Finding Light in Dark Times

 

Pacific Northwest Ballet Principal Dancer Lesley Rausch as Dewdrop
in George Balanchine's The Nutcracker. photo @ Angela Sterling

When I heard the news about Covid's Omicron variant a couple of weeks back, my body just clenched up. “Oh, what fresh hell is this?” I asked myself.

These are dark times, literally and metaphorically, as we hover near Winter Solstice with so few hours of daylight, and news reports of rising infection rates and ongoing political strife crash ashore endlessly.

I always struggle in December, so it’s become my practice to seek out moments of joy wherever they present themselves; simple pleasures--holiday lights emerging like mushrooms on houses and shops across the city, glowing like beacons in the long stretches of darkness. Or baking for friends, with KING-FM on in the background.

Or annual holiday performances, a pleasure I took for granted until last year, pre-vaccine, when the pandemic forced the cancellation or the migration of live shows to online streams. We’ve learned to love, or at least live with, digital performances, but for me there’s nothing like sitting in an audience with other people.

I’ve written before about the giddiness I experienced upon entering McCaw Hall to see Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker. I had a similar sense of glee this month at a performance of A Christmas Carol, at ACT Theatre.

R. Hamilton Wright, Amy Thone and Nathaniel Tenebaum 
in ACT Theatre's production of A Christmas Carol. Photo courtesy ACT Theatre

Actor Nathaniel Tenenbaum’s pre-show speech started off with a rousing “we’re back!” followed by a shout backstage to his fellow cast members “they’re here in the seats!” I got goose bumps, and a bit misty eyed, and filled with the familiar anticipation of the play about to unfold.

Julie Briskman, the Ghost of Christmas Present in ACT Theatre's A Christmas Carol
photo @ Hannah Delon, courtesy ACT

As I watched the brilliant Julie Briskman, the Ghost of Christmas Present, rise up from below the stage on a chaise, draped in green velvet with a matching garland of greenery crowning her head, I broke into a huge smile. Of course, it was under my mask, so nobody saw it, but I know the rest of the audience was probably smiling too.

 

PNB company members with Noelani Pantastico as Dewdrop, 2016
photo @ Angela Sterling

What I didn’t realize was that, this year, performers are relishing these moments too. Arts organizations here and around the world have struggled to keep their heads above water through the pandemic, so reopening with a holiday classic has new meaning.

 

 

Lesley Rausch with her Cavalier, Dylan Wald in George Balanchine's The Nutcracker
photo @ Angela Sterling

“Sometimes, we get to Nutcracker and it’s like, ‘oh, here we go again.”

Principal dancer Lesley Rausch is in the middle of her 20^th season dancing with PNB, so she’s performed her share of Nutcrackers. For Rausch and her fellow company members, the chance to be on stage this December is a return to business as usual, albeit with a twist.

“We’re testing every other day during Nutcracker, with rapid (antigen) tests,” she explains. “There’s a little bit of fear every time that what if this is the time that the virus slips through? It affects the whole company.”

That fear is particularly acute now that Omicron is raging through New York, forcing Broadway theaters to close down shows. As I write these words, Puget Sound arts organizations remain open, but on high alert.

At PNB, everyone backstage is still masked, including the dancers. The masks don’t come off until they twirl out from the wings. Which is only fair, because all of us audience members are also masked. (BTW, that mask should cover your mouth and nose! It doesn’t do anything hanging over your chin except make me want to yell at you!)

 

Lesley Rausch and Dylan Wald in PNB's 2021 production of The Nutcracker
photo @ Angela Sterling

 

This year, watching Rausch and Dylan Wald take the stage as the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier touched me in a way that the familiar pas de deux normally doesn’t. I like the choreography, and love the music, but I’ve seen Nutcracker so many times that I’m often not completely present. This year, though, Rausch and Wald created a magic that I’ve been missing; she truly was a gossamer fairy in Wald’s arms, her descent to the stage from each leap an evanescent, gravity-defiant shimmer.

Rausch says dancing in this year’s Nutcracker has brought her a renewed energy for a show that can sometimes feel like an annual grind. We may see it only once a year, but for dancers, especially those in the corps de ballet, the four-week Nutcracker run can be grueling. This year, though, Rausch treasures every performance.

“We’ve all just been craving it so much!” she says. “Thursday night’s show wasn’t even full, but the audience was wild. I got applause for just walking out on stage. I never had so much fun out there, it was a blast!”

