Category: Feature

Pacific Northwest Ballet’s principal dancer, Carla Körbes, will be retiring at the end of the season. She started dancing in Brazil at age five and as a teen she was encouraged by Peter Boal to pursue her career in New York. By 1999 she was dancing with the New York City Ballet, attaining the role of soloist. She joined the Pacific Northwest Ballet in 2005.

Körbes is the type of once-in-a-lifetime performer who has inspired a legion of superfans. Their enthusiasm will no doubt follow her beyond the ballet into whatever creative endeavor she pursues next—and she’s hinted that there will be more dancing in her future. In an interview with the New York Times she said, “It’s not the end. I just need a change.”

Before her lamented departure from the PNB, we present a few video snippets of her virtuosity. Here’s Körbes at the 2012 Vail International Dance Festival:

And as Juliet:

And in Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet Carousel:

And as Giselle:

And in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Finally, here she is performing the Black Swan at the 2010 Vail International Dance Competition:

Congratulations on all your successes, Carla Körbes, and our good wishes for many more!

I understood the imperative in Europe to be that your job was to further the definition of your practice. Not to challenge it but to say, ‘what else does it do?’

William Forsythe is an innovator, working at the highest level of an art form that has been around for hundreds of years. That’s a daunting task. Hundreds of years, building up traditions, presuppositions and expectations. This doesn’t lead to a culture that’s always enamored with the new. But that’s exactly what Forsythe has consistently brought to the world of ballet, creating an exiting and demanding form of modern choreography that explores the boundaries of the art while fully embracing it’s history. As such, he’s thought a lot about what innovation means and why it is important.

This means that while he is personable and unpretentious, he often speaks in amazing aphorisms like this about the artist’s journey. If you have any interest in creating art, listening to him speak casually about his craft is like getting a pep talk from a motivational speaker. 

The worst thing you can do with this work would be to tick off all the boxes: ‘I did that, I did that and I did that.’

See what I mean? This is the kind of thing Forsythe says all the time in casual conversation. Of course, in this case the conversation was happening in front of an audience of about 100 people in a lecture hall, so I suppose it wasn’t the most casual of circumstances. Peter Boal (previously on Encore here), artistic director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, was interviewing him as a part of the PNB Lecture Series.

Since the 1970’s, Forsythe, a New Yorker, has primarily worked in Germany, for the Stuttgart Ballet and Ballet Frankfurt. His life reflects his approach to work. He wants his dancers to learn by doing, to come to the material through their own experiences, to risk failure in the pursuit of discovery.

It has a reputation in the dance world of being the true test of your endurance. There was a principle dancer in San Francisco who said she would much rather go through another childbirth than do this piece again.

This is in reference to the first piece of his new show with PNB, The Vertiginous Thrill of Forsythe, which runs through March 22^nd at McCaw Hall. Boal described The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude as a “thirty minute ballet compressed down into ten minutes” because they have the same number of steps. This is black belt ballet. Hardcore ballet.

We don’t generally think of ballet as being physically punishing, because the whole idea is for it to look graceful and elegant in execution. But Forsythe’s work demands athletes. Just as in the world of sports, people are constantly getting bigger, stronger and faster then they ever were before, dance evolves to become more and more challenging and demanding.    

How do you say no to Jesus, right?

Forsythe was telling a story about meeting Rudolph Nureyev, one of the most famous dancers of all time. He described the Russian’s presence when he entered the room to that of Jesus to people in his profession. Forsythe was eating lunch in his dressing room at the Joffrey in the ’70s when Nureyev propositioned him. I’ll just let him tell the story:  

“So, he looks me up and down and he goes ‘What are you doing tonight?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’m busy, um, I’m performing something!’ And he said ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’
‘Um… oh, I have a rehearsal.’
‘What are you doing…right now?’
I said, ‘I have lunch!’ [Laughs] How do you say no to Jesus, right?”

Some of the best dancers I’ve ever worked with are the ones that started out with hip-hop and moved to Balanchine.

Apparently the movie Step Up wasn’t too far from reality. Forsythe is willing to draw from any and all sources in his choreography. This hip-hop influence is noticeable in his dancers’ routines, but not overwhelmingly so. A step here, a glimmer there. His work mixes the old and the new in a way that neither favors nor detracts from either. It’s ballet as you know it. But it’s way different.

This applies to the music selection and the costuming. Vertiginous Thrill features tutus, as you might expect, but these ones are lime green and shaped like potato chips. So, you probably didn’t expect that. 

Have you heard about this word, monopoly? Which is not just a game?

