Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Emergence opened last weekend with three dynamic and theatrical works.
Alejandro Cerrudo’s jazzy, “Little mortal jump,” had a distinctly cinematic feel, danced with elan by an ensemble of the company’s dancers. From the design elements to the choreography and music, Cerrudo’s work evoked the black and white film noir of the 1940s but with a sense of humor.
Cerrudo’s set is a backdrop of black that included enormous black cubes whirling together or separating as part of the dance, hiding and revealing the dancers. At one point the black boxes became a Velcro wall to which two dancers were stuck, until they wriggled out of their costumes. Lighting designer Michael Korsch’s concentrations of white light penetrated the darkly smoky air, shifting to highlight the action. The suspenders and lace tunics of Branimira Ivanova’s costumes, in black and white, suggested the 1940s.
“Little mortal jump,” opened with a male dancer racing along the auditorium floor, jumping onto the stage and subsequently leaping off the stage into a blackout. Set to a smorgasbord of music from Philip Glass to Tom Waits, Cerrudo’s choreography offered vignettes peppered with surprises and fillips of humor — a dancer playing air violin, an insouciant flip of a hand, a slow-motion sequence.
Yuri Possokhov’s haunting, “RAkU,” making its Pacific Northwest Ballet premiere, is another atmospheric work. Inspired by the 1950 burning of Kyoto’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion by a deranged Buddhist monk, “RAkU,” substantially reimagines that incident and moves it to a much earlier era.
In, “RAkU,” a Japanese princess is deeply in love with her samurai husband. After he goes to war, the princess seeks comfort at a temple where she falls victim to a monk’s lust and mourns her husband’s death.
Alexander V. Nichols established, “RAkU’s” world with revolving Japanese screens and walls swathed in projections. While Nichols’ images carried us from cherry blossoms falling on the doomed princess and her husband to the burned-out husk of the temple after the fire, the dancers were sometimes lost amid the changing images. Completing the visual landscape were the redolent lighting of Christopher Dennis and traditional Japanese costumes by Mark Zappone.
Possokhov’s choreography is imbued with the sensibility of Japanese dance forms, from butoh to folk-based steps, which are supported by the Japanese-influenced score, written by Shinji Eshima specifically for this work when it debuted at the San Francisco Ballet in 2011.
In the hands of conductor Emil de Cou and his orchestra, Eshima’s score masterfully elicits the pain of inexpressible loss, which Lindsi Dec embodied last Saturday in a searing performance as the heart-breaking Princess. Karel Cruz was a potent Samurai and Steven Loch snake-like as the lecherous Monk. As the warrior chorus, Guillaume Basso, Dammiel Cruz, Miles Perti and Dylan Wald more than held their own, flexing, dipping and wielding their swords in unison.
The catalyst for the title work, Crystal Pite’s, “Emergence,” was Steven Johnson’s book, “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software,” coupled with Pite’s perspective on a ballet company’s structure and interaction resembling a beehive. Pite’s choreography has the dancers moving like insects--with praying mantis arms, sharp gestures and twitching bodies — to Owen Belton’s menacingly militant electronic score. There is something utterly terrifying about seeing the implacable hive mind in action as Pite’s line of black-masked female dancers march in unison across the stage almost effortlessly repelling attacking males.
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Emergence” performs at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall (321 Mercer St.), through Sunday, April 22. Prices: $37-$187, some under-age-25 discounts. Tickets/information: www.pnb.org, 441-2424.
MAGGIE LARRICK is a freelance writer, who lives in the greater Seattle area.
Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers in Yuri Possokhov’s, "RAkU," which PNB is presenting as part of, "Emergence," April 13 – 22, 2018. Photo © Angela Sterling.