PNB company members in George Balanchine's The Nutcracker
photo @ Angela Sterling

In the darkness of a second pandemic winter, audiences are grateful to be able to sit in theaters again, to savor holiday traditions. Sometimes we need to respond with more than cheers and applause.

“I got a letter in the mail, from a little girl,” says Rausch. “She told me how much she loved watching me as Sugar Plum and how she wants to be just like me when she grows up.”

The girl included a gift for the ballerina--a home-made holiday ornament, fashioned from popsicle sticks and covered with glitter.

Rausch’s big blue eyes fill with tears as she tells me this story.

“I mean, cue the water works! We’re so removed from the audience as performers, you forget the impact you can have on somebody’s life!”

When it comes to moments of joy and grace in the December darkness, it doesn’t get brighter than that.

Pacific Northwest Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker is onstage at McCaw Hall through December 28. ACT’s A Christmas Carol is onstage through December 26.

 

 

 

Nutcracker 2.0-It's Back and Better Than Ever

 

PNB soloist Cecilia Iliesiu, center, and fellow dancers in George Balanchine's The Nutcracker.
photo @ Angela Sterling

This past weekend Pacific Northwest Ballet opened its annual holiday production of The Nutcracker.

After almost two years of COVID isolation that forced PNB to cancel last year's run, this opening is a big, big deal.

I’ve seen this version of The Nutcracker at least a dozen times since PNB debuted George Balanchine’s 1954 classic six years ago, but sitting in McCaw Hall Saturday night, watching Lesley Rausch and Dylan Wald perform the Sugar Plum Fairy/Cavalier pas de deux, it was as if I was seeing this ballet for the very first time.

Being able to gather with a (masked) audience to share a live performance, to hear the full PNB orchestra for the first time since February 2020, to watch a stage full of dancers, was remarkable. 

It was both comfortingly familiar, and yet a completely new experience.

PNB soloist Ezra Thomson, left, with DianaStarr Robinson
photo @ Angela Sterling

First, the masks. Nutcracker features a large cast: PNB company dancers, plus dozens of students. To protect their health, and that of the professional artists they perform with, the kids all wear masks, specially designed to match their costumes. 

It’s startling at first, but masking is now part of our new normal as we continue to fend off succesive waves of viral mutations. PNB takes its COVID-19 precautions seriously. In addition to masks, audience members must show proof of vaccination status, or a negative COVID test. Even the wildly popular second act appearance by Mother Ginger and her Polichinelle flock was transformed by health protocols. 

Instead of sheltering all eight children under her enormous skirts, Mother Ginger enters with only four young dancers hidden from view. The other four dance on and off from the wings, the ballet equivalent of social distancing.

These health safeguards are only part of the changed face of this Nutcracker production. PNB has made others the company hopes will help eliminate some of the art form’s embedded racial and gender biases.

PNB corps de ballet member Noah Martzall makes a very natty Green Tea Cricket
photo @ Angela Sterling

When Balanchine created his Nutcracker almost 70 years ago, mainly white audiences and critics most likely didn’t question why the male dancer in the Act II “Tea” section was dressed as an ersatz “Chinaman,” complete with a pigtail. The original energetic choreography also included movements that many Asian Americans have rightly called out as offensive.

Several years ago PNB changed part of that dated choreography to eliminate the racial stereotyping. This year, the character itself, with its costume, has been changed. Meet the “Green Tea Cricket,” complete with bobbing antennae. 

Corps de ballet member Amanda Morgan 
photo @ Angela Sterling

Beyond the Cricket, I noticed more racial diversity among the entire cast. In the "Before Times," the majority of the professional company members were white. This year, it's more diverse than ever before. 

In Friday evening's performance, two of the five Marzipan shepherdesses were young African American dancers. Someday that won’t feel so remarkable, but more than a year after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police sparked an international outcry for racial justice, you can’t gloss over the importance of onstage representation.

And that brings me to another, even more tradition-shattering change.

This year PNB hired two non-binary apprentices, one of whom has trained to perform on pointe, a ballet realm that’s been reserved for cis-gender women, outside of comedy drag troupes like Les Ballets Trockadero. 

The Waltz of the Flowers ends Act I 
photo @ Angela Sterling

Watching this apprentice waltz their way across the stage with their fellow Snowflakes, I knew I was witness to what I can only call a seismic shift in a very hide-bound artform. My Gen-Z son shrugged his shoulders when I pointed out what we’d seen; for him, ballet should reflect what’s happening in the wider society.

