Impassioned Forms and Firebird Fever: Pacific Northwest Ballet's "Firebird", Round Two

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Clara Ruf Maldonado and Lucien Postlewaite in Ulysses Dove’s Red Angels. Photo © Angela Sterling.

The second weekend of a run always provides an opportunity for word to spread, but Pacific Northwest Ballet’s triple-bill program, “Firebird”, broke records in this regard. Fresh faces, stunned by their inaugural ballet experience, and familiar devotees returning repeatedly to witness Rep Four’s potency created a tangible sense of gratitude for this corner of the world. With the revival of Kent Stowell’s Firebird after twenty-one years, and the return of multiple dancers coming back from injuries, Rep Four felt a bit like greeting Pacific Northwest Ballet anew. With Cerrudo’s surprising poesy, Dove’s athletic verve, and Stowell’s classicism, it’s a program that highlights the balance between classical and contemporary aptitude that has long since defined PNB.

Alejandro Cerrudo’s Little Mortal Jump is a little transcendence. Ten years after its PNB premiere, its vivid character greets audiences like a dear old friend. Dense with ideas, motive, and beauty, Little Mortal Jump is never just a one-voiced song. It is an indie film of a ballet. Cerrudo’s language is all his own: quirky, courageous, and self-possessed in vignettes that build to impossible heights in twenty-six short minutes. Anna Pavlova once said, “Dance is the purest expression of every emotion, earthly and spiritual,” and Little Mortal Jump is full of both unconventional beauty and profound gestures that somehow reveal to us a sliver of our own fragile state in the dim light. 

Though Little Mortal Jump is a work cast in dark shadow, that dark canvas lets Michael Korsch (who also designed Cerrudo’s breathtaking One Thousand Pieces) pierce the abyss with a heavenly glow. Amidst the high-hung haze, there’s a drop of sun, in the endless dark, there’s a sharp beam of light casting a dancer’s looming shadow to flit larger than life across McCaw Hall’s ceiling. As harp notes stir each limb, spectacular strands of light reach down from some higher place, and in the final pas de deux, a surge from the first wing drapes desperate, slow-motion forms with half-crescent gold.

Cerrudo’s works are most often contained by their obstacles. One Thousand Pieces is bathed in water and reflected light; Black on Black on Black exists between rising and falling layers that reveal snippets of movement; and in Little Mortal Jump, wheeled boxes transition between scenes to create walls and obstructions, entrances and exits that let light break through to silhouette dancers that appear from thin air.

In that stark illumination, Cerrudo weaves together a host of moods and characters that find their cohesiveness within each group encounter. First bursting with youth’s optimism, then lyrical full-throttle commitment, and at last, a kind of reverent melancholia.

His pas de deuxs are full of the ways that others influence us. Inventive in their near constant physical connection, their interactions are defined by equality and counterweight, a catch and release where bodies push, repel, lift, and return again and again to each other’s shifting shapes. Cerrudo’s studies on relationships range from the playful to the radically poignant: ever-constant, inside out, manipulated, poetic breaths of curling, stirring form. His musical choices aid in character definition, letting intimacy blossom in dark, nostalgic rooms, and intensities and subtle pleasures arise in unlikely places. 

The first pas de deux is gesturally tied to Alexander Bird’s “Beware”, the next whispers with echoes of playful youth, the “Mishima” duet is pure interdependent cohesivity, and in the pas de deux set to Max Richter’s “The Haunted Ocean Five”, Cerrudo begins, in technical manuevers and manipulation to edge us closer to the momentous energy that will close the ballet.

All of these moments land with inexplicable truth, but it is the final pas de deux, rising to fill Max Richter’s “November”, that is Little Mortal Jump’s most ingenious breath. What Cerrudo is able to build in those six and a half minutes surpasses any expectation we had only twenty minutes earlier, as it climbs from silent rumination to an emotionally-charged test of endurance. 

This final pas de deux is an accentuation of feeling, an assertion of what the work has been trying to say from the beginning. With a touch, a dancer plucks his partner out of her insistent repetition and into a place of circling relation and rising urgency. Cerrudo has a circular tendency that, in this pas de deux of incessant momentum, gives his work an ebbing flow. Limbs take the long way home, arcs encircle the core and pass overhead like they could graze the pale ebony. A swung arm, a folding into momentum, angularity melting away into a soft breath, a tender sweep across the brow unfurls as a wildly passionate release of all that Cerrudo is able to profess.

