Choreographer Eva Stone's new work, "F O I L," is a love letter to women in the arts. One of three new works by local artists commissioned by Pacific Northwest Ballet for its "Locally Sourced" program, Stone's new contemporary ballet features eleven company members, mostly women, in a series of five dances with intensely disparate moods and energies.

The intensity is pleasant, a journey in feelings and sparkles and pastel colors. "F O I L" is all pretty. The music, mostly piano and airy strings, is a collection of pieces by important but lesser-known female classical composers. Lit by local lighting designer Amiya Brown, the immediate mood of "F O I L" is set by an array of sparkly ballroom chandeliers that lower and rise with each section of the ballet. A dancer announces the title of each section to the audience: "Now," "Be Still," "Hold," "Wait," and "Exhale."  The titles are more than mere suggestions, and along with these prompts "F O I L" uses movement, music, light, and the power of the female body to create very specific moods. 

The second--and best--section of the ballet, "Be Still," features Cecilia Iliesiu, Margaret Mullin, and Emma Love Suddarth in slow, darkly-lit movements performed entirely with their back to the audience. Costumed in wide hoop skirted tutus the dancers look topless from the audience. The section is sensual but not sexual, commanding but gentle. The dancers' rippling back muscles cast tiny shadows as they move their arms up and down conjuring a spell that leaves the whole of  McCaw Hall in complete silence. 

The second piece in the program, "Love and Loss," from local (but nationally renowned) choreographer Donald Byrd is a fun twist to Byrd's recent style. Local audiences are used to Byrd's creations for Seattle's Spectrum Dance Theater, where he bases full-length contemporary ballets on themes of social justice. The complexity of Byrd's subject matter sometimes requires so much attention that the dancing is hard to focus on. In "Love and Loss," Byrd retains his signature communication of the complexities of the human condition but weaves it together with classical ballet steps and the individual artistries of PNB dancers. Byrd may be giving the audience another social commentary but this time he makes us figure it out on our own.

Composer Emmanuel Witzthm's music for "Love and Loss" is a long, dramatic, classical score punctuated by subtle, sometimes creepy, electronic pulses and beats. The large cast of "Love and Loss" feels heavy on the men, but this could be due to the distinct emotional energy devoted to the men's choreography. Each pas de deux involves a painful separation of the man from the woman, the most dramatic and beautiful in dancer Amanda Morgan's backwards bourrees as she tears herself away from partner Ryan Cardea. Costumed in close fitting pants and partially buttoned dress shirts, the male dancers are the epitome of strength and capability but exude such isolation and melancholy that I wonder if Byrd is alluding to that male vulnerability so rarely discussed in the arts. In classical ballet, men are the stalwart supporters of their female partners, performing impressive leaps and turns when alone onstage. Whatever his thesis in "Love and Loss"--if there is one--Byrd commands the emotions of his audience by bringing out the very best artistic and physical qualities in PNB dancers. The growing strength and artistry of corps de ballet dancer Cecelia Iliesiu and Madison Rayn Abeo are particularly special in this piece. 

And then there's "Wash of Gray," the new work from company dancer Miles Pertl. Another love letter, "Wash of Gray" pays tribute to Seattleites and the stuff we love the most. It's sweet and lovely to watch but the narrative to "Wash of Gray" is so literal it frequently washes out the dancing. Each piece of "Wash of Gray" is its own entity: the constantly-changing backdrop art, the costumes made to reflect Seattle weather and landscape--it's all important but gets lost in the jumble. 

The choreography has its bright moments. Principal dancer Liz Murphy's physical abilities and artistic grasp on ballet technique is more badass with each season. Her lines and arching back are tiny works of art in themselves. Her partner, new corps member Luther DeMeyer, dances with a lyricism and grace not usually seen in younger dancers. And the crowning moment in "Wash of Gray," dancer Sarah Pasch's short but gorgeous solo in her 28th week of pregnancy, narrated perhaps the most memorable theme in "Locally Sourced." Everything that is here, here now, has its own unique beauty that makes this place what it is: strong, wise, and moving forward with the times. 

