Pacific Northwest Ballet launches its first ever "Celebrate Seattle" dance festival on Thursday, April 5. A quick scan through the listings reveals a number of Capitol Hill connections both historical and current, oddly echoing the development of dance in this city.
Most Seattle dance historians point to the Cornish College as the birthplace of both ballet and modern dance here. Nellie Cornish made dance an integral part of the Cornish School of the Arts when it opened in 1914. By the 1930s, Martha Graham was teaching there and inspiring a number of young dancers and teachers to follow her example. One of those students was choreographer Merce Cunningham.
During this period, Cunningham met composer John Cage, who worked at the school as an accompanist/composer. The pair would eventually form an artistic collaboration that would stretch for more than 50 years, experimenting with various ways of producing dance and music that began independently and eventually came together as one piece-a radical and original way to choreograph that electrified 1950s New York dance audiences and caused some grumbling among dance critics who weren't quite sure the often deliberately disjointed pieces with electronic scores were serious dance. Eventually the Merce Cunningham Dance Company would become regarded as one of the premier modern dance companies in the United States.
In the third week of "Celebrate Seattle," Cunningham's "Inlets 2" makes its PNB debut. Fittingly, the work was inspired by the Northwest climate and topography as well as the art of painter Morris Graves.
Another Seattle native who changed audiences' expectations of ballet was Robert Joffrey, who gave his first concert at the Women's Century Club (better known these days as the Harvard Exit Theatre) in 1948. Eventually, Joffrey also left Seattle to form his own ballet company, which is now based in Chicago.
PNB picked Joffrey's "Remembrances" for the festival, a contemplative piece set to Wagner's "Traume" and fittingly sung by Seattle transplant and famed Wagnerian soprano Jane Eaglen.
While Cornish and other dance studios scattered throughout the city continued to teach ballet and modern dance throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the city did not have a professional ballet company until the 1970s. A young couple who met dancing with the American Ballet Theatre were persuaded to come to Seattle to take over the fledgling PNB. Founding artistic directors Kent Stowell and Francia Russell settled on the Hill and raised three children there while establishing PNB's school.
Under their directorship, PNB rose to international fame for its beautiful presentations of Balanchine and its increasingly talented dancers as well as the strengths of its school.
Stowell choreographed numerous works for the company during his directorship from 1977 until retirement in 2005. None have been quite as extravagant as "Carmina Burana" which runs for the first two weeks of the festival. The piece features an enormous tilting wheel set piece and a full choir suspended above the dancers. The bawdy and the sacred duel for attention, matching the mood of the 13th-century poems set to music by Orff.
"Carmina Burana" has been matched with the PNB premiere of "Pacific" by Mark Morris, another Northwest native who began his dance training in Seattle before moving to New York. Originally created for the San Francisco Ballet, "Pacific" pulls its inspiration from the cultures touching both sides of the great ocean.
Not surprisingly, one of Kent Stowell and Francia Russell's sons decided to pursue a professional career in ballet. His work "Adin" will be danced by Oregon Ballet Theatre as part of the third week of the festival at McCaw Hall.
Donald Byrd's Spectrum Dance Theater will also appear in the third week. Byrd, an African-American choreographer whose work ranges from a Tony-award nomination for "The Color Purple" to a recent new piece based on the music of Kurt Cobain, previously choreographed "Capricious Night," "Subtext Rage," and "Seven Deadly Sins" for PNB. He became artistic director of Spectrum in 2002. Byrd's "Bhangra Fever" will be performed by guest dancers from Spectrum during the second program of "Celebrate Seattle."
Other guest artists from Scott/Powell Performance will dance Mary Sheldon Scott's "Locate" during the third program. Scott's work has been featured in numerous Northwest venues, including Cornish Dance Theatre and Velocity Dance Center.
PNB's "Celebrate Seattle" is certainly not the first dance festival to prominently feature Northwest choreographers-Velocity and On the Boards has been doing similar, but much smaller, work for years. Still, PNB's admirable attempt to highlight the Northwest's many contributions to dance helps spotlight the historical and current dance scene on a whole new level, with the 2,900-seat McCaw Hall providing a much bigger venue for this type of work.
PNB artistic director Peter Boal (another family man who decided to settle on Capitol Hill when he moved to Seattle) has taken a certain financial risk in opening up PNB's season to this experiment. By picking a number of historically famous choreographers like Morris, Joffrey and Cunningham to season the mix, he's sure to draw the dance curious as well as the serious dance aficionados. And dance fans can only hope that the "Celebrate Seattle" will grow in the coming years to take in even more of Seattle's thriving and current community of dancers and choreographers.
For more on "Celebrate Seattle," April 4 through 22 at McCaw Hall, check PNB's Web site at www.pnb.org.
Rosemary Jones writes about arts and entertainment for the Capitol Hill Times. She can be reached at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.
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