Selma Jeanne Cohen wrote “great art answers to our most profound questions, even–perhaps especially– the ones that we cannot formulate in words”, and indeed, part of dance’s greatest mystery is how motions evoke and convey the tensions and exstacies that our minds have no language for.

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Christopher D’Ariano and corps de ballet dancer Destiny Wimpye in Alejandro Cerrudo’s Little Mortal Jump. Photo © Angela Sterling.

Cerrudo leaves us with questions. Why do two dancers stuck to the wall in velcro suits seem to, beneath the humor, suggest a metaphor that blossoms into sweetly naive reciprocity? Why do two dancers pushing a wall of boxes into shattered motion evoke perseverance? How does momentum, even the gentlest notion of propelled unity amidst the small cast of ten, become an intoxicating force?

This momentum arises in both the steady flow of curling limbs and in fragmented gestures repeated with a prayer-like reverence. Near the ballet’s close, as dancers move through a section of repetitive, insistent motion, simplicity falls into a stream of potency, where they find a stillness of spirit, though not of body. Refracted refrains, a reach that grows with each reiteration, a kind of focus rarely seen, spins a chilling poignancy amid the abstract shards of Cerrudo’s unity. Ten in motion, unified, then polarized in juxtaposition. Ten in motion, then four, then three. One solitary committed soul carrying on.

Among the many highlights of this run: Kuu Sakuragi, who we know in flight so keenly, is grounded in bold movement pushed to its granular limit; Joh Morrill, stretched, extended, a definite reach of fluidity; Destiny Wimpye bringing surety and strength to light with a beautiful sense of freedom; and Leah Terada’s theatricality in Cerrudo’s most unserious moments.

But, most vividly, it is the dancers whom Peter Boal described as having soaked up Cerrudo’s language “like a sponge in water” when the work was first brought to PNB ten years ago, that linger in the mind's eye. I still don’t have words for dancers who always go further; I only know what my eyes see and the immediate and lasting imprint of the artists who move through Cerrudo’s swell as though it is what they were born to do.

Dylan Wald’s presence is larger than life when he comes into motion. George Balanchine once said that you cannot see soul, cannot dance soulfully, but I believe it is possible to see the artists in whom an inner commitment lends itself to a full-bodied envelopment. The way Wald propels himself, his eagerness to move, and his divine attention seem to stretch time by extending a movement to its fullest potential. He is a poet of gaze, and gesture, and intuitive musings. At the epitome of sincerity, Wald’s grandiose motive arises in buoyancy and ease, ever a vision of boundless freedom that is a magnetic sight after residing only in memory for nine months. What a gift to have him back upon the stage.

The airiness of Elizabeth Murphy’s classical form weaves its way into Cerrudo’s language with an abundance of ethereal fluidity. After living in the role for ten years, her swiftness and tenacity finds her deeply entrenched within the work’s hold. Watching them together, it’s hard to remember that this partnership is in its final months. Such a fact is incomprehensible. But, in this blessed present, to witness their intertwined curling, and to think of all the paths that brought them to this cohesive moment is a bittersweet thing to cherish.

Occasionally, a dancer embraces a choreographer’s language so passionately that it becomes their own. With eyes lifted to the heavens and an intrinsic hunger to consume every inch of its magic, Elle Macy is in a different dimension within Little Mortal Jump. She has always had a presence that swells motion into unsuspecting magnitude, and what she imparts is visceral: an expansive force through thickened air in which one can feel the inner coil of movement instead of only seeing its outermost layer.

It is not simply heavenly fluidity, but the pacing of such fluid motion that strings together her steps in a seamless unfurling of all-consuming expression. In Little Mortal Jump, the intensity of Macy’s fervor, her gestural strength, and lucid clarity surge through Cerrudo’s form like a vast declaration.

There, centerstage, even in the work's most repetitive gestures, we see her unrestrained artistry so fully. The nature of art and of dance means that some works become defined by a certain voice. This one, with its fearless drive and rolling, full-bodied momentum, is undoubtedly one where Elle Macy’s billowing strength finds a kindred spirit in Cerrudo, and likewise, Cerrudo finds an artist who extends his vision beyond its fullest potential.

