What Comes Next? A note from Price Suddarth about his family’s next big adventure
After 16 seasons with PNB and 30 years of performing on stage, I’m stepping away from the curtain call.
Retiring from the life I’ve known for nearly three decades isn’t easy — but it feels right. The stage has given me so much more than I could have ever dreamed: a career, a voice, and, most importantly (and possibly most surprisingly), a family. As I take my final bows at Pacific Northwest Ballet, I’m not saying goodbye to the artform—I’m stepping into a new role, a new chapter, and a new kind of creative life. Together, Emma and I are launching Jumpkut, a multimedia contemporary ballet company that blends movement, cinema, and storytelling. It’s the next evolution of everything we’ve built—onstage and off. Before we talk about the next chapter we should probably take you back to the first.
Price Suddarth bows at the premiere at Signature, photo © Angela Sterling.
This all started, as many good stories do, with a complete disaster.
Sixteen years ago, we met under the bright lights of Romeo et Juliette. I (Price) was a nervous new Professional Division student at PNB, thrown into a production before the school year had even begun. Emma, a new company dancer, was my partner in a ballroom lift that… ended in glorious chaos. Her hand slipped, smacked me across the face, and spun my mask halfway around, leaving me to finish the scene mostly blind.
It wasn’t graceful — but it was unforgettable. And in many ways, it set the tone for a story that’s been unfolding ever since: one built on partnership, persistence, trust, and the willingness to see what’s possible even when the vision is (literally) obscured.
That September sparked a friendship that grew over time, nurtured through countless hours spent in the wings during a 50-show run of Nutcracker (Act II, every night), and years of creative collaboration onstage and off. What began at PNB as an accidental partnership became a shared life — and now, it’s fueling our next adventure.
Emma Love Suddarth and Price Suddarth backstage, photo © Angela Sterling.
Jumpkut has been simmering quietly on the back burner for years—a dream we kept feeding, slowly, patiently, in between rehearsals, shows, and life (now with two crazy boys). It wasn’t until deciding to step away from the stage that we realized we were finally ready to turn up the heat and build something full-time. Not just a company. A home.
Jumpkut is our creative laboratory, our choreographic house, and our call to action. It’s the place where the past decade of work—staging, writing, directing, dancing, choreographing, failing, and growing—comes together. After years of creating pieces for companies around the country, it’s time to bring that experience under one roof.
We’re not a traditional ballet company, and we’re not a film studio either. We exist somewhere in between—by design.
Emma Love Suddarth and Price Suddarth in a video still of The Intermission Project.
Jumpkut lives in the space between the stage and the screen, between classical structure and contemporary storytelling. We’re disrupting both the nonprofit dance world and commercial media landscape to carve out a new kind of creative space — one where the integrity of our artform can be preserved and shared more broadly.
We believe that great art shouldn’t be limited to one format or one audience. By combining the rigor and beauty of concert dance with the reach and accessibility of film and digital media, we’re building something flexible, future-facing, and deeply rooted in craft.
We blend contemporary ballet with cinematic and theatrical storytelling, creating original works for both stage and screen. Some of our first projects include:
- A full-length evening of work, debuting in Seattle spring/summer 2026
- Lovesick, a short-animated film about a jellyfish who mistakenly falls in love with a plastic bag, in collaboration with Double Plus Productions in Los Angeles
- Chasing Windmills, a live-action reimagining of Don Quixote for film, in collaboration with Couldstar Pictures.
- The Afterwords, a hybrid stage/animated feature exploring grief, trauma, and hope, also with Double Plus
Each project carries the heart of what we’ve always loved about dance—its immediacy, its emotion, its ability to say what words can’t. But they also reflect what we believe dance can become when given room to grow beyond traditional formats.
Right now, we’re focused on building community. We hope you’ll follow along and join us as we shape this new adventure. If you’ve ever wondered what dance can be—what stories it might still tell—we’d love to show you.
