The dancers of Pacific Northwest Ballet are bringing Crystal Pite’s The Season’s Canon to life to the effect of more than just the visually stunning synchronicity of the 54 dancer piece, which incites an understanding of the possibilities for choreography to create meaning beyond semiotically-bound representations of narrative and emotion, but as a mimetic form of life and earth itself.
But long before Pite makes tectonic plates of dancers, Twyla Tharp’s rarely seen Sweet Fields opens the show, uniquely set to 18th and 19th century American Shaker a capella choral hymns. The dancers are adorned in whimsical, flowing garments by Norma Kamala, and the all-white fabric shimmers in and out to a gorgeous dappled lighting by Jennifer Tipton. The effect is kaleidoscopic, but not at all dizzying. With the choral performers’ voice boxes as the piece’s only instruments, Sweet Fields is about keeping the body close and letting go the rest go.
Twyla Tharp’s vocabulary of movement revels in its simple and novel brilliance. Heavily influenced by ballet, Tharp twists classical technique motifs into a mix of whimsy, mime, and shaking hips. At one point, the dancers begin massaging each other’s backs before spinning back into a whirlwind of step-patterning with flexed and pointed feet.
When the church bells ring, the dance is dropped, and the congregants walk towards its sound. But they never leave the stage before soaking in a joy worked into the body with such strength, groundedness, and kindness that it hardly needs to be expressed, only lived.
Jessica Lang created The Calling after receiving a posthumous letter from a mentor. On opening night, Principal Dancer Dylan Wald is cast as only half himself, with everything beneath his torso swathed in an enormous skirt. I was entranced by the minimalism of Lang’s choreography and the details of the set and costume, which come forward in sharply contrasted light, the creases of his shoulder muscles mirroring the creases of the skirt.
Wald moves the fabric only once throughout the piece, taking a few steps, raising a leg for barely a breath— and the rest is only port de bras. The huge, heavy skirt’s limitations on his movement makes it feel less like a costume than the curtains of the theater itself, with the stage of the body inside half obscured. Wald moves with a strength and grace that despite itself still can’t lift something almost like grief, not for long, moving only above it like a moon rising over the ocean.
In a tonal shift from the first two works, The Season’s Canon is set to a rearrangement of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and is characteristic of the contemporary and neo-classical choreographer Crystal Pite’s outstanding reputation, where she is often known for weaving every dancer in the company into huge ensembles and patterning synchronicity into sweeping landscapes of rolling and stuttering movement. It’s visually stunning in the same way the beach is stunning, or a city from a plane window, a swarm of locusts, a murmuration of starlings, layered strata of rock: the swarm and colony, in any form, can enchant us with its existence alone. Meanwhile, the continuously shifting mass configurations glimmer in the space between the inorganic and organic.
And despite how distracting I found the digital background — its animations kept catching my eye and taking my attention off the dancers — its red-orange renderings of abstract networks and filaments do help The Season’s Canon position itself as an ode to all the life sciences, from the molecular to the ecological. As both a scientist and a dancer, I was in awe as I watched the dancers clinging to each other like enzymes. For a moment, they were nothing but proteins, in the next breath, I saw one woman picked up like a child–her body wrapped around the soloist who carried her, resting her head on her shoulder–and the softness in her face was so human, so completely distant from atoms and their bonds that it broke me open in understanding. The Season’s Canon asks you to remain in awe at the insect larvae swimming every season to the river’s surface and taking flight, and all the while it hopes you are the lone figure that might be leaning over the water, marveling.
PNB is presenting Sweet Fields, The Calling, and The Season’s Canon on a triple-bill at Seattle Center’s McCaw Hall April 12 – 21, 2024 (and streaming April 25 – 29.) This triple-bill is not one to miss.
Tickets: https://www.pnb.org/season/the-seasons-canon/