At the pinnacle of this spiraling delirium, pushing through the walls is a groundbreaking metaphor after all that Cerrudo has built. Amidst the swirling boxes they stand in a beam of light, drawn upwards until, at once, they’re gone from sight, leaving only a sharp intake of breath in their wake. 

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancer Noah Martzall and soloist Juliet Prine in Ulysses Dove’s Red Angels. Photo © Angela Sterling.

When Ulysses Dove choreographed Red Angels for New York City Ballet in 1994, it was a quick-spurred, intimate affair, with often only him and four dancers in the studio. As one of those dancers was Peter Boal, it is no surprise that the work became a defining, bold addition to Pacific Northwest Ballet’s repertory more than twenty years ago. 

Placing it after Little Mortal Jump accentuates its calculated approach, its squareness to the audience, and the punctuated attack that creates an exhilarating pronunciation of familiar steps. Red Angels uses the athletic drive of Balanchine’s dancers, their limberness and verve, to bridge heaven and earth with the non-balletic influences of Dove’s career. In the work’s saunter and sway, there’s a distance between audience and dancer, as though they nearly push back a bit despite how presentational the work is in its heightened tension.

Red Angels begins in silence. A spotlight waits for a solitary figure to pierce its stillness. That solitary figure–straight facing, en face, shoulders taut–is a focused beacon who is soon joined by Michael Jinsoo Lim’s electric violin. Dove gave his dancers the artistic license to show up unapologetically, and by bringing shadows of his own life into its fold, allows them to find the same courage beneath those stark beams.

In the works most modern stretch and daring risk-taking, one can see that Dove spent three years dancing with Merce Cunningham. In 2020, Peter Boal reflected that Dove had encouraged dancers to “arrange the musicality based on the physicality that was currently occurring”, to play in the present moment and see what might come from it. Instead of commanding a balance to end on a particular count, Dove allowed dancers to push that balance to its maximum before finding themselves again within the musicality.

As Lucien Postlewaite closed his two-decade-long relationship with Red Angels, this play with balance and risk increased with every performance, until, one glorious final time, physics glitched. There he was, frozen on relevé in a la seconde, stopping time itself with this thrilling sustain as Michael Jinsoo Lim carried on. It’s one of those moments that you can’t believe actually occurred before your eyes, a remarkable feat born from a work that granted such possibility.

Postlewaite shares an electric partnership with Clara Ruf Maldonado which brims with cool command. As he ends his journey with the ballet, Maldonado’s debut in the role originated by Wendy Whelan is intensity personified. She is a blur of swift ruthlessness, with a steely gaze and unrestrained power coursing through her that was still an ever-growing thrill many rounds later. 

Dammiel Cruz-Garrido, returning to the stage for the first time in over a year, is a striking presence, a bold magnitude that fills Dove’s work with precision and authority. In the tightest chaines turns pivoting on a dime, Ashton Edwards is a rush of fiery energy. And while we often see her in sunnier works, Red Angels places Juliet Prine in an entirely different hue: vital command and tensioned zeal exuding full-bodied might.

After simultaneous pas de deuxs and impassioned individuality, their riveting forms are stark scarlet beacons against an incandescent sky. At the close of fourteen dense minutes, four pairs of angel wings lift into the rising heat, and with a single glance our way, they’re silhouetted, and gone.

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancer Malena Ani (center) with company dancers in Kent Stowell’s Firebird. Photo © Angela Sterling.

Kent Stowell’s Firebird is a full-length intensity compacted within thirty-seven minutes (though one forgets about time when under the spell of such a work). Night after night, as the curtain rose on Ming Cho Lee’s opulent scene, exclamations arose at the enchantment revealed by Randall G. Chiarelli’s moonlight. Though Lee’s set is much more spare than other productions–no stone men or golden apple tree–Stravinsky’s ominous overture gives us all we need to feel the charmed garden’s eeriness.

After four composers of higher rank turned down the offer, Sergei Diaghilev took a risk on the vastly unknown Igor Stravinsky, who was only twenty-seven years old at the time. Stravinsky was so delighted with the concept that he began sketching scenes before a contract had even been signed, and later spent a great deal of time in the studio, coaching the dancers through the complexity of his rhythms. Anna Pavlova famously turned down the role because the score was too intricate, but it was these novel rhythms and rich orchestration that stood in such contrast to the expectation for ballet music at the time that would become Stravinsky’s first great success.

