An Indulgence of Shadow and Spector: Pacific Northwest Ballet's Mystic "Ghost Stories"
The second program of the season always carries a special hue at Pacific Northwest Ballet. The “big dark” has just fallen upon us; the trees have lost their crowns; and in some inexplicable way, a night at the ballet seems to chase away this growing darkness. Following an incredibly rich season-opening program, “Ghost Stories” brings together four works that dwell in realms of ghostly mist. Alejandro Cerrudo’s Silent Ghost and Pacopepepluto, an Edgar Allan Poe-inspired world premiere by PNB’s own Kyle Davis, and George Balanchine’s La Sonnambula, which returns to the stage for the first time in nearly two decades, form an unusually story-heavy, mixed rep program.
Like so many of his works, Cerrudo’s Silent Ghost is a meditation in movement. It doesn’t build to colossal heights like Little Mortal Jump, contain fantastical set design like One Thousand Pieces, or even touch on sly wit like so many of his works, but rather lingers in the melancholic intimacy of very human images. It is filled with a tenderness that reveals itself in the meeting of two bodies, in their honesty with each other and with us, and ushers forth an incredibly raw sentimentality.
There, in the gray haze pierced by soft pleats of light, Cerrudo has a remarkable ability to capture mood and let us find a sliver of ourselves in the intimate nature of his gestural forms. Silent Ghost is a gauzy orb of small groups and pas de deuxs, a ceaseless flow that lingers in a timeless space; melancholy edged with a quiet persistence that only Cerrudo could capture.
Perhaps it is the way that his movement moves with the music, sometimes choosing (as in the group of five men moving with great insistence upon the gentle haunting of Ólafur Arnalds “Now I am Winter”) to raise the pace of movement though the score stays sedate. Their tender coexistence thus somehow grows into a deeply moving overcoming, and we feel this inner motion as much as we visually perceive it. His vocabulary could also be characterized by the containment of energy. He gathers momentum–holding it still for a breath before it rises from a wingspan and rushes forth; energy suppressed, spurred on again until it breaks open with bottled-up necessity.
Why, and how dance moves us will forever remain unfathomable, for there’s no explanation for why these visions seem to carve a home into our souls and bring forth feelings that words fail to explain. All I know is that you could see it one hundred times and be newly moved one hundred times over. Silent Ghost is a gift that, as Doug Fullington put it, lets us come off of “whatever kind of day we’ve had” and lets it all fall away in the face of such intention.
The stage begins bare until one dancer paces across the hazy space with great haste, lurching into a stream of sharpened, rapid movement, soon joined by another who floods Dustin Hamman’s gritty electric guitar score with a macho vigor. Another, and another; steady, even-tempered, slightly-hunched physicality, with encircled arms crossing the midline, carving their way through the muddy gray until a line forms beneath Michael Korsch’s transcendent lighting.
Like so many of his other works, Cerrudo uses the visual effect of a line of bodies catching the light to transform repetitions of movement into an architectural feat. Light and shadow grow his gestures beyond the human form until their unison–lifted by echoed breath and illuminated geometry–becomes a stirring tranquility. There’s a specificity to Cerrudo’s vocabulary that so many contemporary works fail to find, and in this line, the minuscule, pointed details multiplied by eight bodies settle us all with their equilibrium.
And then, at once, there’s suddenly nothing but two honest souls there in the endless dark. Beneath streaking strands of light, Cerrudo’s pas de deuxs are sculptural, ever-fluid meetings of two equals. He melds forms with the sensitivity of a poet, allowing the most human gestures to streak the hazy gray. Coiled, inside out, through every crevice of self until their lines blur, he seamlessly melds two dancers into one being of flowing, ever-constant, breath-stilling unison. They have all the time in the world. They are time-suspended there in a flow state of reciprocity. Lifted, hovered, swiveled; legs rising unmoored from the plane of another’s back; a rippled arm, almost creaturely in its slowly-realized birth; a head placed declaratively with the gesture of offering oneself wholly–denied, once again, then received.
Amidst a cast of ten, forms catch the eye who inhabit Cerrudo’s form like it is their own innate outpouring. From the start, Dylan Wald’s avidity for motion, his focus through cathartic coils of momentum, and his care for the smallest of breaths and gestures are an overpowering sight. There’s nothing else in the world when he’s immersed entirely within the carving of this steadfast profession, and in a particularly tender pas de deux with Leah Terada, the flow state of their motion leaves us in a daze of lingering images.