And that’s how this particular PNB apprentice put it to me in an online exchange.

“It makes me so excited to see what is next not only for PNB but for ballet, as the world keeps evolving and dancers like me become normal.”

I don’t know how many of my fellow audience members were aware that they were watching history-in-the-making, because this particular dancer blended so well into the full corps de ballet. And that's as it should be.

Sugar Plum Fairy Angelica Generosa, with her Cavalier Price Suddarth
photo @ Angela Sterling

Meanwhile there I was, mask on, sitting at a relatively safe distance from audience members I didn’t know, soaking in Tchaikovsky’s familiar score, appreciating this old ballet in a new way. Beyond the pageantry itself, I was keenly aware of the many stagehands, costumers and other staff working behind the scenes to restore a bit of normal to a world that COVID-19 turned upside down last year.

As I said, this year's Nutcracker was comforting, familiar, and at the same time, transformed by the calls for justice and change that have rocked our world. I wept with joy, relief, and on this Thanksgiving weekend, gratitude, for a chance to savor it all again.

Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 2021 production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker is onstage at McCaw Hall through December 28^th.

 

New Films From Seattle Dance Collective

 

Noelani Pantastico, foreground, with Jacqueline Burnett in Robin Mineko Williams' Where You Stay

                                                         photo @ Bruno Roque

Performing arts venues are slowly starting to reopen to live audiences, but many organizations continue to offer either hybrid, or all-digital, seasons.

And that’s the case for one of Seattle’s newer small arts groups, Seattle Dance Collective.

SDC is the brainchild of Pacific Northwest Ballet Principal Dancers Noelani Pantastico and James Yoichi Moore. Instead of a dance company with a fixed group of participating artists, Pantastico and Moore wanted to create a structure that would allow them to collaborate with a variety of dancers and choreographers as the spirit moved them. Their goal was to commission and present new contemporary work each summer, when PNB dancers aren’t working.

The first season, 2019, audiences at the Vashon Island Performing Arts Center were treated to work by Marco Goecke, Bruno Roque, Penny Saunders and more. 

When the pandemic hit last spring, SDC, like every arts organization, had to rethink its plans. Last summer, Moore and Pantastico commissioned five dance films, tapping PNB colleagues like Miles Pertl and Amanda Morgan, as well as artists outside the immediate ballet world they inhabit.

This year, with the fate of live performance still iffy, SDC again decided to present a digital stream for its fans. The program, HERE & NOW is available now; it features three new works, all created during a summer artistic residency on Vashon Island.

Alice Klock and Florian Lochner in To Dust, by Juliano Nunes. photo @ Bruno Roque

To Dust, choreographed by Juliano Nunes and filmed and directed by Bruno Roque, is a moody duet performed by FLOCK, Alice Klock and Florian Lochner.

The duo also choreographed a work for SDC, 5 Favorite Things.  This dance features six performers, Jaqueline Burnett, Jane Cracovaner, Andrew McShea, Noelani Pantastico, David Schultz, and James Yoichi Moore. Roque’s camera is onstage with the dancers, weaving around them like a seventh performer.

SDC dancers in FLOCKS' 5 Favorite Things. photo @ Bruno Roque

In both 5 Favorite Things and To Dust, audiences experience something we’ve grown accustomed to during the pandemic: a very intimate, very closeup view of a dance. Our eyes are directed to certain perspectives chosen by the choreographers and directors, as opposed to the way we watch dance live, where the audience watches the same dance, but as individuals, we may focus on different aspects of the same artwork. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad; it just is the way dance adapted to the pandemic. I wonder if we’ll have a hard time readapting to live performances?

The third work on the HERE & NOW bill is by Robin Mineko Williams. Unlike the other two offerings, Where You Stay was filmed in and around a small house on a historic Vashon Island farm. Burnett, Cracovaner, McShea, Pantastico, Schultz and Moore appear alone, in duets, and trailing a mysterious young boy, the choreographer’s son, through the surrounding woods. There isn’t a linear story; for me, it evoked the sensation of being tied to our houses for most of the past 20 months, the ties we had with people in our immediate pods, moments of joy and moments of darkness.

Well, you can see for yourselves. Find out more about the project and buy tickets here.

The films are available through November 21.

