Every program, really, is Peter Boal’s “Director’s Choice.” It’s now six years into his reign as artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet and today’s audiences are reaping the fruits of his vision and labor. The risks Boal has taken in recent years (challenging his dancers/audiences with everything from live singing in the “West Side Story … [Read more...]
3 by Dove (And 1 by Quijada)
Pacific Northwest Ballet Marion Oliver McCaw Hall March 18 – 28, 2010 This is just a quick note about the unusual program of Ulysses Dove pieces running at Pacific Northwest Ballet throughout the weekend. I saw it on opening night -- I imagine the program is just getting stronger and tighter as the nights progress. An African-American … [Read more...]
Salt Horse presents “Man on the Beach”
It is so damn hard to get allegorical storytelling translated into movement. Images fall flat, or feel overweighted, or just so free-floating and random that the stage becomes an endless crazy carnival written in an unknowable tongue. But here in Seattle, the legacy of great achievers in movement poetry (33 Fainting Spells, Pat Graney, Robert … [Read more...]
Bruno Beltrão’s Grupo de Rua in “H3″
[First published on Seattle Dances.] I have been waiting all fall for the Seattle debut of Bruno Beltrão’s company, Grupo de Rua. From what I read, I expected to see dark, volcanic Brazilian street dancers performing hip-hop without the accompanying loud, rapping pulse -- to thus feel time stilled and movement writ large. Though hip hop started up … [Read more...]
Bruno Beltrão’s Grupo de Rua
At On the Boards, Fri - Sun Jan 28 - 31, 2010 @ 8pm. This ghostly, washed-out photo of Grupo de Rua, the contemporary Brazilian troupe run by Bruno Beltrão that's performing at On the Boards this weekend, is actually a good indicator of the luminous cinematic quality of H3, a 50-minute dance work for nine men. (Check Seattle Dances soon for a full … [Read more...]
Dissolving Ballet (and disappearing tickets)
Tickets are flying fast for the first official, full-length concert by Whim W'Him, Olivier Wevers' brand new supergroup Seattle dance company -- so please get over to the OTB site now! Besides being a superstar performer, Belgian-born Wevers has true choreographic talent -- his phrases are never arbitrary; always probing at matters physical or … [Read more...]
2009: Five Best Moments in Dance
In Seattle and otherwise... 1) "Esplanade" at the UW Meany Hall World Dance series. The dance that I saw as a young child that hooked me forever. It looked a little off-balance with a full-size woman in the jumping-over-bodies role (Lila York, for whom it was created, told me once that it indicated Paul Taylor's belief that the meek shall … [Read more...]
Buster Moves
On Sunday December 13 at On the Boards, independent choreographer Amelia Reeber was chosen the winner of Seattle's first-ever A.W.A.R.D. dance competition -- a strange, high-stakes way to watch dance. The purse of 10K for the winning choreographer had imbibed the sold-out houses with a kind of giddy disorientation at first. But as the weekend … [Read more...]