Likewise, watching Elle Macy inhabit Cerrudo’s language is like watching her come home to her own artistry. Silent Ghost clarifies anew the all-possessing conviction that she brings to her work. In the vulnerability of the ballet’s breath-stilling quiet, in the tenderness of her partnerships with Luther DeMyer and Melisa Guilliams, she is stripped of everything but the present moment. Through Silent Ghost’s rolling impulse, she is a pillar of strength, a nucleus amidst a sea of movement, extending fully realized, fluent gesture to its molecular limit. What a privilege it is, to witness such innate purpose.
Silent Ghost is filled with repetitions–leitmotifs, a shared language, if you will– that tie the separate sections together. In the first pas de deux, a dancer extends his arms and his partner touches them one by one, replacing them with her own as his fall at her touch. In the ballet’s final moments, Cerrudo repeats his raised arm sequence for the third time, but there is no release. Leah Terada leaves Dylan Wald’s arms suspended there while his illuminating beam of light contracts around him, his arms more tethered than lifted heavenward. Cerrudo lingers on this image until it becomes almost uncomfortably raw: just one soul upon the stage, an impeccably vulnerable gesture; curtain fall.
Six years ago, during PNB’s COVID-19-inflicted digital season, a brief little gem of a ballet danced its way across our screens at home. Cerrudo’s Pacopepeluto, originally created for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago in 2011, is an uplifting palate-cleanser set to three tunes made popular by Dean Martin. Bathed in golden light, three solos in near-nudity show us a more playful side of Cerrudo, where abandon and charm take precedence in quickly fleeting visions. Like so many of Cerrudo’s works, Pacopepepluto overflows with ideas and glimpses that race past us with daring, unconventional form.
“Paco”, danced with compact fluidity by Noah Martzall, is a frisk, quick-footed flow racing along Martins’ “Memories Are Made Of This” with rounded vigor. In “Pepe”, a contagious optimism spurs on raunchier flashes of verve along the swell of “Chapel in the Moonlight” that evokes a nostalgia for something we’ve never experienced. On Saturday night, Dylan Wald simply gleamed; his vast reach and soaring being ushering forth an unapologetic rush of might and swift velocity.
“Pluto” is the comedian of the night. For though all three are abundantly free, the humor and literal gesture of“Pluto” bring light-hearted closure to the short-lived work. Jonathan Batista is a physically evocative comedian, and Joh Morill (forever terribly undercast) has an elasticity that extends the fluid gestures with light-as-air ease. It’s understandable why Cerrudo chose not to give Pacopepepluto a curtain call (thus not breaking the spell of these briefly-seen, illuminated, golden forms), but these dancers certainly deserved a bow after such cathartic declarations.
Poetic literature has been the source of a multitude of balletic works (Romeo and Juliet, Onegin, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Le Corsaire, Giselle), but to draw a ballet from a short, 2,000-word poem is a relatively unexplored feat. PNB’s own Kyle Davis saw potential in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 poem, The Raven, and paired with a nearly unknown piano concerto only two years the poem’s senior, a wealth of beauty and grief and brilliance is professed in just under twenty minutes. He grows the poem to enthralling dramatic heights, painting direct poetic lines while not binding himself to the structural limitations of transforming verse to physical realization.
Davis has also selected a team whose contributions shape a cohesive physical home for The Raven. Like her designs for Dani Rowe’s The Window, Emma Kingsbury’s costumes move like poetry themselves, even gifting the Raven’s tapered tail a vengeful quality that is very fitting. Jim French has designed a well-lived-in set that catches light and shifts the room’s character like a storyteller itself.
Beginning in silence, the work is cast into raging drama by Alexander Dreyschock’s tour de force for piano, Morceau de Concert (played impeccably, of course, by Christina Siemens). Urged on by this score, Davis’ vision is ambitious. He has given each of the three characters a voice that is distinctly their own. The ghostly Lenore–all bourrées and sylph-like weightlessness–shares a classically bravura partnership with her beloved. Lifts that land on pointe emphasize her ephemeral nature, while flashes of dashing passion and a wilting kind of grief give her an air of the Romantic era. Later, as the Man surges through maddening spells of disbelief and Lenore grows weary, their shared language turns towards the dramatic likes of Kenneth MacMillan’s physical evocations; all draped, dropped, flown, and agonized.
