Stalking Ballet's Future
Loving PNB's Professional Division
If you’ve ever seen the annual holiday Nutcracker ballet at Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB), you’ve seen at least one of the students from PNB’s Professional Division program.
The PDs, as they’re known inside PNB’s Phelps Center headquarters, are like a Triple-A farm team for Major League Baseball. Although the Professional Division is a school, with daily classes, the PDs are also PNB’s bench players, on tap to perform as Nutcracker’s extra waltzing flowers or snowflakes, or as swans or hopping Wilis in other large story ballets. I guess you could call these roles the ballet version of being called up to the majors. The PDs are utility players, well trained and invisible to most of us.
Once a year, we get a different opportunity to watch the PDs in short original works created by some of the PNB company dancers. The program, currently called NEXT STEP, is curated and directed by teacher/choreographer Eva Stone. This year Stone chose six projects from seven PNB dancers. They ranged from several slow, contemplative works to a series of whimsical vignettes by Lily Wills to a wild finale created by Zsilas Michael Hughes and featuring 15 dancers and Hughes’ own musical composition.
NEXT STEP has been around longer than that name. More than 20 years ago, in 2004, former PNB Artistic Directors Francia Russell and Kent Stowell established the program as Choreographer’s Showcase. According to Stowell, new choreography was “the future of our art form and the future of PNB.”
That hasn’t changed much except for the dancers and the dance makers. As I get older, they seem to get younger. Before the May 16 matinee that I attended, current NEXT STEP curator Stone told the 200 or so audience members who’d gathered in the ballet company’s Studio C that it was rare to have organized creative opportunities like NEXT STEP.
This year we saw six short works, each approximately 20 minutes long. And each in some way reflected either the choreographer’s personality, their creative influences, or both. None of the dance makers was the next Crystal Pite, but each had the chance to showcase themselves as well as their dance.
Soloist Ashton Edwards’ Hues of You opened the show with a speedy troupe that included some notable standouts including Max Howard, Ayana Stampley and Christopher Karhunen, who I last saw in the title role of Jessica Lang’s Momotaro. It was fascinating to see how Edwards channeled their youthful energy into their own highly technical movement style.
Luther DeMyer and the married duo of Elle Macy and Dylan Wald delivered two more beautifully danced and very somber works. DeMyer’s For the end of time featured a live performance of Olivier Messiaen’s 1940-41 Quartet for the End of time, performed by cellist Emily Hu and Christina Siemens on piano.
Macy and Wald’s To Echo was accompanied by an original score by Michael Wall, and the six dancers, wearing shades of gray, were both subdued and elegant.
Leah Terada’s compelling trio from colors of sun and steel also boasted an original score, this one written and performed by Matthias Loibner. Like the Macy/Wald ballet, it followed DeMyer’s work with slow, somber tones along with some beautiful dancing. With its intricate choreography for arms and hands, Terada’s trio was an apt reflection of Terada’s own dancing, especially the many contemporary works she’s performed both at PNB and as a freelance artist with other Seattle companies.
By the way, Terada, Macy and Wald have all spent many months sidelined by injuries and rehab. All three should be back onstage at the end of this month when PNB opens its last show of the regular season, a salute to choreographer-in-residence Jessica Lang.
I’ve now seen at least three of Lily Wills’ pieces in consecutive NEXT STEP programs. I don’t know this artist personally, but I’ve been told that each of her very lyrical, almost whimsical, dances accurately reflects Wills’ own sunny personality. Her Vignettes were most definitely a change of pace from the earlier pieces on the bill.
The NEXT STEP finale, Hughes’ PUSH, was also an apt expression of the choreographer’s almost fierce, independent stage presence. In this case, PD student Ruthie Akin seized the stage in what felt like a reflection of Hughes’ almost swashbuckling style. This work put the exclamation point on the NEXT STEP program.
We audience members don’t always get a chance to see the PDs, especially in as intimate a setting as PNB’s Studio C. If you are one dancer among a flock of swans, your job is to blend in with the flock by not distinguishing yourself. Utility players, as I said. The trick for these young artists is to stand out just enough to catch the eyes of current Artistic Director Peter Boal and his associate Kiyon Ross.
This was the first year in recent memory that PNB presented NEXT STEP in Studio C, normally the ballet company’s main rehearsal space. Black curtains and screens blocked windows and provided makeshift wings for the dancers. We didn’t get the wizardry of lighting design or other fancy stagecraft, the way we have in past performances at McCaw Hall or On the Boards. But our proximity to the dancers and the company members were excellent trade-offs. And it’s always an enticing game to watch the PDs and wonder what the future holds for them.
PNB may hire only a small number of PDs each year to fill the ranks of its corps de ballet. And we may never see how the PNB dancers’ choreographic ambitions evolve. But as the years go on, I’m so happy to watch work by former PDs like Edwards and Hughes appear on the NEXT STEP programs. And to get a chance to track the professional careers of the young artists who are yet to come.