Autumn Knight just drama therapied the shit out us. Her one-woman show, "M___ER," is less of a theatrical production and more a deliciously intimate investigation into two things that terrify people the very most: audience participation, and forgetting our mothers' birthdays. And perhaps beyond that, Knight's show (at least tonight) was an fearless incursion into what happens to a group of mostly white theater-goers when a powerful black woman breaks the fourth wall and inhibits the passive consuming of art. 

Knight opens her show by wandering through through a pitch-black theater while making a series of common human sounds: breathing, crying, sniffing, bellowing, yelling in ecstasy, whispering. Knight's sound collaborator Rena Anakwe weaves the sounds through a pattern of soft clicks, raising and lowering the volume so that it feels as though Knight is moving through the crowds like a ghost, unidentifiable until the lights slowing raise to reveal her sitting on a weird wooden throne, moving around objects that were unidentifiable to me by sight or sound. 

At the beginning I couldn't see shit, as I was seated at the back of one of six clumps of chairs thrown so weirdly together that people had to climb into some of them. Between the groups of spectators were piles of brown butcher paper up to five feet high and hanging from heavy rolls suspended from the ceiling.  Backlit by soft pastel colored lights, the paper piles resembled rough mounds of toys and random stuff that might be laying around a house, heavily present but unidentifiable and unimportant. Knight spoke to the audience as if she were our collective mother, sometimes speaking to us a group and sometime individually, so easily making up names as she addressed her "children" that it felt as if she had studied our faces for longer than a few seconds. Some people responded to Knight's questions--"Why did you forget my birthday?" "What did it feel like when I died?" with no effort, some offered way more material than seemed necessary, and some didn't answer at all. In this role as mother, Knight dug into the audience's psyche with every question and as people's individual body language reflected their discomfort, Knight would address them: "Perk up!" "Perk down!" and look them square in the eye. I have a cold, and she turned to me directly to ask if I needed a tissue and told me that I looked cute even when I was sneezing. People looked at me when she said this. I was uncomfortable. I don't know why. 

Knight's background in psychology and multi-disciplinary performance gives her the tools to take her highly gifted intuition and insight into humans to levels that might scare the shit out of some people. Continuing with the birthday theme of the rough storyline, Knight walked through the crowd of audience/children offering spoonfuls of dairy and nut free artisanal ice cream from clean, individual utensils. And some people refused, even looked repelled at the suggestion of being fed a bite of ice cream. Volumes could be written about the reasons for these refusals but the one visible emotion I could see was fear. What the shit? Knight's presence is gentle, feminine, nurturing, loving, and true, but that makes her art impossible to hide from (as do the bright lights shining down on the faces refuses spoonfuls of ice cream). We are used to watching art, loving or judging it from the dark anonymity of our theater seats and then going home. Knight does not let us do this--maybe because it was never really our right to view art this way in the first place. 

"M___ER" closes after tomorrow's 5pm performance. That one might be vastly different than the one I saw tonight, but the gravity of Knight's message about art consumption and bodies and black bodies and the inescapable hold of motherhood over society will not change, nor will it ever not be relevant. Go see it. And eat the fucking ice cream. 

Tickets: https://www.ontheboards.org/performances/m-er

Alia Swersky holds my arms over my head by the wrists, whispers something softly into my ear and then lets go. It is the middle of Swersky’s new solo performance piece, "When your arms ached, I watched the Mountain hold its fragile form," and I, who usually balk at audience participation, am in the middle of the stage.
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When Alia approached me during a rehearsal viewing and whispered, “I’d like you to join me in the space, you can say no, it’s ok,” I followed her without a second thought. Alia led me around the performance space and prompted my body’s movements, holding my arms up and letting them fall, gently guiding my steps while I kept my eyes closed and walked by her side. When she picked up my arms I kept my muscles mostly limp, trusting her to let them fall only when they were safe from hitting anything that might hurt me. I felt completely comfortable, more powerful and at home in my own body than I remember since giving birth to my son.