Ballet and Beyond

PNB company members in Alonzo King's The Personal Element, photo @ Angela Sterling

                            
Maybe it’s just me, but even after almost two years of social distancing, and the gradual reopening of live performance venues, it feels like we’re all just starting to re-adjust to life among our fellow humans.

That’s one reason why Pacific Northwest Ballet’s second program of this artistic season really resonated with me.

Beyond Ballet is a medley of work by three choreographers, each with a distinctive movement vocabulary and sensibility. Despite the stylistic differences, each work centers on interpersonal relationships, something we’ve struggled to maintain through Zoom happy hours and Facetime conversations. As I watched the performances, I appreciated the aesthetics of each work, and the dancers' commitment to them, but found myself most drawn to the myriad ways they depicted love, grief, joy and the ways we are connected to one another.

Before I talk more about the dances themselves, I just have to say that, to me, Beyond Ballet is a misnomer. Each work on this program is a ballet, right down to the pointe shoes. What they don’t do is mimic the 19^th century classics. Instead, they’re emblematic of ballet's metamorphoses. If Beyond Ballet represents the art form's future, hey, I’m all in!

The program opened with Ulysses Dove’s 1993 Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, which has been in PNB’s repertoire for 15 years. This elegy to the people who lost their lives during the HIV/AIDS epidemic is as resonant now as when it was created.

Soloist James Kirby Roger, left, with Corps de Ballet member Christopher D'Ariano in 
Ulysses Dove's Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven. photo @ Angela Sterling

Dancing features six performers, three women and three men clad in white unitards and shoes. On opening night, the entire cast was stellar: Cecilia Iliesiu, Amanda Morgan, Lesley Rausch, Christopher D’Ariano, James Kirby Rogers and Dylan Wald. 

Veteran Rausch demonstrated both her command of technique and her artistic mastery, imbuing the movement with fierce, but tender, emotion. But Iliesiu, Morgan and D’Ariano, as well as PNB newcomer Rogers, also danced with an almost heartbreaking clarity. Watching Morgan extend her long, long leg into the air was nothing short of hypnotic.

This ballet is a tribute to lives lost too soon, but it’s also very much about the grief of those left to mourn them; it was an apt programming choice during this current pandemic.

Jessica Lang’s Ghost Variations offered up a very different reflection on pandemic loss, this time through its structure.

PNB Principal Dancer Elizabeth Murphy in Jessica Lang's Ghost Variations
photo @ Angela Sterling

Lang created the ballet for PNB in 2020, when COVID protocols meant that only four dancers at a time could be in the studio together, and only those co-habitating could actually touch one another. 

Lang worked with two pods—eight dancers altogether—to create a dreamy, almost stately, modern version of a classical ballet, complete with long tulle skirts and waltzing couples. The twist: the couple very often consisted of one dancer onstage and a shadow dancer behind a large white screen. For instance, Postlewaite performed a duet with D’Ariano; later in the ballet, Kyle Davis danced with four of his own shadows.

Ultimately, newly promoted Principal Dancer Elle Macy and her partner, fellow principal Dylan Wald, appeared in front of the screen. As I watched them twirling together across the stage, in contrast with the shadow duets that came before, I couldn’t help but reflect on how the pandemic really limited our physical contact with people outside our immediate households. We’ve all been waltzing with Zoom shadows, haven’t we?

PNB originally presented this work a year ago as part of its digital season, but Lang told me then that she always envisioned it to be performed for a live audience and indeed, I enjoyed it much more as a stage, rather than screen, presentation.

The program ended with PNB’s first---and I hope not last---presentation of work by San Francisco-based Alonzo King.

According to very brief program notes, The Personal Element is meant to showcase the interplay between Jason Moran’s piano score and the virtuosity of the dancers. For me, it did that and much more.

The eight dancers--Lesley Rausch, Elle Macy, Amanda Morgan, Cecilia Iliesiu, Miles Pertl (newly promoted to Soloist), Lucien Postlewaite, Dylan Wald and James Kirby Rogers—are virtuosic indeed, but to me, this 20-minute ballet was more than a showcase. I found it to be a mesmerizing tapestry of people coming together, dancing alone, merging into a community.