Are you aware of the great ballet shoe conspiracy? According to Boal, PNB spends a quarter of a million dollars per year on pointe shoes. That’s right. There 26 ballerinas in the company, and each one, on average, goes through a pair per day. At 80 to 85 dollars per pair, and supposedly there is only one place you can get them! This seemed like a frustrating but inevitable reality for Boal and Forsythe, who didn’t want to name the shoe manufacturer in question. I’d like to further investigate this story, but I’m afraid of what will happen if I dig too deep and upset the shadowy overlords of Big Pointe Shoe.

What is the present composed of right now, as opposed to what I think it’s composed of?

Forsythe spoke a lot about Marcel Duchamp’s “Art Coefficient” proposal, which is “the difference between the intended but unexpressed and the unintentionally expressed.” Basically, he advocates the shedding of delusions. From his perspective, innovation and originality can only be achieved if you see things with absolute clarity. You have to know how your own hopes and fears are influencing your perception of reality. “Seeing the future” was a recurring theme in this talk. That’s something he’d like to help his dancers and his students do. And you can’t do that if your jumping off point is an incorrect vision of the present.

Carey Wong is a prodigiously talented scenic designer who summons entire worlds onstage for major houses like the Portland Opera, the Seattle Opera, the Intiman, Seattle Children’s Theatre and a host of others. This year he’s already designed a slew of shows, including the world premiere of Cheryl L. West’s Mwindo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (at ACT April 17 through May 17), and Around the World in 80 Days (at the Village Theatre in Everett March 6 through 29).

This month, Wong’s work is on display at the Rep with The Comparables (running through March 29), a play by Laura Schellhardt about three women in high-end real estate. The show explores competition, empowerment and intrigue against the backdrop of Wong’s chic but forbidding set. I joined him on the Bagley Wright Theatre stage, where he walked me through some of the aesthetic and practical choices that went into creating this convincing representation of the steel-and-glass world of cosmopolitan, cutthroat business. Wong speaks softly and thoughfully, explaining his process with the clarity of his thirty-plus years in the business. The following words are his. 

 
“We started out with just the description of the environment in Laura [Schellhardt]’s script: a very high-end real estate office on the Upper East Side. She wanted it to exude a sense of wealth and confidence and a hierarchy. The environment we wanted to create was a very masculine one—solid, sober, no frills, very little femininity—to give a sense of the world that Bette, the proprietor, had to create to get ahead.”

“For the research for this show [director] Braden Abraham and I looked at a lot of pictures of metal and glass skyscrapers, both inside and out. One image we were drawn to was an image of a very dark office in the foreground leading to a very light, bright and vibrant white office in the background. Another image we were drawn to was an office that had not only glass walls and glass ceiling but a glass floor. So we wanted to combine those two images, and what we did was create this glass surround that suggests skyscrapers. It actually lights up and illuminates as a picture frame, and the women can step out of the world of the office by standing on this and being lit separately.”

“The rest of the office, we followed that idea of making a dark foreground with this wood paneled veneer and having this white office that Bette occupies upstage. To create that expensive world of this environment, we tried to furnish it with really nice furniture: black Barcelona chairs and the Design Within Reach glass desk in Bette’s office, the Eames chair, and some Mirra chairs from Herman Miller around this conference table.”  

“In Bette’s office are some riffs on Josef Albers graphic drawings from the 40s that complement her office and make it very geometrical. We also wanted to provide a couple of things that soften this office, so there’s the Degas drawing in the center and the plant and these two lighting fixtures we built: the ‘Sputnik’ one downstage that looks like a starburst and the more organic one in her office are softer things that give it more style but also break up the hard lines and hard edges and the angles.”

“One image that is really prominent in this show is a goldfish bowl. It’s talked about as a world that delimits the fish, and in some ways this office also functions as a goldfish bowl; it has both its possibilities and its limits. So this ‘Sputnik’ lighting fixture was also appealing to us because it also resembles air bubbles, maybe that’s an extension of the goldfish bowl metaphor which is so potent.”

“We also were dealing with this huge stage at the Bagley Wright and it’s a three-person show, so we wanted to find a way to make it more intimate. To push the action closer to the audience, I decided to angle the stage forward. The challenge of working in the Bagley Wright, for me, is that the audience seating can start out very low in the theatre and if the [stage] floor is flat, actors even fifteen feet upstage seem really far away. So if you tip the angle of the stage a bit, you create a dynamic, an energy, and it allows the audience to see the movement and choreography. It’s an expense, so I try to use it judiciously when projects require it, but I’d say I probably use it on a quarter of the shows I design. It’s very effective.”

“The other thing we did to get the action to move closer to the audience was to create everything in forced perspectives. The verticals are true verticals but the horizontals are actually diagonals. This creates a greater sense of scale, so the human figure can appear to be very present. We’ve also crafted desks that are designed in forced perspective, where Iris and Monica work. The height of this room looks much bigger than it is by being in forced perspective.”