Alia Swersky’s artistic and physical power is contagious. The culmination of two years of creative and physical preparation,  "When your arms ached, I watched the Mountain hold its fragile form"is a combination of durational performance, dance, art installation and dance improvisation that communicates the parallel traumas experienced by female-identifying bodies and mountains. The show requires an incredible amount of energy to perform. In the first two hours Alia rolls around on the floor of the performance space at Base Experimental Arts in Georgetown in a “silent durational ritual,” designed to demonstrate the passage of time and to engage the audience in silent reflection.

“For me,” says Swersky in a phone conversation, “the passages of tribes and women and migration through the mountains is right there with the image of the female body rolling around.” Alia incorporates a huge swath of pink fabric into her movements, her hair and the fabric blowing slightly around from wind produced by small fans on the corners of the room. “It’s sensual and sexy with the pink fabric, a soundscape, an environment that I hope people will come into to feel as opposed to being expecting to be entertained. My hope is that people will feel comfortable coming in and laying down, writing, thinking--the ritual deepens the experience of the performance because it contextualizes it.”

Accompanied by music and soundscape by Monika Khot, an enormous mural of a mountain by artist Mya Kerner, and lighting by Amiya Brown, Alia Swersky’s performance is an experience, something to think about rather than to just observe and go home--but there’s also a lot of room to enjoy art and the presence of other people.

The performance section of “When your arms ached” is packed with symbolism, intense emotion, and beautiful dancing. Swersky’s background in classical dance, improvisation, yoga, meditation, motherhood, and life come together with choreography that is packed with technically brilliant and unique movements. At one point, Swersky faces the audience and points one long, perfectly arched foot at the ground while vibrating her upper body almost violently. The juxtaposition of visually stunning physicality combined with disturbing violent messages are synonymous with “the onslaught of violence of our culture and our environment and on woman and woman’s body,” says Swersky. “I’m not trying to be an environmental activist in this piece, but the metaphor of the fracking of mountains and rape are there.”

Despite these heavy themes, "When your arms ached, I watched the Mountain hold its fragile form" isn’t a piece about sadness or panic in the face of cultural and environmental degradation. “While there were some things going on in my life while I made this piece, some of the actual physical movements like the shaking and holding my arms up demonstrate a rite of passage back into my purpose after abandoning my art in some ways.”

Swersky wants her audience to experience this rite of passage as a way to connect to the idea that “we aren’t alone, that connections to one another are essential,” she says. This is why the section where she holds an audience member’s arms for them is so important.

“I’m from Colorado and I’ve always had this sense that I had to be as strong as the mountain,” says Swersky. “We think that it’s strong and stable but the mountains are always changing and eroding, just like us. None of us can get through this alone. You can be belittled by it or you can take charge of it. Be as big as the mountain and look into the male gaze and be in charge.”


"When your arms ached, I watched the Mountain hold its fragile form" runs May 17-19 at varied times. Schedule and tickets here, more about Alia here 

A beautiful fairy princess falls in love with a donkey who prefers to chew on grass instead of returning her affection. We've all been there. It can be a bit depressing to watch stories of unrequited love unfold onstage, but Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" includes brilliant comedic twists and heavy social commentary that aren't lost when the story is presented through dance rather than script. Pacific Northwest Ballet's current production of "Midsummer," in the company's repertoire since 1997, delivers a solid storytelling experience with fast paced choreography.

The beautifully detailed sets from the legendary Martin Pakledinaz are intentionally reminiscent of a Pacific Northwest Forest scene--giant pinecones hover over the stage while evergreens hang in the background and a giant toadstool and buggy-eyed frog bookend the dancers in selected scenes. On opening night, the always lovely and technically perfect Laura Tisserand danced a charming Titania and a stern-faced Kyle Davis performed a strong and convincing Oberon. But Jonathan Porretta's Puck was the highlight of the evening, nailing that fine art of comedic timing and jumping many more feet into the air than one would expect of someone who recently sustained a torn achilles tendon. Porretta will retire from PNB at the end of this season and although dancer retirements are inevitable and always a bit sad, this one's really gonna sting. Porretta is that rare ballet dancer whose artistic mastery and technical proficiency seem to be matched by a deep spiritual maturity that makes his performances particularly memorable. 