When the curtain went up, the entire octet was standing still under bright lights. Then Iliesiu rose to a teetering point, windmilling her arms as if she needed them to keep her balance. As if, indeed. Morgan and Postlewaite emerged in a duet, Morgan lifting a long leg, toe pointed elegantly. With a quick flick, she flexed her foot, only to return to her pointed extension. That move, repeated, was like an exclamation mark: see what I can do balanced on one leg?

Amanda Morgan, left with Lucien Postlewaite in Alonzo King's The Personal Element
photo @ Angela Sterling

When Pertl escorted Rausch onto the stage, she had one leg bent up behind her, and she clutched her foot, the way a runner stretches out a tight quadricep muscle. As Pertl propelled her diagonally downstage, Rausch repeatedly extended the other leg in front, like a slow-motion prancing pony.

Throughout this ballet, the dancers came forward in dazzling duets or solos, then rejoined the group in a line reminiscent of the imagery you might see on a Grecian urn or a painting by Matisse, their legs and arms intertwined. They stood still, but it wasn’t static. To me, it was as if their moving bodies had been captured in a still photograph. Days later, I can still see that image in my mind’s eye, although I’ve got Angela Sterling’s fabulous photo to refresh my memory.

Mixed rep programs like Beyond Ballet are always a crap shoot. I’m usually satisfied if I like two of three works on the bill. Beyond Ballet, to stretch my gambling metaphors, was like pulling the slot machine arm and getting three cherries lined up; PNB hit the jackpot and so did the audiences.

It may take me a while to readjust to a life lived in public, but I’m so glad that life will be graced by artists like these. And seriously PNB, if this is where ballet is heading, I'm with you for the ride.

Seattle Gets a New Dance Studio

 

Joshua Grant, standing behind dance student, and his partner Christopher E. Montoya, right, inside their new studio, Dance Conservatory Seattle. photo @ Marcia Davis

It was raining the day I drove down to South Park to visit the newly-opened Dance Conservatory Seattle. 

Even without the weather, I might have missed the studio if co-founder Joshua Grant hadn’t told me specifically that its exterior was white and blue. The scruffy industrial building, surrounded by a chain link fence, hardly looks the part of a new arts center. We all know, though, that looks can be deceiving.

Dance Conservatory Seattle occupies more than 6,000 square feet in a former warehouse. Grant, with his husband and business partner, Christopher E. Montoya, found the empty space this past summer.

Somehow they saw magic in the scuffed and stained indoor/outdoor carpeting in the offices, the dinged-up walls and the vast, high-ceiling, cement-floored loading dock. That’s where they installed a sprung dance floor, almost the size of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s largest rehearsal studio. 

Stacks of lumber wait for the couple to transform these raw building supplies into risers they hope will provide seating for audiences who attend live performances. When I arrived, a ballet class was just wrapping up, under the watchful eyes of two standard poodles and a tiny dog named Gizmo.

The family poodles watch Joshua Grant, left, with Christopher E. Montoya 
photo @ Marcia Davis

Grant and Montoya hatched the plan to open their own dance school in the midst of this pandemic. Grant, a PNB soloist, had been sidelined after Governor Inslee ordered a ban on public gatherings in March 2020, part of the effort to stem the spread of the coronavirus.

Christopher E. Montoya, left, with Joshua Grant 
photo @ Marcia Davis

He and Montoya, who was then director at Dance Fremont, started teaching what they called “rogue ballet classes” for very small groups of dancers at Yaw Theater in Georgetown. Several of their students urged the couple to open their own school. That’s when they started the search for an appropriate, and affordable, space.

The South Park location “reeked of regret and disappointment,” the couple says. Aside from the stained carpeting and walls missing large paint patches, the former tenants had tried to convert an upstairs office—illegally--into a bathroom. A piece of white plastic hose still dangles from the room’s wooden ceiling. But since taking occupancy this summer, Grant and Montoya have been hard at work. In addition to building a dance floor, they’ve spruced up the entryway with new floors, paint, and original artwork on the walls. Devoted students helped build out changing rooms and a little lounge area.

This fall, Dance Conservatory Seattle only offers open classes, for vaccinated adults. Grant teaches ballet; Montoya also offers jazz and modern instruction, and they bring in guest instructors when they can. Ultimately, Montoya says they dream of creating a school that welcomes anyone, regardless of gender identification, race, or body type. They plan to create a curriculum for children as well, once they have wide access to COVID vaccinations.

While both dancers are classically trained, they envision an environment that’s less rigid than what they grew up with.

“We want to train thinkers, not soldiers,” he says.

