Persistent Origination: NEXT STEP 2026
- 16 hours ago
- 9 min read
New works are an intoxicating thing. With arts organizations around the country facing extreme cuts in funding, putting resources towards the creation of new works is an increasingly exorbitant luxury. For Pacific Northwest Ballet’s cherished NEXT STEP program, which gives company dancers the opportunity to choreograph on the school’s Professional Division students, recent budget cuts mean these new works received their premiere not on McCaw Hall’s stage with full production, but rather next door in the Phelps Center’s spacious Studio C.
But artists know how to turn lemons into lemonade, and circumstantial disappointment quickly turned into recognition of the beauty of such an intimate space. The general public rarely has the chance to witness ballet in its day-to-day dwelling; that is, upon expansive gray marley, streaked by past motions, and beneath lofty ceilings where movement displaces air and sends it rushing, along with heavy breath, towards bystanders like a score itself. Being invited into this space, to be a fly on the wall or a shadow in the wings, is an experience far from the cavernous majesty of McCaw Hall’s 3,000-seat theater. It feels like being invited into ballet’s home for a most intimate, celebratory gathering. A celebration of what exactly? Of the fact that art abounds, and that artists will always find a way to create.
As NEXT STEP program director, Eva Stone, proclaimed, McCaw Hall’s “beautiful red velvet curtain tells you that something magical is going to happen…” And yet, in Studio C, without lights, or a curtain, or even wings to conceal waiting dancers, the magic was still there, showing itself in the different hues that make a studio performance uniquely intimate and cohesive between audience and performers. In such an environment, the necessity of this program seemed to grow to mammoth heights before my eyes.
NEXT STEP gives company dancers the invaluable experience of being at the front of the room and allows them to grow as choreographers with the support, funding, and guidance of the program. For students, it means having the opportunity to have a work created on them and being pushed to heights they didn’t know they were capable of. One of the most beautiful things about NEXT STEP is that after an entire season of seeing the Professional Division fill out the corps de ballet, they finally step front and center with a startling amount of declarative artistry; suddenly fully seen.
There is also something deeply beautiful about seeing work envisioned by artists whose own dancing you know, who you’ve seen bring to life countless other creations, and now reveal what vocabulary feels like their own. Seeing what they choose to create and hearing their voice so authentically through other bodies clarifies the fascinations and passions that they bring into their own dancing.
The diversity of movement that stems from such authenticity is an overwhelmingly inspiring element of NEXT STEP. With six new works by Ashton Edwards, Luther DeMyer, Elle Macy and Dylan Wald, Leah Terada, Lily Wills, and Zsilas Michael Hughes, this year’s studio performance allowed for the rare chance to sit mere feet from the intimate outpourings, to coexist at once with the breath, sweat, and effort, and, multiple viewings permitting, to see the works from different viewpoints.
As dancers filed into formation, dressed in the sky blue tones of costumes borrowed from David Dawson’s A Million Kisses to My Skin, piano music from a class in the next studio drifted in to fill the silence. A moment later, any thought of the informality of the space had vanished. Ashton Edwards’ Hues of You pounces upon its electronic score with undeniably contagious vigor, all steady momentum and a constant hum of energy. The tantalizing spirit of youth brims with Edwards’ own characteristic verve, dividing attention with simultaneous solos and partnerships while a flower of limbs blossoms repeatedly, containing and releasing unity. And then, into a sacred silence, the vibrant group energy dissolves into an intersweaving for two, full of intricate physical maneuvers. Despite all this intricacy, the most lasting of images is the simplest: when their pas de deux unravels itself to let them encircle the stage, guided by one hand held promisingly before them like a beacon to chase. And then, as they circle, the fifteen others are pulled into their spiraling orbit, a satisfying vision of serene cohesion.
Stillness crawling into motion, life tediously swelling a limb, breath-stilled…so begins Luther DeMyer’s solemn For the end of time. Inspired by the weight of “Quartet for the End of Time”, composed by Oliver Messiaen in a German prisoner of war camp during World War Two, as well as the shadowed artwork Käthe Kollwitz, DeMyer forms moving pictures that seep with humanity. DeMyer approaches the work almost as an architect would, building layers of height and limb-formed line that, snapshot by snapshot, evoke the Kollwitz inspiration. Time morphs in the gestures of care that shape his work with a tender speed, allowing images to be fully digested before they slip away. Reaching, uplifting, embracing, easing the burden from each other’s shoulders, the meditative crawl of motion never breaks the breath-stilling spell.
Placing multiple simultaneously unfolding partnerships on the stage is not always successful, for the eye is conflicted, but DeMyer’s use of divided attention at such a steady pace is an exception. His use of tensioned, familiar gestures (a pique turn with hands clasped in fists, a dancer drawn up to pointe by her deeply carved turmoil) and deliberate pace ring with hues of works DeMyer himself has found a strong voice in: Alexei Ratmansky’s haunting Wartime Elegy, and Jessica Lang’s Let Me Mingle Tears with Thee. When the final scene has formed its armature, there we leave them: one final glorious lift, and an earthbound embrace.
With Michael Wall playing live from a corner of the studio, and movement strung in the space between resounding piano vibrations, something sacred is born in Elle Macy and Dylan Wald’s To Echo. In silence, the quiet patter of pointe shoes begins before Wall’s lilting arpeggios send the six dancers across the floor and back again on their own paths in flighty repetitions of steps staggered so that they freckle the light like entirely different motions.
