Crystal Pite Is Still A Genius
No, I haven't changed my mind
I confess, ever since live performance returned post-pandemic, I haven’t been the most diligent of online video viewers.
I watched a lot of digital content during the first couple of COVID years. Those videos were life-saving, but now that I’ve gotten back into the swing of live performance, I’m reminded of the enormity of what I missed during lockdown: the thrill of live performance and the knowledge that anything can happen onstage. Even more important, and less measurable, I missed how a live show melds the many people in a live audience into a single community experiencing a performance together — communion in its best sense.
That said, my friend Sandi forwarded to me a link to a Paris Opera Ballet video that both rekindled memories of a Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) performance and reminded me of the inherent truth of something I wrote when that performance was first produced in Seattle.
I stand by the words I wrote here then: Crystal Pite is a fucking genius. If you haven’t had the good fortune to see her work, you don’t have to transport yourself to Paris (although that sounds like an excellent adventure).
Pite has been bringing her choreographic genius to Seattle for years, through appearances by her own company, Kidd Pivot, and through productions of her dances at PNB and On the Boards (OtB), where I first saw Pite’s work and thought to myself that she’d raised the bar for any dance-maker I’d see in the years to come.
The piece was Dark Matters, performed here by Pite’s company Kidd Pivot in 2011. I wasn’t feeling great that night and called to cancel my tickets, but OtB’s then-publicist warned me that I’d be missing something extraordinary if I didn’t go.
She was right.
I don’t think Pite was much over the age of 30 then, but the Vancouver Island native seemed to have an intrinsic gift for storytelling, and for bringing her audience on a complete journey with her. Everything about that show was onstage for a reason, from the mind-bending prowess of the dancers to the placement of the lights. That’s not always the case, especially with younger artists. Pite became my choreographic measuring stick.
She’s only gotten better.
The Paris Opera Ballet video includes four contemporary ballets, with a full performance of Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon about halfway in. Pite’s ballet was commissioned by former artistic director Benjamin Millepied, and premiered at Paris’ Palais Garnier in 2016. Seattle audiences had the luck to see this ballet, set to Max Richter’s glorious re-composition of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, in 2022. It returned the following season and blew everyone’s mind.
I saw the show live at least four times in those two years and watched both a PNB limited access video, plus this Paris Opera version, a few more times. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the immense power of this work, with more than 40 dancers, the amazing score and an electrifying set, but even on video it has the power to take my breath away and to bring me to tears. To be fair, most good art reduces me to weeping, especially during the current official animosity towards art. This ballet evokes in me a flood of emotional response, to both its artistry and the difficult times we live in.
And the video, which captures some of the choreography so intimately that I wondered how involved Pite was in its creation, had me marveling anew at her ability to see beyond what’s in front of her and to imagine more than 40 bodies moving as a single entity.
This season, PNB’s artistic director Peter Boal and his associate Kiyon Ross programmed Pite’s Emergence, a stylistic precursor to The Seasons’ Canon, a ballet about the world of bees that stunned me when it had a Seattle debut in 2012. Seeing it again after my Seasons’ Canon love fest was a great opportunity to watch an earlier iteration of how Pite envisions transforming multiple bodies into one massive creature
Seattle audiences have had the good fortune to see Pite’s less balletic works at OtB and Seattle Theatre Group (STG) venues. STG partnered with OtB to present the dance theater work Bettroffenheit, a stunning performance that Pite and Kidd Pivot created with Vancouver, B.C. artist Jonathan Young of Electric Company Theatre. It’s based on the death of Young’s child in a house fire, and his subsequent descent into despair and addiction.
Pite and Young returned to Seattle’s Paramount Theatre in 2023 with a unique adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 play about mistaken identity, The Inspector General, (Ревизор/Revizor in Russian). As I said, Seattle area dance and movement lovers have been fortunate to see so much of Pite’s work. We long for the next creation.
There’s nothing on tap at PNB next season, or at an STG theater, that I know of. And given that neither Pite nor her dancers are American citizens, the whole visa process is both time consuming, costly and uncertain. I’ve been working on a story about international artists attempting to perform in the U.S. and, under our current America First administration, the status of global cultural exchange is as clear as mud.
If you don’t have the names Crystal Pite and Kidd Pivot etched in your psyche, write them on a pad in permanent marker or tape them on the wall, whatever will help you memorize them. Perhaps Kidd Pivot will perform soon in Vancouver, B.C. and we can all take a road trip. Until then, check out the Paris Opera Ballet video, and follow these amazing artists down the computerized rabbit hole.