Christopher E. Montoya, left, with Joshua Grant performing "Les Sylphides"
with Les Ballets Trockadero 

Beyond that, the couple, who met while performing with the drag troupe Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, are committed to "ungendering" dances. The Trocks are known for a comedic take on classical ballet; Grant and Montoya imagine a future where a trained dancer of any gender could take on roles like Giselle or Swan Lake’s Odette/Odile, without hiding behind the label "drag." 

Beyond training students who’ve traditionally had access to arts classes, they couple wants to encourage South Park neighbors who may not have had an opportunity to dance in a professional studio, to come take a class. As Grant says, talent is distributed equally; access has not been as equitable.

If you’re interested in checking out Dance Conservatory Seattle, they’re holding an open house on Sunday, November 14^th.

A Return to Ballet--and to Hope

 

    Pacific Northwest Ballet company members in Alejandro Cerrudo's "One Thousand Pieces"                                                                    photo @Angela Sterling

Almost exactly 18 months ago I had the inordinate privilege to watch a ballet performance at McCaw Hall.

It's a privilege I've often enjoyed, but this particular show was different. I was one of three journalists invited to Pacific Northwest Ballet’s dress rehearsal of resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo’s “One Thousand Pieces” and David Dawson’s “Empire Noir.”

But this wasn’t your standard dress rehearsal. 

A few days before, in a desperate move to slow Covid-19’s relentless spread through Washington State, Governor Jay Inslee had ordered a halt to public gatherings. None of us had any idea how long the closure would last. Everyone was jittery, uncertain what to expect.

PNB artists presented this single show for a miniscule audience; about 80 people were dispersed in the vast hall, witnesses to an impassioned and heartbreaking performance, in many ways a farewell to the familiar. 

    PNB company members in Alejandro Cerrudo's "Silent Ghost." photo @ Angela Sterling

That evening was very much top of mind for me on Friday, September 24^th, as more than 1,000 ecstatic ballet fans gathered, masked, in McCaw Hall to celebrate PNB’s return to live performances with, fittingly, an evening of Cerrudo ballets, including an excerpt from “One Thousand Pieces."

Passing through the ID and vaccination card check into the lobby was both strange and strangely familiar, a reincarnation and reinvention of life in the “before times.” Things were different, but joyful; as each patron handed her ticket for scanning, the ushers greeted us with smiling eyes, welcoming back the denizens of this arts palace.

I don’t mean to imply that I didn't enjoy PNB’s all-digital 2020-21 artistic season, along with streaming offerings from some of the world’s great dance companies. There’s no denying the upside of watching dance in your pajamas—affordable, accessible, comfortable. 

But, truly, nothing compares to sitting in the theater before a show, hearing the chatter of your fellow patrons, thumbing through the program, gazing at McCaw Hall’s sumptuous red spangled curtain, filled with anticipation as you wait for it to rise. It’s a singular experience, particular to each individual, but shared with everyone in the building. 

And on this night of nights, we were ready to celebrate.

When PNB Artistic Director Peter Boal came through the curtain to welcome us back, the cheers and applause lasted at least a full minute and probably would have gone on longer but for the fact that we were all impatient to see the dancers, to witness ballet performed live for us.

The program, “Singularly Cerrudo,” was a fitting opening presentation.

For one thing, Alejandro Cerrudo’s appointment as PNB’s resident choreographer came just a few months before the Covid shutdown, so audiences really didn’t have the opportunity to welcome him. 

PNB Principal Dancer Dylan Wald with Soloist Elle Macy in Alejandro Cerrudo's "Little Mortal Jump."                                                     photo @ Angela Sterling

Beyond that, Cerrudo’s work is performed mainly to recorded music (although a small group of PNB orchestra members did play live--wonderfully--for one of the ballets), requiring fewer musicians to gather together in the orchestra pit. 

And although the three works on the bill do feature some exquisite duets, there are also sections that don’t require the dancers to touch one another, a side benefit when it comes to health and safety precautions.

I am an unabashed Cerrudo fan. 

I love the way his choreography, music selection, and brilliant Michael Korsch’s dreamy lighting designs, merge to conjure emotions ranging from the almost elegiac evocations of human connection and separation in “Silent Ghost,” the program opener, to the surreal watery world of “One Thousand Pieces,” to my personal favorite, “Little Mortal Jump,” which on this September evening felt like a tentative ode to the future.

