There are some performances so moving and beautiful that you leave the theater full of gratitude for simply being alive to witness it. Pacific Northwest Ballet’s fifth rep of the season is exactly that. Featuring Twyla Tharp’s Sweet Fields, Jessica Lang’s The Calling, and crowned by Crystal Pite’s The Seasons' Canon, it is the shortest rep of the season, yet is potent in what it gifts the audience. The entire night felt like a religious experience. Together, these three pieces build upon each other in theme and vehemence to create a flawless performance that reminds us of the temple that a theater can become.
Sweet Fields, set to traditional American hymns, is full of simple joy, flexed feet, and flowing white garments. It places dance in its natural habitat, evoking the mood of dancing in a meadow, free from the cares and worries of the world. Focused on life, the afterlife, and the transition between, Sweet Fields finds both somber and joyous moments within the echo of the swelling Tudor Choir. One section featured four dancers carrying a fifth above their heads, coffin- like, who then swaps out for another in an image of inevitable death. The stage brightens once more to a scene of peaceful harmony, full of humor and good nature. The dancers seemed to find genuine joy in the particular thrills of Twyla Tharp’s choreography, filled with running backwards, hopping, and a whole lot of shaking out of their hardworking limbs.
In The Calling, Dylan Wald managed to still the world in an offering of divine beauty. Like a marble statue come to life, Wald reached towards heaven and earth with aching purpose and unending control through every fingertip. In this solo work, the dancer is cloaked by light, surrounded by darkness. They exist in a world all their own, and stand solitary, anchored by some unseen force. The skirt that encumbers the dancer becomes part of the choreography and moves as though it is a partner in this dance, rippling, billowing, and pleating in response to every heavenly movement. Jessica Lang never fails to create moments that feel deeply spiritual, and which seem to sing with sacredness even in a work as short as this. You could have heard a pin fall in the second tier, so great was the breathless beauty which Dylan Wald brought forth.
Although Sweet Fields and The Calling were captivating in their own right, the anticipation for The Seasons' Canon was palpable throughout the audience as the rep’s titular piece approached. From its first flickers of light, The Seasons' Canon is a masterpiece that I have no doubt will one day be thought of as a classic as significant as any one of Balanchine’s or Petipa’s works. I first saw The Seasons' Canon in November of 2022, and the amount of time that I have spent thinking about its brilliance since then is unparalleled by any other work. I hope it’s not dramatic to say that The Seasons' Canon changed my life, because it’s true. It completely changed my expectation of what dance could convey, or what a group of bodies could shape together. I walked out of the theater that day feeling changed in some significant way, and this time was no different. Crystal Pite, and the dedicated dancers of PNB have created a world so full of meaning and breathless wonder that you will walk away feeling like you have experienced something truly extraordinary.
During the pre-show talk on opening night, one audience member asked what the dancers were trying to express in The Seasons' Canon. My answer to that would be: everything. All of life is enclosed within this work of art; all that ever was, and all that ever will be.
There is something overwhelmingly powerful about seeing 54 bodies moving in unison, their collective energy roaring with purpose and life. With needle-sharp precision, they don't just move as one, they become one. Together they transcend the human to become something far greater. The blurring of company structure, of individual features and characteristics, creates a power to shift reality in a way that I have never seen dance attempt to do. They shake ground with their combined strength, they lose their human form and regain it once again, they are water and mountain, microorganism and beast.
In The Seasons' Canon, Crystal Pite has managed to reshape the world, and lets us discover the anguish, glee, strength, fear, turmoil, pain, wonder, and heartbreak of the natural world as if for the first time. Awe floods every moment of this work. It is an otherworldly scene before us, and yet we recognize it all. Human emotions are reflected in the patterns of nature and we end up seeing ourselves in each gesture and breath, moved beyond words by the spectacle shaped by 54 hearts, 108 feet, and 108 hands. Limbs become light and shadow, human form gives way to a kaleidoscope of collapsing patterns made of dancers who seem to build magic out of nothing.
The dancers leap into the work with wild abandon, throwing all they have upon the stage as if they do not remember any other movement ever filling their limbs. Summer 1, when three duets break free from the collective form, is particularly full to the brim with unbridled power, aided on by Max Richter’s immaculate score. All three couples were breathtaking to behold, but Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan and James Kirby Rogers attacked the stage with such ferocious passion and urgency that I thought their collective force might never come to a still.
The Seasons' Canon is an incredible feat of human artistry and innovation. If you’re not already in tears by the time Winter 3 begins, that will surely do you in. Fifty four dancers continuously reinvent their form, creating layers of domino-effect ripples where bodies turn to limitless building blocks, to cells, to living, dying, breaking, collapsing things. It simultaneously feels like the world is ending and like it is beginning all anew. Beneath a sky of falling snow, they shift reality again and again, until they are suddenly far too still and only one desperate being remains amid the frozen lifeless group, searching, searching, searching.
Letting it end, all this breathless beauty and infinite brilliance, is terribly difficult. The audience leapt to their feet before the curtain could even begin its descent. This piece reaches out to every soul, urging on some heartfelt response. It’s not every day that the entire house gives a standing ovation, but on opening night there was no question, everyone leapt to their feet, roaring with appreciation.
If it were up to me, The Seasons' Canon would come around every year, but knowing that it won’t, savoring its brief, fleeting luminosity makes it all the more precious. If you never see anything else, go see this miracle of a work.
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