SEATTLE – Pacific Northwest Ballet premiered its new season last week in a program titled “Director’s Choice.”
In a curtain speech, Peter Boal, the company’s new artistic director, said this is the program he’d want to see if he were in the audience.
If that was a hint of things to come, it should make dance fans happy.
“Director’s Choice,” which continues in performance today through Sunday at McCaw Hall, is a mixed-repertoire program that includes three company premieres, showcasing Boal’s interest in expanding the company’s reach while building on the past, plus the return of an audience favorite.
All the works were danced with polish and style on opening night by the full company in a program highlighted by some superb solo turns.
The program opened with “In the Night,” a Jerome Robbins dance set to Chopin nocturnes played with shimmering beauty by pianist Dianne Chilgren.
Robbins, perhaps most associated with such Broadway musicals as “West Side Story” and “Wonderful Town,” was ballet master for New York City Ballet (where Boal spent his dancing career) and worked in classical dance for decades.
“In the Night” gives us three duets – three sets of lovers representing the sweetness of youth, the mature lovers and finally the tumultuous couple in a lover’s spat. Taking their cues from the music, the dancers revel in these stages of love in a seamless flow of beautiful lifts and steps.
The roles were danced on opening night by Olivier Wevers and Noelani Pantastico, Jeffrey Stanton and Patricia Barker and Louise Nadeau and Christophe Maraval, respectively.
Two PNB premieres by George Balanchine are also on the program, both set to music by his great collaborator, Igor Stravinsky.
“Duo Concertant” follows in a PNB tradition of putting the musicians on stage with the dancers, in this instance violinist Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi and pianist Allan Dameron.
Two dancers – Louise Nadeau and Le Yin – on opening night, listen pensively to the music. Then they begin to dance – Nadeau the stronger of the two – as they respond to the music and its moods, together and solo. Nadeau is a beautiful blend of lyricism combined with strength.
The returning work on this program is William Forsythe’s “Artifact II,” a dance of sharp angles performed to a throbbing score that received its PNB premiere in 1988.
This big work employs the entire company ensemble plus two pairs of dancers breaking off for duets and a fifth solo dancer, identified only as “The Other Person.”
Bach’s D Minor Partita for solo violin, presented in a recorded performance of jaw-dropping virtuosity, is turned up full volume for this bravura dance, which builds in momentum as the leotard-clad dancers go ever faster, their movements punctuated by the curtain, which comes crashing down at intervals.
Closing the program “Symphony in Three Movements,” a big, complex dance by Balanchine that opens with a familiar and striking image: the large corp of dancers are drawn into a line with one arm raised in a straight out position.
Balanchine’s modernism is on full display here with its driving energy and complexity, with Casey Herd and Patricia Barker paired in the central pax de deux.
‘Director’s Choice’
Pacific Northwest Ballet mixed-repertoire program at 7:30 tonight, 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. Sunday at McCaw Hall, Seattle Center. Tickets, $20-$149, 206-441-2424, www.pnb.org.
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