Tag: Dance

Restaging “Giselle,” a revealing, exciting adventure

A page from the choreographic notation of the ballet Giselle in the Stepanov notation system. Courtesy Harvard Theatre Collection.

By Philippa Kiraly

For the past year, Pacific Northwest Ballet’s artistic director, Peter Boal, dance historian Marian Smith, and Boal’s assistant and choreographic decipherer Doug Fullington, have been working on a restaging of the romantic ballet “Giselle” which goes back to the original score of composer Adolph Adam, original and extensive 1842 rehearsal notes, a detailed choreographic notation from 1860 and the Stepanov choreographic notation of 1899-1903.

“It’s a bit like cleaning the Sistine Chapel ceiling,” says Fullington, commenting that the ceiling was beautiful as was, but cleaning brought into the light bright colors and many areas not particularly noticeable before. “The ballet is more dense, secondary characters are fleshed out. Some of the work that has been simplified over time, we find is more complex.”

“Giselle,” a famous story ballet which has remained in the repertoire and performed all over the ballet world since its premiere in Paris in 1841, took a long time to establish itself in the U.S.
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Trisha Brown Company returns to the NW

Choreographer Trisha Brown.

By R.M. Campbell

It now has become a commonplace to note that the Northwest has been particularly fertile ground for choreographers. Robert Joffrey, Merce Cunningham and Mark Morris have powerful Seattle roots. The city would like to claim the fourth, Trisha Brown, but somehow she managed to skip Seattle on her way from her hometown of Aberdeen (like the painter Robert Motherwell), stopping in the Bay Area for Mills College and a couple of years in Reed College in Portland before arriving in New York where she has lived most of her life.

But she remembers the Northwest and feels a sense of kinship when she is in Seattle. It is a connection she never left.
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Cirque Dreams returns to Seattle

By R.M. Campbell

In its more than 20 years of business around the world, Cirque du Soleil has spawned all sorts of children seeking some of its mystique and popularity. Cirque Dreams, descended from Cirque Productions, is among them with shows in theaters, casinos, arenas and parks. Its current show, Cirque Dreams Illumination, runs through Sunday evening at the Moore Theatre.

This somewhat dowdy theater, which has hosted all sorts of events, high and low, for a good share of the past 100 years, the Moore is a good place to present a show that is part circus, part vaudeville, part glossy entertainment. The current production is all of the above. The best parts are the circus performers and the worst is the shlock in which they must perform. There are nearly 30 artists all of whom perform multiple roles. They are amazingly diverse in national origin, with some from Mongolia, Russia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Belarus in the Old World and the United States, Canada, Argentina, Cuba and Trinidad in the New. They bring years of training and experience to their circus roles, defined in the program as magicians, wirewalkers, vaudevillians, cube aerialists, chair climbers, foot manipulators, percussion jugglers, perch balancers and perch aerialists, ring rollers, paint can stackers, hand balancers and strap flyers. Most of the acts have a novel twist that makes them unique.
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Mark Morris Dance Group makes its annual Seattle visit Friday night at the Paramount

By R.M. Campbell

Time passes. Is it possible that the Mark Morris Dance Group has been visiting Seattle for 25 years? It is. Morris is now middle-aged, as is everyone else still around from those days, at the very least. On the Boards was the first to bring the company here in its funky space off Yesler. Then, Morris outgrew that for Meany Hall, which presented the company for years until it got too expensive. For the past there years, the Seattle Symphony and Paramount Theatre have co-produced the annual visit. Thank goodness. Who does not want to see the Morris company on a regular basis?

Sometimes he brings new work. Not this year. On Friday night there was “Gloria,” his first major work from the 1980’s. The other two works were only slightly younger: “A Lake,” premiered at Wolf Trap near Washington, D.C., by the White Oak Dance Project, which Morris co-founded with Mikhail Baryshnikov, in 1993, and “Jesu, meine Freude,” commissioned by Dance Umbrella in Boston and premiered in that city two years later.
Continue reading Mark Morris Dance Group makes its annual Seattle visit Friday night at the Paramount