Crossing the stage with mathematical symbolism (three steps forward, pivot, one forward; four steps backward, pivot, one back; five steps forward into canoned unfurlings) the use of parallel lines forms the steady structure of To Echo. Later, in a glorious pas de deux, the taut thread between two bodies in a simple placing of step is a visceral connection that lets Crystal Pite’s Emergence glimmer for an instant in the command of such intentional placement.
When a line of turned backs exits the stage save for two, the first pas de deux is filled with the lucid beauty of an unfolding limb and an encircled penché within the breathless grace of Wall’s hushed serenity. Their needle pointed delicacy soon finds polarity in the second duet, where, earthbound in socks and intertwined synchronicity, lush extensions end in flexion–a line upturned.
To Echo contains elements that would make me think of Macy and Wald’s dancing even if the piece were not tied to their names. Their fingerprints reveal themselves in the work's intrinsic strength and time spent unmoored from the earth, in the fluidity that weaves its way through stillness, and the articulation through the very last inch of each extremity. The purity of movement and intentionality that fills To Echo is a mesmerizing feat. As Michael Wall’s soft whistles flooded the studio during the work's final breaths, it seemed there could be no greater gift than to witness and be brought to such peace.
Leah Terada’s from colors of sun and steel, is, in one word, profound. The commissioned score by the Austrian hurdy-gurdy player, Matthias Loibner, forms a gritty, richly granular plane upon which chiseled gesture and folkloric step evoke a world far beyond the scope of what this studio usually holds. Three dancers, in long swirling white, push their heels into the human truth of the work, and in their grounded steps and organic fusion of gestural inflections, they conjure spells. Terada’s use of symmetry and sharpened gesture, as well as homely ones, holds a Crystal Pite-like focus on the power of hands.
from colors of sun and steel is not just a beautiful creation, it is an ancestral conjuring, for Terada has something to say about womanhood, sisterhood, and humanity that her brilliant casts of three paint before us. (Daisy Bayard, Annie Smith, Nicole Solomon, as well as Lyra McDonald and Hollis Serson in a partial second cast, swelled the studio with the magnitude of their committed vulnerability and artistry). Though they spend the majority of the work related briefly in overlapping connections, when all three come into unison, it is potent. For a few blessed minutes, there was nothing else in the world save for the spell of rhythm and their cohesive power, which could move mountains.
Much like Balanchine had his Stravinsky, and Justin Peck has his Dan Deacon, Lily Wills returns to Chris Cohen’s music like she’s the only one who could make his optimistic rhythms visible. It’s impossible to watch a Lily Wills creation without a stubborn smile, and Vignettes is, from its first burst of sunshine, full of a spirit that is unmistakably her own. In her fourth NEXT STEP piece, her work is instantly recognizable, not because she’s repetitive, but because of the character that rushes from her work so unapologetically.
Four decisive worlds are formed in Vignettes. First, the sweet playfulness of folk and country hues: heel, toe, decisive hip swings–all a skipping good time and full of the bright youth and spontaneity that informs so much of Wills’ work. Then, in Balanchine-esque black and white symbolism that flows with its own whim and closes with an arched back kneel in a scene nearly straight out of Stravinsky Violin Concerto.
The first pas de deux is filled with an unbridled sweetness and intimacy that lets the most intricate partnering unfold with the ease of a breath. A crossed wrist in penché, the trust in arabesque that he’ll catch her, the building anticipation that breaks free into glorious freedom, paints a brief and lovely picture of love. And yet, eyes turn down different paths, and perhaps it's not fated to be.
It is the fourth and final section where Wills’ voice is at its clearest. Cohen’s lyrics guide two soft-clothed figures through gestural repetition that begins separately rooted but is sparked by their sudden connection to reveal an endearing partnership of give and take. A tap on the head, rippled reactions, and the little accents of musicality are, in Tess Fein and Jonimarie Purtle’s focused embodiment, a place we’d like to linger much longer than Cohen allows us to.
In Push, Zsilas Michael Hughes places one against many. With a large cast of autumnal hues, there’s immediately a kind of pushback, full of stark boldness and tender evocations. The structure of linear configuration shapes Hughes’ work, with walls of dancers that move in on one trapped between, a pivot line held by a dancer in extension, an uncurling canon line, and a sense of cohesion formed by these visual threads. To see so many bodies in unison is a powerful thing, and Hughes harnesses this power to highlight the imbalance of one separated from this lyrical unity.
NEXT STEP allows us to see a dancer's artistry in a new light. Christopher Karhunen commands space with crystalline clarity, and the authenticity that Ruthie Akin brings to this work is a startling reckoning. Akin’s strike, speed, and chiseled form are filled with a freedom that bursts forth from the themes of otherness that shape Push’s rise and fall. She reaches for connection, is jostled and torn, and as the beat overtakes her, leaves it all out there in a brilliantly raw portrayal of unapologetic acceptance: gloriously alive.
At the end of the evening, there it was again, ballet class music drifting in from the studio next door, reminding us that all of this magic had been spun up in a place devoted to the daily work. An in-studio performance like this year’s relocation gave us the opportunity to see that dance does not need the frill of lights, ceremony, or red velvet to create those moments where the rest of the world falls away. Movement is a most powerful magic regardless of setting.
A huge thank you to those persistently making creation possible!
