Director's choices brings PNB's season to a magnificent conclusion

June 5, 6:10 PMSeattle Theater ExaminerRosemary Jones

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Louise Nadeau and Olivier Wevers with company dancers
© Angela Sterling

Pacific Northwest Ballet’s current season ends this weekend with more performances of their Director’s Choice program and a special tribute to retiring dancer Louise Nadeau.

For his final program of the season, Peter Boal picked a trio of beautiful ballets, showcasing a company growing stronger with each past year despite the loss of major talents like Nadeau.

Anyone who observed Nadeau dance in last weekend’s “Dances at a Gathering,” the first piece in the Director’s Choice, saw her signature grace and flowing style. And that very Louise spark of humor as she portrays the woman in green left behind by the other men pursuing other beauties.

The 1969 ballet also demonstrated that PNB under artistic director Peter Boal is becoming as much a Jerome Robbins company as it ever was a George Balanchine company. With an increasing repertoire of Robbins’ work, ranging from his Broadway spectacular (like the company’s recent performance of "West Side Suite") to more classic emotive works like this piece set to Chopin, the company makes this master American choreographer’s precisely planned ballets look fluid, elegant, and deceptively easy.

In his introduction to “Dances at a Gathering” in his Director’s Notebook (a must-read part of the PNB’s program), Boal discussed how a company has to “earn the right” to perform this work and how Robbins rehearsed his dancers to make the same emotional connections on stage as actors.

As you watch the dance unfold, five men and five women come together, part, return, linger, slide slowly away, and settle with a new partner. At times as giddy as a high school prom and then as sophisticated as a waltz with an old lover, “Dances at a Gathering” lovingly turns the briefest of touches into the most romantic of moments.

In bringing his history of working as a young dancer under Robbins’ direction, and such stagers as Susan Hendl and Ben Huys to PNB, Boal has created a company both sympathetic to Robbins’ goals and more than able to connect to each other in “Dances at a Gathering.”

For the second piece of the evening, Boal selected a modern pas de deux by Christopher Wheeldon, showcasing Maria Chapman and Batkhurel Bold on opening night.  It’s stark, the dancers appearing almost nude in their flesh-colored costumes, and passionate.

One lighting designer once remarked that light, more than air, is the medium through which all dancers must swim.

Certainly in Wheeldon’s “After the Rain Pas De Deux,” Mark Stanley’s lighting design caresses the two dancers, throwing arms and legs into sharp relief or hiding them in shadows, with an effect as evocative as a slow hot kiss during a cold rainstorm.

The evening ended with the perfect nod to the company’s heritage, Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” staged by former artistic director Francia Russell.  

With music by Bizet and flurry of tutus and glittering prince costumes, this candy box ballet, as sweetly stuffed with an assortments of goodies ranging from Carrie Imler and Stanko Milov showing off all their amazing strength to Nadeau and Olivier Wevers looking sensational together to Jonathan Porretta partnering Kaori Nakamura with even more brilliance than his solo dancing earlier in the evening (and that’s like saying Mt. Everest is high, but this was higher), and Mara Vinson and Seth Orza demonstrating that this company has talent to spare among the younger dancers.

And, of course, there was the marvelous corps, soloists, and principals whose names are too numerous to mention here that fill the stage until you think there isn’t room for one more toe-shoe.  But there is, and the line breaks and reforms, and sweeps to amazing conclusion to a magnificent season.