“All of that is resolved in Bette’s office upstage, which has a flat floor. It has some forced perspective in the ceilings but not in the walls, so hers is an island of peace and calm and light and niceness slightly elevated from this world where a lot of the action and a lot of the deals are made.”

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We sent illustrator/animator Joe Garber to the opening of Seattle Children’s Theatre’s Goodnight Moon, running through April 26. Here’s his stunning interpretation.

Carousel was the first play I ever saw. It was 1985, give or take. I would’ve been seven or eight. It was a local production, staged by a volunteer cast at the Warehouse Theater, a much-loved little black box in the middle of a park in Yakima. I don’t remember much. I enjoyed it without following the story in any substantive way. I fixated on the props, the dust swirling in the spotlights, the not-quite imperceptible movements of the backstage machinery. One of my classmates was in the cast. I remember thinking he was an amazingly good dancer. You don’t generally see your friends dance much in elementary school. 

So I was really looking forward to seeing the 5th^h Avenue Theater’s new take on the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. My idea was to compare and contrast my impressions of the material as a child and from a 30-year vantage point. And boy oh boy, it was much, much different than I remembered. For a viewer in 2015, it can be quite shocking. I was not expecting that at all.

Before I continue following that thread, I would first like to stress that this is a wonderfully staged production, filled with ingenious, spartan set design, an immensely talented cast and terrific musical numbers. It’s a thrilling and faithful adaptation of a genuine classic. That faithfulness, however, could be a sticking point for some. 

Carousel takes place in a maritime community in late 19^th century Maine and centers on the romantic misadventures of a group of lower-class young women who work at a mill. At the heart of the story is the relationship between Julie Jordan and carnival barker Billy Bigelow. They share a lovely courtship scene in the first act, which eventually leads to marriage and pregnancy.  At this point, about a third of the way through, Billy becomes abusive and the tone abruptly shifts. The show becomes much darker for reasons both intended and unintended by its creators when it first premiered in 1945.

Alcoholism, poverty, attempted murder and suicide are disturbing plot points no matter the era, but the gender dynamics are what makes Carousel particularly disconcerting. These sorts of generational differences pop up whenever I watch old movies (if you like watching the classics, you have to get used to seeing men grabbing women and leading them around by their arms like it’s completely normal), but because Carousel is a story almost exclusively about sex and the interplay between genders, it’s a buzzer that goes off constantly. Much of the time it can be chalked up as quaint and funny; in the blazing central musical number “June is Bustin’ Out All Over”—a tribute to seasonal horniness—the line “girls ain’t even putting up a fight!” is particularly telling of the time it was written.

Other times it’s brutal, as in the script’s treatment of domestic abuse. What I found most surprising was the story’s absolution of an unrepentant wife beater (“It’s possible, dear, for someone to hit you, hit you hard—and it not hurt at all”). It’s a narrative choice that’s nearly impossible to imagine today—or even 30 years ago. There’s no redemption for Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. It’s a line that characters do not easily get to come back from once crossed.

This may not have been the case in 1945 for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. I wondered how much of my reaction arose from my exposure to modern attitudes about gender equity, feminism and patriarchy. Was it somewhat new to have this kind of reaction to the classic musical? Had things changed so much during my own lifetime?

“Oh, I couldn’t believe how dark it was,” my mother Cecilia Vogt recalled over the phone. “You go in thinking, ‘This is a great play to take our kids to,’ and you go out thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is dark!’” She was just as rattled by the play in 1985 as I was in 2005. I don’t remember her having this reaction, but perhaps this is not the sort of thing a mother usually wants to talk about with her preadolescent child. All I remember is for weeks afterwards, she’d run around the house singing “JUUNE IS A BUSTIN’ OUT ALL OOOOVEEER.” Especially when I had friends over.

One of the greatest things about watching a 70-year-old play live on stage is being confronted with the evolution of social attitudes, face to face with real people. It’s far less soothingly alien than watching, say, Gone With the Wind, and seeing dead people say horrible, antiquated things through the haze of time. It forces you to confront these troubling issues in a much more immediate way. The words aren’t preserved in amber—they’re coming from the mouths of real people, as they did in 1945. As my mom puts it, “Maybe that’s the benefit: it makes you think about these awful things in our culture that haven’t really gone away.”

I know a lot of people who refuse to watch Gone With the Wind because they see it as racist and hateful. It certainly is those things, but it’s also gorgeously shot, lightning-paced for a 26-hour long movie (give or take) and an absolutely essential part of our history, cinematic and otherwise. I think that, if anything, we should watch these kinds of things more often. It’s okay to be uncomfortable. That’s often how history feels when we don’t look at it through the lens of hindsight. Gone With the Wind was the biggest box office hit in the history of the United States. It’s where we came from. It’s beautiful and ugly. It’s who we are. Our past does not always have to be glorious to be acknowledged.