Diaghilev took a chance on Stravinsky because he had been the protegé of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and one of Stravinsky’s strongest tools in Firebird is one that he had learned from this accomplished composer: that of leitmotifs. Stravinsky created two distinct worlds in Firebird: using the diatonic scale for the tale’s human characters, and the chromatic scale to create a supernatural effect for the immortal characters. When Prince Ivan catches the Firebird, a frenzied passage echoes between the woodwinds representing the flighty Firebird and the strings representing Ivan. The Princesses, too, are each brought to life by a specific instrument or a combination of instruments which use the diatonic scale, but, brilliantly, have a subtle chromatic passage running beneath because they are still under Kastchei’s spell. The world that Stravinsky builds, complete with the glittering sound of golden apples falling (an element of the original tale that is not obviously apparent in Stowell’s production), is an enrapturing realm of both chaotic and moonlit-spun potency.

It’s always a delight when, after a triumphant debut, a second performance greets one with shocking strength all anew. This happened on the penultimate day of Firebird, as Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan burst from the wings like a gust of wind with astonishing zeal and airborne height. Her strength alone in this role, propelling her Firebird to an unearthly degree, is an uncontested feat of might. Tantalizing vim owns the stage from the moment she flits upon it, and yet beneath this, she’s soulfully imbued, full of distrust and longing that ring from those ever-potent, steely eyes.

Ryan’s Firebird is an unforgettably vibrant bird who pierces the audience with her gaze like a whetted knife, and has not only Prince Ivan, but the entire house pressed under her command. The placement of each sharpened finger and lyrical breath, her clarity at incomprehensible speed, the ethereal ripples of her limbs, and her brilliant severity are a meticulous creation of fully embodied character. After twenty-one years without a Firebird, Ryan’s fiercely convincing one is already carved into memory; all risk and zest, darting wit and startling verity.

The Firebird’s choreography arises from a lineage of balletic bird influences, but in 1910, her image was a revolutionary sight. Sharp, staccato, and sharpened, her flightiness in changes in direction is an unsettled quality so distinctly removed from Swan Lake’s softened feathers. Perhaps because we know her Odette/Odile, Angelica Generosa’s Firebird ignites the contemporary edge of these familiar bird forms. There’s the Swan-like drape of her arms, and a winging flight, and yet, in the flicker of her fingers, it's clear what a different temperament the Firebird has. Generosa’s exacting precision and chiseled clean lines let her stop on a dime, finding sustain and a control that reigns with musical sensitivity. In the Berceuse, her grit gives way to a flood of tranquility, where sorrow alights from sharpened feathers and weaves its way into a vivid picture of this elemental being.

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancer Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan in the title role of Kent Stowell’s Firebird. Photo © Angela Sterling.

The influence of George Balanchine is explicitly clear within Kent Stowell’s Firebird. With the Firebird’s Rubies-like turned-in neo-classicalism, he gives her a flighty verve that makes Stravinsky visible in the way that Balanchine so often did. Meanwhile, the monsters echo Balanchine’s goons from Prodigal Son, taking their lopsided steps and squated turning wheel into their repertoire of grotesque, unrecognizable forms. Here, Stowell also returns to one of his favorite choreographic tools, the circle, shaping chaos into synchronized unity in an instant. A tour jeté, multiplied by twenty-four wild-flurried monsters, is a chilling cohesion conjured by the power of movement that Stowell captures brilliantly. The monsters, carried greatly by the Professional Division students, are due an immense amount of credit after two weekends of filling the stage with jolting vigor.

The ballet’s final scene, with its golden hue and Stravinsky’s grand score, is a declarative triumph. Amidst a full house of enraptured breaths and new interest bubbled up by this rep, such a perseverance seemed to speak for PNB’s vitality as well. But after a rep of such varied beauty, how do we carry what we’ve received out into the world? What carves itself into memory? A yearning reach in stark light, a tender touch upon the earth, some bold ferocity in an unrecognizable eye, a defiance of gravity, a breath? The curtain falls, life goes on, and yet…there it is, days later: potent in the mind’s eye like a little drop of light.

Sources:

"Apollo's Angels" by Jennifer Homans

https://podcast.nycballet.com/311-hear-the-dance-red-angels-part-1

"Next Week, Swan Lake" by Selma Jeanne Cohen

"Serenade" by Toni Bentley