Though the 1845 poem refers to the Raven as “he”, Davis’ decision to place this fierce bird on pointe and give her a striking, Odile-like temperament changes the entire nature of the work. She contains both the stillness of her corner-placed repetitions (which could be interpreted as reality) and the fiery intensities that threaten to overwhelm the Man in her merciless athleticism and attack (perhaps only his perception of her mocking). Her pas de deux with the Man shares this same striking quality: an off-balance, daring, neoclassical vocabulary which enunciates her dominating spirit.
Cast as the Man are three of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s most eloquent poets of the physical form: Christopher D’Ariano, Luther DeMyer, and Dylan Wald. D’Ariano billows as soft as a breeze, swooning into memory, and tumbling through the agonizing truth of his reality with feverish urgency. DeMyer is entirely guttural in his choices and particularly effective in his clarifications of dreaming and snapping back to reality. On Saturday night, the work found a new truth as Wald–ever so young and willowed by grief–left every morsel of the tale’s truth there upon the stage. Wald always manages to slip into a work with a genuineness that lets it all unfold as a profession of his own soul, and even in these brief twenty minutes, his grief-stricken Man is a wordless poet through and through.
As the ghostly Lenore, Angelica Generosa is a flicker of Romantic-era grace and precision. Her ghostly delicacy as she flits between walls, tossing willowy limbs to the air with cathartic will, is a potent evocation. Clara Ruf Maldonado’s Lenore is, from the start, drenched in concern for the well-being of her beloved. There is a real truth which defines her Lenore, with lyricism draping her dashing flurries until the ghostlike quality of her being is lighter than air before us. With Dylan Wald at her side, we believed every morsel of their turmoil and loss.
From the moment her looming shadow cast itself upon the theater wall, it was quite clear that the commanding drama of the Raven could not be better suited for Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan. Not only is the role–with its speed, dexterity, and blazing footwork– a technical marvel in her hands, but her unbridled intensity of character entirely forms the work’s pulse. Even in the controlled corner repetitions of winging gesture, simply the reigning power that she exudes is a potent portrayal. With sharpened, gleaming eyes growing ever more wickedly gleeful, and the athletic domination of her vengeance, her enthralling characterization distinctly clarifies reality from feverish perception. Needless to say, The Raven is a testament to the unwavering vividness of Ryan’s artistry.
In Edwin Denby’s 1946 review of Ballet de Monte Carlo in La Sonnambula (then titled Night Shadow), he concurred that the ghostly ballet would be well-suited for lovers of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. “It gives you a sense–as Poe does– of losing your bearings, the feeling of an elastic sort of time and a heaving floor”, he wrote in a November 1946 review. (During that same two-week run at New York City Center, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo had in fact premiered an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells by Ruth Page, though it was not received well). How fitting then, that eighty years later, the rarely-seen La Sonnambula should find itself following The Raven.
Forty-three years after his death, Balanchine is still full of surprises. Though he is so closely associated with neoclassical, plotless, abstract explorations of body and sound, La Sonnambula is quite the opposite. Created in 1946 for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Balanchine borrowed only a snippet of Bellini’s story, namely the element of the Sleepwalker and an entangled love triangle to craft this strange, yet unexpectedly moving tale. The technicality of dance invention is hardly the focus; its effect relies on the juxtaposition of the jovial social dances and the simple, yet profound pas de deux between the wandering Sleepwalker and an awe-struck Poet. It relies on atmosphere: swooning, bone-chilling, moonlit atmosphere and the perfume of the stars.
La Sonnambula was revived for the New York City Ballet in 1960, remarkably surviving unscathed from Balanchine’s frequent cuts and simplifications. It is entirely plausible that he could have left behind all the frolicking, all the plot, and retained only the heart of the ballet–the moonlit pas de deux and its ghostly shadows. But thank goodness that it remained intact, for it is this contrast between the worldly and the sublime that makes the ballet. Though it is unassuming at first, with its bright 1940s-hued costumes and at times nearly-kitsch stylization, what Balanchine builds upon the atmosphere of Vittorio Rieti’s arrangement of Vincenzo Bellini’s operas turns not just towards the sentimentally tender, but the utterly profound. Beginning with lighthearted group dances and divertissements that evoke the final act of a story ballet is what makes the end land with such profound heartache, for we have traversed and been witness to so much in 37 minutes’ time.
