PNB's 25th anniversary present to audience: ten new ballets - Pacific Northwest Ballet

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1997 by Paul Ben-Itzak

SEATTLE -- If Pacific Northwest Ballet is not the first dance company to offer a season with ten world premieres, it is the first in memory to celebrate an anniversary not with retrospective programming but with a look into the future.

For its 25th anniversary season, the company that is known beyond Seattle mostly as the crown prince to New York City Ballet's king as a Balanchine repository is presenting ten new works by some of the brightest young choreographers in the United States.

"Sometimes with anniversaries, you look more at the past than at the future," says Kent Stowell, who directs PNB with wife Francia Russell. "The basic statement about this season is about the future. What we want to be talking about all the time is the future. That's what we've tried to do since we've been here: what's the next season, the next choreographer, the next ballet, all that."

By PNB's account, the new generation of top choreographers includes Diane Coburn Bruning, Donald Byrd, Val Caniparoli, Lynn Dally, Mark Dendy, Paul Gibson, Miriam Mahdaviani, Kevin O'Day, and Lila York. The season is capped by Stowell's Silver Linings, an evening-length premiere ballet to familiar and unfamiliar songs by Jerome Kern, complete with an audience sing-along to the bouncing ball.

If the roster is not completely revolutionary -- Byrd and Dendy are the only two with downtown credentials, O'Day and York come from mainstream modern dance, and the daring and inventive Caniparoli usually works within the classical idiom -- it is still more daring than the museumlike commemorations that characterize most anniversary seasons. And, in a world numbed by the refrain, "There are no good new choreographers," the season offers a chance to take a close look at some choreographers who are wearing the mantle of American ballet's future.

The selection also reveals Stowell as a choreographer/director who has a quality not shared by many of his peers: He knows his limits. Explaining the special relationship Dendy has with the company, he says, "Basically, he is kind of the other side of me. I'm a classical ballet choreographer -- some people probably think conservative -- and he adds to the repertory the more kind of zany off-the-wall stuff that I don't do, and that's not necessarily part of our rep, and so it helps to establish more variety in the rep."

"I'm not a fan of musicality," says Dendy, "which to me is not musicality at all but predictable paint by numbers, almost using it as a crutch, not a springboard -- there's no element of surprise to it. Also, creatively, why would I want to do that when Balanchine and Taylor have done so so thoroughly? So I tend to look at music as a landscape for the piece. The dance itself is what the music is there to serve, not the other way around. In the pieces that are strong musical pieces, I like to make them to go with the music, but not to the music." But if Dendy sets himself apart from Balanchine in approach, he is not averse to working with Balanchine's tools: His ballets for PNB -- the new work will be his fourth for the company -- incorporate the movement invention that is bread and butter to modern choreographies and the ballet vocabulary. Last year, Dendy took private lessons with former PNB soloist Harriet Clark to get a better handle on that lexicon. "I'm more a movement-invention person, I like it to come from me," he says. "So to use an existing vocabulary is quite a challenge, and I'm finding a way of integrating my inner work and idiosyncrasies and torso and port de bras work that I do with the legs of a ballet dancer." And in PNB, Dendy says, he has found a company of dancers that is able to do both. "I was really shocked when I saw them perform Nacho Duato's Jardi Tancat," he says. "It was almost as if this incredible European modern company was up there all of a sudden, and you just didn't see the ballet in their use of torso and pelvis. And I was like, wow, I hadn't even tapped this in them, because I was thinking they're not capable of it. So that inspired me for this new piece to go back to my movement more, especially for the men." The work, which was untitled at press time, is about angels -- fallen, celestial, and in heaven, and is set to the music of another downtown denizen, Philip Glass.

Caniparoli echoes Dendy's praise of the PNB dancers' technical prowess and versatility and also seems to see Russell and Stowell as parent figures. "They've been really very free in letting me succeed or fail," says Caniparoli, a Washington State native who made his first ballet, Street Songs, on PNB in 1980. "Talk about ambitious -- they're willing to take risks, and that's what it's all about."

As it looks toward an ambitious season and to its future, the biggest weapon in PNB's arsenal is not its choreography but its dancers, who are also willing to take risks. As confident as the ensemble is with the Balanchine repertory, the big hit of last season's mixed repertory programs was the PNB premiere of Caniparoli's Lambarena, which blends and alternates the Western classical vocabulary with African dance. The combination of Caniparoli's inventive choreography and the dancers' adaptable bodies had patrons fighting for tickets by the ballet's closing performance. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's R.M. Campbell wrote that principal Ariana Lallone "led an extraordinarily energized company. . . . The entire company threw itself into this piece with dedication and focus, the result of which was a thrilling sense of spontaneity, high talent, and ability to comprehend and execute vastly different movement styles."