​Other notable performances* this evening include soloist Ezra Thomson's Bottom: the donkey-headed tailor doomed to fall under Titania's lustful gaze. Thomson has an almost eerie ability to communicate story and emotion with his body, he can write an entire character with the sweep of an arm and performs a solid duet with Tisserand even though it looks like he can barely see out of the donkey mask. Angelica Generosa molds gracefully into almost any role she's given, but fairy flitting and quick, pristine footwork are among her most noticeable masteries. Additionally, soloist Elle Macy just keeps getting stronger and more expressive and shone in her solo as Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, although her pas de deux with Dylan Wald's Theseus lacked the same energy and flow as her mile-high leaps and killer fouettés. And the bugs! 25 Pacific Northwest Ballet students in charming little antennae danced in a variety of formations throughout the whole ballet with perfect timing and coordination that rivaled a professional corps de ballet. Go Bugs! 
 
I'm not usually a big fan of the pomp of classical story ballets, but according to the program notes Balanchine wasn't super keen on it, either. Jeanie Thomas' reprinted 1997 program notes talks about how Balanchine eschewed "the excesses" of traditional story ballets and opted to choreograph "Midsummer" with fast-paced mime and exacting choreography rather the hallmark slow, sometimes painfully boring plot-setting scenes common to ballets like "Swan Lake" and "The Nutcracker." Instead, the flow of PNB's "Midsummer" has the same feel as the flitting fairies that decorate both acts, as jovial as you'd expect your Shakespeare to be and as filled with steamy, unpredictable encounters as Burning Man at sunrise. 

Pacific Northwest Ballet's Midsummer Night's Dream runs through April 19-21, info here ​https://www.pnb.org/season/midsummer/#casting

*I didn't talk about Lesley Rausch's Divertissement pas with Jerome Tisserand because I ran out of time--there are two children climbing up my back as I type this--but Rausch's performance Friday night was breathtaking. See the brilliant Marcie Sillman's fine review of Rausch's performance here.
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I took my three year old son to see performance artist Cherdonna Shinatra's current show, "DITCH" at the Frye Art Museum last week. Perched on my lap on a bench in a windowless gallery covered with carnival colored fabric and tiles, my child sat rapt through the entire hour. His first dance performance outside of a studio. His first feminist performance art. His first Cherdonna--an artist whose ethics and artistry I've deeply admired for years--and it appears my tiny offspring is also quite the fan. Proud mama, right here.

Cherdonna Shinatra--the performance persona of Seattle artist Jody Keuhner--is a contemporary dance performer and choreographer who also describes her work as as "part bio drag queen." For the uninitiated, this means that Kuehner's Cherdonna is female, like Kuehner. She looks like a drag queen with large, expertly painted and caricatured feminine makeup and sometimes a huge blond wig perched atop her glittery head. "DITCH," an hour long performance shown six days a week for three months at the Frye (the free art museum!) is easy for a three year old to watch, and a little like church for his mother*.

"DITCH" is performed by Cherdonna and her dance company of six, DONNA. The choreography starts out light and airy with a 1980s Jazzercise feel, but gets dark and heavy as the piece progresses. For a kid, "DITCH" looks like a bunch of women in bright shorts playing around with a clown, all of them making exaggerated facial expressions and skipping and playing with hula hoops. For me, "DITCH" is a look inside the mind of every female-identifying person who stresses about being judged. Because she is. We all are.