And what of these social dances? In “Balanchine Variations”, Nancy Goldener declares them “unextraordinary”, but there are dashes of Balanchinian brilliances scattered throughout the stylized humor and courtesies. The rapid gaiety of those heeled feet, little bobs and hand flutters along the tapestry of the score, toe taps, and musical sensitivities quickly name the work his own, though it stands in such contrast to what we expect from him.
Dance critic Arlene Croce once wrote, “If George Balanchine were a novelist or a playwright or a movie director instead of a choreographer, his studies of women would be among the most discussed and most influential artistic achievements of our time.” In La Sonnambula, there is not only the Sleepwalker with her unseeing eyes and mysterious circumstances, but the lively Coquette, who lies at the most tangled corner of this love square. In her pas de deux with the rather smitten Poet, she leads the way, falling and expecting his awaiting arms, guiding them through the tango with glorious flair.
As the Coquette, Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan has a distinct air that seems rather impossible to replicate. The vividity and versatility of her artistry continue to astonish to no end. It’s in the smallest of breaths, and inflections turned to extravagances, in the lush abundance that marks her every step, in the daring pause of a sous sus, and the rich splendor of her pas de deux with Kyle Davis.
In the wake of Davis’ retirement announcement, the swooning content of their shared tango overflows with gratitude for the present moment. I don’t know what we’ll do without Davis’ quick-footed wit or the intensity of his focus, but for now, we have time to burn into memory the wonderment that possesses him in a story ballet such as this. He is utterly charmed by the Sleepwalker, and we by him.
When the arousing polonaise clears the stage, the score quite suddenly plunges into a chilling melancholy. Above the lone Poet, a mysterious candlelight travels past windows until a ghostly Sleepwalker with willowy sleeves trailing behind her emerges from the door with haste. Her fingertips see; her eyes do not. Traveling on pointe, her quickened steps traverse the stage with urgency. She turns in sharp right angles, halts and pivots on a dime, guided by an inner direction. Despite being an afterimage of the Romantic-era theme of a poet-type encountering an unattainable woman not quite of this world, there is a disconnect that gives her fluttering steps their unsettling quality.
As the Sleepwalker, Leta Biasucci is emboldened by the purpose of her direction. Vacant-eyed, she somehow simultaneously possesses a steely intensity that steers her. She beautifully expresses the subtle shift in the Sleepwalker after the Poet’s death, for she is suddenly not quite vacant, but more so blind, fully present yet still unseeing.
The Sleepwalker has the vast task of expressing so much without outwardly expressing anything at all. From the first glance of Madison Rayn Abeo’s Sleepwalker, it was the unsettling possession of her eyes that immediately imbued her floating, flurried steps with an ethereal otherworldliness. In the gauzy blur of her bourrées and silken drift, the spectral quality of her far-off gaze leaves her unrecognizable, as though she sees past this world onto another plane of existence.
Clara Ruf Maldonado, too, all ghostly weightlessness and a sharpened look in her unseeing eyes, is untethered from the earth in her wandering sleep. After the Poet’s death, a chilling vacantness fills her eyes, and yet, there’s a glimmer of remorse that ripples through her when he’s placed in her arms, a momentary, lucent upheaval before she is gone into the night.
It is this final scene that truly makes the ballet. As the Poet lies lifeless after the revenge of the Baron, the Sleepwalker emerges once more, this time in a shroud of unexpressed, yet deeply palpable grief. This time, she no longer flits on pointe, but walks flat-footed with great intention until her feet find his form. Stepping over him may not seem like a great portrayal of grief or remorse, and yet, somehow, that is expressed through her carriage. As he is placed in her awaiting arms, and she bears the burden of the night’s unfolding, it is a scene so profound, so unusual that it steals the breath from the theater. She disappears, is gone with him in her possession, and the silence thereafter is a haunting thing.
As we watch her candlelight slowly retrace her steps past each window, it’s one of those magical, captivating moments where you forget that what’s before you isn’t real. Nothing occurs onstage except for the witnessing of this eerie phenomenon; the weight of what has just occurred as heavy as the evening air even after the curtain has fallen upon the chilling scene.
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