After the standing ovation and the curtain call, the audience at Carousel was clearly buzzed. I looked over at my friend Sarah, who had been kind enough to accompany me. She was applauding and shaking her head, dumbfounded. “The play was filled with unlovable characters, but they were played so well by such talented people that I was filled with confusion and frustration and yet admiration for the actors,” she told me later. “I didn’t know how to hold these things inside at the same time.”

It was a peculiar kind of excitement. The feeling you get from being provoked and entertained in equal measure.

I’m grateful that the 5th^h Avenue Theater has decided to give us a faithful adaptation of Carousel,without watering down or clipping the queasier parts. It made for one of the most memorable nights of theater I’ll ever experience. As Sarah and I walked out of the theater, we had so much to say. We could’ve talked for hours. As evidenced by the din of exited conversation among the crowd pressing around us as we all streamed out onto the street, we weren’t the only ones. I still can’t stop thinking about it. And I can’t stop singing “June Is A-Bustin’ Out All Over” around the house.

English colonial explorers of the Rudyard Kipling mold were once seen as towering figures of bravery and myth. They discovered lost lands, conquered the natives and brought great animal trophies home for the pleasure of the crown. We can’t take them too seriously these days, however, because we’re more prone to believing things like:

• You can’t “discover” a place in which people have lived for centuries.
• You shouldn’t call people “savages”, especially when you’re the one who just killed a bunch of them for pleasure—er, I mean “glory.”
• Lions and elephants getting shot in the face by drunken aristocrats might not be the greatest thing ever. (Well, some people might disagree.)

Then again, these guys lived over a hundred years ago during a much different time, so it’s kind of hard to hate them too much. Also, they were British and those accents are just too delightful. I can’t think of a single British person I truly hate (other than that monstrous Thomas Cromwell! Oh, and maybe Hugh Grant).

Taproot Theater’s season-opening play The Explorers Club understands the hilarious, misguided allure of Victorian men of science. It’s a gentle satire that offers five different “Gentlemen Explorers,” each an avatar for a specific brand of stereotypical English absurdity. There’s the stodgy puritan, the prim and polite egghead, the entitled alpha-male and the oblivious ponce (two of them, actually).   

Meek but well-meaning Professor Cope (Solomon Davis) attempts to bring progress to his beloved Explorers Club by proposing the induction of it’s first female member, Phyllida Spotte-Hume (Hana Lass), who “discovered” a lost city and has brought home one of its tribal residents (Bill Johns), nicknamed “Luigi” for the sake of brevity. Needless to say, this potential upending of the orthodoxy doesn’t sit well with some of the members, particularly the pious Professor Sloane (Robert Gallaher), who believes that “God created science and God wrote the Bible and the bible tells us to beware the evil woman!”

What happens next goes far beyond the expected battle of the sexes. The play wisely realizes that most of the gender issues involved in this conflict have been well enough litigated by this point. Instead, the familiar conflict and character archetypes provide a necessary foundation for fast-paced, freewheeling absurdity. Make no mistake; The Explorers Club is not about tackling serious issues. The true pleasure of this play is watching a bunch of cartoonish Englishmen played by hilarious American actors bounce off one another with an anarchic energy that at times seems like it might fly right off the rails. Heads are kicked off. Guinea pigs are eaten. Queens are punched.

The Taproot’s uniquely intimate and informal setting only adds to the chaos. The stage juts out into the crowd, giving each seat a unique perspective on the constantly shifting action. The actors lean out into the audience at times, inches away from the people in the front row. When drinks are being literally thrown around (“Brandy and cigars is what separates us from the animals!”) it seems like any of them could easily fly into the third row. No one is truly safe, though fortunately no real poisonous snakes are used in the production, as far as I could tell.

Playwright Nell Benjamin packed the script with great one-liners and exchanges that emphasize the oblivious pomposity of the Professors:

“I once named a mountain after an attractive Sherpa girl. Got nowhere. She said it already had a name.”

“The Irish don’t like being told where they can live.”
“But everybody does it!”

“What we know is what we can touch and feel and kill and stuff!”

“Nuts to you, Pope!”

Much like those British explorers from Kipling, however, it’s hard to hate these gents. The actors are too well suited to their roles, and they’re clearly having too much fun. Particular standouts are Ryan Childers as the self-aggrandizing idiot Harry Percy, who has a history of ill-fated expeditions (“Its seems as if you walk out of the corner grocery and twenty men die!”) and Hana Lass, who plays more than one character, but I’ve already said too much. You should go see it for yourself. Get close to the action. TO SCIENCE!