brought her troupe, Kidd Pivot, to the city for the one-night-only local premiere of 2019’s Revisor.
Choreographed and directed by Pite, with text by her frequent collaborator Jonathon Young, Revisor is loosely based on Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General. It’s a farce about a corrupt bureaucracy that panics at the news of an impending inspection.
In the first section, the dancers’ moves, synchronized to Young’s pre-recorded text, punctuated the words with shoulder ripples, small kicks, or swift torso undulations. The result was often hilarious, but also extraordinary to watch. Gregory Lau as the Revisor, a lowly visitor mistaken for the Inspector, seemed able to dissolve his muscles and bones as he slithered off a couch, or twirled like a rag doll in the arms of the office doctor (Brandon Alley).
Revisor’s second half featured less text and more full-cast dancing, evoking some of Pite’s work for such large companies as Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Ballet. Fans of both Kidd Pivot and of Pite’s ballet creations left the theatre satisfied.
While Pite and Lopez Ochoa’s works were performed on proscenium stages, Seattle choreographer Alice Gosti created Someone in Some Future Time Will Think of Us for the monorail, a small train that travels an approximately three-minute route between the Seattle Center and the city’s retail core.
Gosti’s work, which unfolded over two round-trips, attracted several dozen ticket holders, but passengers not apprised of the performance in advance also were treated to the sight of five dancers in yellow jumpsuits, their movements timed to the train’s motions, referencing both daily commuter behaviour and the architecture of the buildings the monorail passed. Someone in Some Future Time Will Think of Us, commissioned by Seattle Center, was part of an artist series that will bring more dance and other live performances into non-traditional venues in the coming months.
The unofficial winter dance season culminated in mid-March with Pacific Northwest Ballet’s semi-annual presentation of contemporary works. This year, for a program called Boundless, PNB commissioned two premieres, Black on Black on Black by resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo, and Jessica Lang’s Let Me Mingle Tears With Thee.
The evening’s third work, Penny Saunders’ Wonderland, was a revised live version of a dance Saunders originally created for PNB’s all-digital season in autumn 2020. At a time when performing artists had no idea when — or if — they’d be able to return to theatres, Saunders intended Wonderland to be a love letter to theatres and the artists who animate them, taping the dancers throughout the empty Marian Oliver McCaw Hall, PNB’s home theatre.
Saunders’ live version of Wonderland retained elements of the video: dancers emerged from the empty orchestra pit, performed in box seats, and glided up the aisles. In 2020 Saunders, like many pandemic-era choreographers, learned to adapt dance for the camera. With the new iteration of Wonderland, she successfully moved the action from videotape back to the stage.
Cerrudo regularly creates dances that employ stage wizardry, for example, showering water onto the stage from above, or Velcroing dancers to walls. For Black on Black on Black, he choreographed for 15 dancers as well as a chorus of black scrims that rose and fell, revealing — or obscuring — tantalizing tidbits of dance.
What audiences saw on opening night was apparently a work in progress; the choreographer was still tinkering with the scrims and dancer placement earlier in the day. As PNB artistic director Peter Boal wrote in the program, “if this work were a painting, it would still be wet.”
By contrast, Lang’s monumental Let Me Mingle Tears With Thee, which capped the evening, was fully fleshed out, a meticulously choreographed ensemble piece, set to a live performance of Giovanni Batista Pergolesi’s 18th-century Stabat Mater. The dance’s 12 sections, corresponding to Pergolesi’s music, alternated between tableaux that resembled living Renaissance sculpture and intervals of more abstract movement. After the performance, some audience members griped to me about what they saw as overtly Christian symbolism, but the virtuoso ten-dancer ensemble received a standing ovation from an enthusiastic opening night audience.
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s program, along with the season’s other offerings that showcased both international and emerging local talent, provided satisfying theatre experiences as well as moments of light in Seattle’s long dark winter.