The dancers move around the small-ish gallery, surrounded by audience members seated on a few low benches or on the floor. The walls are covered with giant swaths of brightly colored cushioned cloth, the corner of the gallery made up to look like a headless torso. Dancers emerge out of a vibrantly patterned vagina and skip around the floor, eyes wide with the faux innocence and delight of little girls at a country fair. As the piece progresses, the music changes from carnival-themed to something dark and foreboding and Cherdonna's movements become slow and pained. All the while, she smiles and makes occasional happy squeaks. Cherdonna, ever the perfect woman, never sacrifices her joyous facial expression even as her costume falls partway off or she loses a shoe in an effort to execute a warped version of a relevé. The other dancers begin to frown and shake their heads at Cherdonna, meanwhile still smiling and flirting with the audience. No one stops moving, and eventually they all disappear back into the pretty giant vagina. The colors on the walls are still loudly pink and blue and yellow and polka dotted, the lights still bright--everything is still pretty. That's the way we're supposed to be, right? Pretty and vivacious in the face of, well, anything?

This show is stunning. It is weird and loud and made me *feel* a little more than I'd planned on, but it's been stuck in my head for a week. Cherdonna's movements--breathy, slow, hunched over at times, startling and rambunctious at others--call out the shitty parts of living in a female/femme body while also making fun of societal norms that force these expectations. We're all done with it. I'm done with it. I want my son to see these expectations as weird relics instead of something he has to fight, but I'm still a bit lost on exactly how to teach him to think differently. Thank god we have Cherdonna to help us out.

DITCH runs at the Frye through April 28th. Tickets are free! Take your kids.
https://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/7043

*This is a compliment, I like church.

I spent about 14 million hours researching preschools in the North Seattle area. Now that I'm on a first first name basis with my beloved spreadsheet I cannot bear to throw her in the trash bin, so instead I'll share it with you and hopefully save you a few brain cells.

Click here to access my preschool info sheet.

There are also a few Queen Anne and downtown schools sprinkled in there.

Please note! All data were entered by me, a fallible human who sometimes spells her own name wrong. If you see something glaring that needs to be changed, feel free to comment and I'll right it as best I can. Happy school hunting, see you out there! 
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I took my dad to opening night of Pacific Northwest Ballet's Sleeping Beauty. It was our first dad/daughter hangout in years and my dad's first glimpse of a professional ballet company in action. It was also the first time I was enthralled by a performance of Sleeping Beauty, but it wasn't that the production had changed or the dancers any more talented or engaged. I'm seeing things differently these days.
I was lucky to live the dream of the 90s through my early twenties and thirties. My social life revolved around a neighborhood coffee shop, I lived alone in an small basement studio on Capitol Hill, and I payed my way through college with a collection of weird jobs. I had a good time but existed under a cloud of jaded antipathy for anything that smelled remotely of The Establishment, and this included princess-driven classical ballets, stay-at-home parents, and Subarus.

Oops. Look at me now. 
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Twenty years later I make part of my living writing about classical ballet, I stay home with my three year old son and low and behold I drive a flippin' Subaru. The highlight of my February was a classical ballet fairly dripping with princesses, sparkles, and the most incredible technique and artistry I've seen in my decades of watching world-class dance.

Pacific Northwest Ballet is known for tall, leggy ballet dancers but is increasingly embracing a diversity of physique in their company. Some dancers, like opening night's Princess Aurora Lesley Rausch, are tall and long-armed, with gravity-defying grace and arabesques that seem to stretch for days. During her pas de deux with Jerome Tisserand's Prince Florimund, Rausch's strength was at its finest and the flicks of her head at the end of turns, her leg extension and expressive hands gave the impression that it was her mastery of movement that guided the orchestra, rather than the conductor (no offense, Mr. de Cou--we know you're a master). 

There was an equal magic to the small-framed dancing from newly-promoted principal dancer Leta Biasucci's Bluebird, her strong legs and expressive face flitting appropriately through the variation while easily maintaining the same authority onstage as Rausch's Aurora and Lindsi Dec's Lilac Fairy. I don't point this out to criticize dancers' bodies but to point out how perfectly Pacific Northwest Ballet nurtures the individual physicality and artistry of its dancers. Artistic director Peter Boal doesn't aim for a company of identical automatons--he operates a company of artists who develop their own talents and style and very clearly enjoy their work. Everyone onstage in Sleeping Beauty--especially the outstanding Jonathan Poretta as the weirdly beguiling Carabosse--was having a super great time!

