Anyone ever heard of Lincoln Kirstein? It’s okay if you haven’t; even George Balanchine didn’t know who he was when Kirstein walked up to him in Paris in 1933. In the post-Diaghilev era in Europe, Balanchine was trying to find footing as a choreographer. He had just presented his new venture, titled Les […]
Dear Friends,
Don Quixote is honestly one of the greatest productions PNB presents. It’s funny, heartwarming, visually stunning and full of the extraordinary dancing our audiences relish. We’ve been having a blast in the studio over the past several weeks and now we’re ready to bring you the fruits […]
Though it’s now been three years since the premiere of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Giselle, the idea for staging our own production was presented to me almost five ago. I had been unsuccessfully shopping for the right Giselle when Doug Fullington came to me with the suggestion that I look closer to home. […]
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 2011 production of Giselle has been staged by PNB artistic director Peter Boal, based in part on primary sources from Paris and St. Petersburg, with the assistance of dance historians Marian Smith and Doug Fullington. In 2014, new scenery and costumes designed by Jérôme Kaplan will be added to the production.
Last Friday, PNB raised the curtain on Ronald Hynd’s enchanting production of The Sleeping Beauty. This will be the 5th time PNB has presented the ballet since we acquired it from the English National Ballet in 2001. Here are a few interesting facts about this production that you may not know:
You might be surprised to learn about all that goes into presenting a performance of The Sleeping Beauty. For the performers, step one is the casting, which I do in September and again in November. After my first two passes, the ballet masters and the head of the Costume […]
I expect there will be a great deal of discussion about Crystal Pite’s Emergence this week, and I thought I might kick it off by offering my perspective on the work. Not since programming William Forsythe’s One Flat Thing, reproduced, have I seen such a polarizing and thought-provoking […]
In April of 2011, I had the pleasure of traveling to Den Hague in the Netherlands to meet with one of the greatest choreographers of our time, Jiri Kylian. Jiri doesn’t travel far from home, so I went to him. I was there to […]
Twyla Tharp is no ordinary person. One look at her bio and you get that. It’s not just the mountains of awards, medals, prizes, fellowships, and honorary degrees, or the three books, six films, twelve television specials, four Broadway shows, two figure skating routines, […]
“In Westphalia, the former Saxony, all is not dead which lies buried. When we wander there through the old oak groves we can hear the voices of the olden time, and the re-echoes of those deeply mysterious magic spells in which there gushes a [great] fullness of life …A mysterious awe thrilled […]