PNB's All Wheeldon Program

 This was our first ballet of the 2011 season and the first in our brand spankin' new fancy seats - courtesy of a generous graduation gift. I do miss being so close that I can feel splashes of dancer sweat, but being able to see the stage is an additional boon, and what a view!

Christopher Wheeldon has this unparalleled sense of shape. While it blurs the line between dance and acrobatics, his transitions and sense of motion in stillness, both requires a pretty staggering amount of physical control from his dancers and adds a synaesthestic quality to the music - watching the dancers, I really feel that I am hearing the music he has chosen through them. This is often the idea of dancing - the body as an instrument, but I rarely experience it so literally as when watching his work.

from Polyphonia - one of his best known
a set of 10 modern interludes

My favorite of the pieces was After the Rain Pas de Deux, performed to Arvo Part's Spiegel Im Spiegel. The piece is mesmerizing in its stillness and lyrically interpreted by piano and solo violin. The dancers are minimally costumed and seem more bare than nude. Together they intertwine at a physical intersection of  poetry and origami. It's strange and inhuman, but beautiful:

Opening the program was a piece inspired by Carousel, the Rogers and Hammerstein musical. Incorporating themes from the musical - which were vaguel y familiar but not well-placed in my consciousness - he uses dancers to become both the carnival bustle and the carousel itself. Two lovers dance between the madness with a brief pas de deux interlude. The costumes were perfectly complementary to the theme - on theme of the carnival festivity in high contrast, but without a distracting deluge of hue.

And as a really perfect end piece - hey too much concentration on a Sunday afternoon is clinically bad for your brain - they showed a backstage-farce of the ballet world that was not without its teeth despite general silliness. More or less it's All About Eve in toeshoes, but with quite a bit more slapstick, including the prima donna leaping headfirst into the "orchestra pit" (the 4th wall opens into one of the wings of the stage) when a male dancer fails to catch her. Of course there's an ingenue and of course by the end the ingenue has risen to the primadonna's spot and contumely only to notice a new shy ingenue sneaking in to practice as she had once done. The farcical elements on ballet productions were entertaining and his work with the tech crew/janitorial staff had a lovely Fred Astaire quality to it. I can only imagine how much fun playing the prima ballerina must have been.

one of many tiffs and tizzies the prima had

I am constantly impressed with how well the PNB selects their programs. It was an exceptionally balanced afternoon of dancing, even if I could always do with cutting down to one intermission.