        PNB Principal Dancers Noelani Pantastico and Lucien Postlewaite in Alejandro Cerrudo's                                                                 "Silent Ghost," photo @ Angela Sterling

PNB’s dancers gave everything—even more than 100%--to this show. It was a revelation to see them perform live after so long and their joy at the return to live performance was abundantly clear. Bravos to everyone. 

Three couples shone in particular. 

In “Silent Ghost,” Noelani Pantastico and Lucien Postlewaite were flawless. They have been onstage partners at PNB and Ballet de Monte Carlo for many years, and that knowledge, comfort and mutual trust were evident, as was their technical command and their artistic mastery. Pantastico and Postlewaite don’t perform choreography; they inhabit it.

    PNB corps de ballet members Christopher D'Ariano and Leah Terada in Alejandro Cerrudo's                                               "One Thousand Pieces," photo @ Angela Sterling

In “One Thousand Pieces,” corps de ballet members Christopher D’Ariano and Leah Terada were paired for the first time, and watching them dance together was a revelation. 

D’Ariano has stood out for me ever since he joined the company as an apprentice in 2017; Terada has been a steady, lovely presence throughout her PNB tenure, but during this Covid break, she’s had more opportunity to be front and center both in PNB digital productions and in work she created and performed with partner Miles Pertl. She has developed a quiet self confidence onstage. Terada and D’Ariano together were magic in this ballet.

Finally, but by no means least, Elle Macy and Dylan Wald in “Little Mortal Jump” reconfirmed their talents for us. They are a couple offstage, and that infuses their onstage partnership. Their every move is perfectly synched, their bodies a lovely match. 

                    PNB's Elle Macy and Dylan Wald in Alejandro Cerrudo's "Little Mortal Jump."                                                                        photo @ Angela Sterling

Watching them move in slow motion toward the bright light shining from the wings felt like a metaphor for all of us as we creep with tentative hope into the future.

Whatever that future holds, I want it to include these dancers, on this stage, with all of us sitting in the audience.

Coming Back to Ballet

 

                                        Lesley Rausch in Ulysses Dove's "Red Angels" photo @ Angela Sterling

                                                                        

It’s been forever since I last posted here.

Pandemic. You know how it is.

But, it’s time to stop using global disease as an excuse not to write, so here goes.

A few months ago, I ran into Pacific Northwest Ballet Principal Dancer Lesley Rausch on the street near the Seattle Center. We got to talking about the year+ of Covid, about ourselves, about our dreams for the future.

I’d just retired from my 35-year career in public radio. The pandemic put the kibosh on my plans to attend grad school in New York, so I was thinking out loud about my next step. Lesley—who’s approaching 40, an age when many ballet dancers contemplate their futures—knew exactly what I meant when I talked about transitions. We said our goodbyes, looking forward to PNB’s next artistic season.

That conversation really stuck with me, so in August, I asked Lesley if she’d be willing to talk to me regularly over the next months, about everything from getting back into ballet shape to what it means to be one of PNB’s senior dancers to her thoughts on the future.

She agreed.

                      Lesley Rausch, September 1, 2021, Seattle Center

We met for the first time on a beautiful early September afternoon. The yellowing leaves on the trees above the bench where we sat, not far from PNB’s Seattle Center home, filtered the sunshine although not the construction noise from nearby Climate Pledge Arena.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of emotion when we come back to the theater,” Lesley told me. “On both sides of the curtain.”

I’d asked her about the ballet company’s upcoming season. On September 24^th, Rausch and her fellow dancers are scheduled to return to the McCaw Hall stage for their first performance for a live audience in more than a year. I write “scheduled,” because if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that nothing is certain. For now, though, both artists and ballet fans like me are looking forward to the big night.

For Lesley, it’s been a long and emotionally arduous road back to the stage.

Like almost every arts presenter in the world, PNB shut its doors in mid-March, 2020, the day after the dress rehearsal of choreographer-in-residence Alejandro Cerrudo’s “One Thousand Pieces.”

Lesley wasn’t onstage that night. She was rehabbing an injury, prepping to perform the title role in the classic ballet “Giselle,” the next scheduled presentation last April. But when Governor Jay Inslee mandated that all public venues shut down, her plans went out the window.

“We didn’t know if--or when--we’d be coming back,” she recalls.

As the weeks passed, it became clear that PNB’s artistic season---at least as planned—was over. Although the ballet company quickly decided to pivot to a digital season, starting with previously recorded performances, nobody could predict when they’d dance again for live audiences.

Lesley Rausch and husband Batkhurel Bold in Kent Stowell's "Swan Lake," photo @Lindsay Thomas

For Lesley and her husband, former PNB Principal Dancer Batkhurel Bold, the end of the artistic season normally meant they'd return home to Hawai'i. But Covid travel restrictions trapped them in a Seattle limbo: no jobs, no way to travel, no clue what to expect moving forward.

Like all of us, Lesley struggled to keep her spirits up. Often, she couldn’t summon up the energy to attend the online classes PNB offered its dancers. Instead, she did a lot of Pilates, and took long walks with her husband, exploring Seattle neighborhoods they’d never had the time to see when they were both working.

She was grateful to get regular unemployment checks, and even though PNB had laid off the majority of its staff, company managers committed to continuing health care benefits. 

Despite her relatively stable situation, Lesley was emotionally gutted by the extended break from her beloved ballet. She’d never spent so much time away from the studio. Unlike her younger colleagues who could spring back into their careers after a six-month hiatus, as Lesley homed in on her 20^th season with PNB, she knew her performing days were numbered.

 

                   Lesley as the Stepmother in Jean-Christophe Maillot's "Cendrillon." photo @Angela Sterling

PNB called back its dancers in August, 2020, but it wasn’t business as usual. Operating under strict Covid safety protocols, the dancers were divided into small pods of four to six people. They rarely encountered anyone outside their group.

Lesley hated the separation from her friends and colleagues, but she says the hardest thing was getting her body in shape for the demands ballet would place on it.

“It was a shock,” she says. “All those tiny little muscles that allow me to roll slowly up to pointe, they weren’t there anymore.”

She remembers those first couple of weeks back as “tortuous;” each evening she’d return home in tears.

“It was really hard to believe that I could ever get back to the place I was before.”

Beyond the work needed to get her body ready, Lesley was gutted by the fact that Covid protocols dictated that only dancers who lived together could dance as partners, in the studio and onstage. For her, it was the loss of one of the things she loves best about ballet.

“It’s such a unique experience, and I didn’t get it at all last year.” She pauses, as tears well up in her eyes. “In a way I took it for granted.”

Lesley did have one opportunity to work with a partner, though. She was paired with Dylan Wald in a duet from George Balanchine’s “Apollo” for a performance marking his promotion to Principal Dancer.

    Lesley and Dylan Wald in Balanchine's "Apollo," 2020. photo @Lindsay Thomas

It’s been almost a year since that performance streamed online, but I still remember the shock I felt when I watched Lesley reach out her hand to Dylan, their fingers lightly touching. We’d all been shuttered away for so many months, deprived of casual hugs, handshakes and physical contact. Seeing these two dancers connect made me weep both for what we’d all lost, and in gratitude to the artists who let me experience that contact vicariously.

Last summer, Lesley didn’t know if she’d even get the chance to dance for a live audience again. If the pandemic dragged on for too long, she feared it would be just too difficult to summon the discipline to work as hard as she needed to prepare her body. 

Now, though, as she and her colleagues approach the launch of the new artistic season, she’s less anxious, maybe even a little hopeful. She made it to another artistic season with PNB.

But Lesley’s clear that while things seem close to normal in the studio, nothing is normal, or at least not the way it was in the “before times”. Millions of us heading back to classrooms or office cubicles are experiencing that same combination of hope and trepidation. We long to have our old lives back.

What’s changed, at least at PNB, is a lot more understanding about how to dance with the a deadly virus.

“We’re all in masks, and there are stringent protocols about what you can do,” Lesley says. This season, the company gets to rehearse in larger groups, rather than in the small pods they were restricted to last season. 

Plus, the new rules allow vaccinated company members to dance together. Lesley’s been rehearsing a pas de deux from George Balanchine’s “Diamonds” with Dylan Wald. She’s also learning two duets from Alejandro Cerrudo’s “Silent Ghost,” one of three Cerrudo ballets that make up PNB’s opening program, “Singularly Cerrudo.”

“To be able to come back and really, truly work. It’s such a blessing,” Lesley says. But she confesses that it’s been an emotional homecoming.

“I cried at least five times the first day back.”

Lesley Rausch anticipates more tears when the McCaw Hall curtain goes up on September 24^th. Onstage and off.