​It's painfully obvious when dancers aren't enjoying themselves onstage, it can ruin a show. But Rausch's face clearly exhibited a passion and joy for her work along with the intense concentration that guides her through her increasingly exceptional dancing. Wouldn't it be great if we could all enjoy our work like this? If our bosses encouraged us to be our best selves and to incorporate some amount of play into whatever we're producing? This hard-won mastery of skill and play, I realized while watching Sleeping Beauty, was the pinnacle of success. I never succeeded as a ballet dancer but this equation is exactly what I experience as a mother. 
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I like to think that I look as happy and passionate about my jobs as Rausch's Princess Aurora. Most of the time I probably do not, my eyes bagged from lack of sleep and my frizzy hair tucked under a hat as I chase my son through the Arboretum or drag him through Fred Meyer at rush hour. But I am, I promise. And I wonder if artists and parents are the only ones who can consciously do this at work without getting canned. 

I've never reviewed The Nutcracker. There was never much I wanted to say about it publicly, even when the Seattle ballet-loving public mourned the loss of the beautifully mysterious Maurice Sendak/Kent Stowell version after Pacific Northwest Ballet switched to George Balanchine's Nutcracker in 2015. For me, Nutcracker was always an easy Christmasy uplift, a way to get lost in the sparkle of traditional classical ballet, a bump in memory that made me feel twenty or thirty years younger for a few days afterward. But in all of that it was always just a comfort ballet with nothing mind-blowing or weird enough to pitch to an editor. 

Until this year. On opening night, newly promoted PNB principal dancer Leta Biasucci's Sugar Plum Fairy blew my mind. Biasucci is a favorite for many; her dancing is sharp and exacting, her smile authentic, her stage presence making every character she dances immediately believable and adored. But lately Biasucci's technique is more refined and mature, surpassing her previous tendencies to sometimes rush through steps and hide her deeper personality and artistry from the her audience. Now she adds just the right amount of time and physical presence to the end of her movements so that her extended fingertips, feet, or facial profile are as stunning as the difficult step she's just completed. At the risk of sounding cheesy, Biasucci paints a picture with the emotion and energy of each movement and with her increasing technical skills she has the promise of becoming one of the greats. And I'm not the only one who thinks so--even the tiny chatty balletomane behind me only spoke once during Biasucci's and principal dance Lucien Postlewaite's pas de deux, "MOM, she's soooo beautiful!" Check out the end of Leta and Lucien's standing ovation-worthy grand pas here on PNB's Instagram.

Another memorable performance on opening night was young dancer Jack Kaspar's Nathaniel, Drosselmeier's nephew turned Little Prince. Dancing these important roles is understandably overwhelming for many young Nutcracker dancers and sometime that stress shows up in a lack of energy and enthusiasm in the characters that need to communicate a big part of the ballet's storyline. This year Jack Kaspar's classy, smiley stage presence and impressive miming skills brought a lot of fun to the potentially boring-as-heck beginning of Act II, and his battle and party scene performances were pretty darn good too. Keep rocking, Jack Kaspar. 

Also noteworthy were exceptional performances by Joshua Grant as Dr. Stahlbaum, Seth Orza as Drosselmeier, Angelica Generosa as the Marzipan Shepherdess, and Toy Soldier Kyle Davis. So what's different? What's going on in the company this season to make everyone shine like this? What's going on in the dancers' lives? What do they think about while they're dancing? When I write criticism for publication, I often ask the art creators about this stuff but I've never asked it of a dancer performing the work of other choreographers. Maybe I should. Balanchine's Nutcracker choreography has been performed god knows how many times since its 1954 New York City Ballet premiere but each dancer must put their own mysterious, indelible artistic mark on it to become as good as Biasucci's performance on Friday night.

I started reading Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere yesterday. I read in two ways now, in this new different life where mothering and cooking and growing things has taken precedence over books and work: I read parenting and self-help books at night, and I "read" audio books for an hour or two in the afternoon while West naps. I used to poop on the idea of audible books as a bonafide literary experience. I don't now. I take books in whatever way I can get them, and I feel shitty for how I used to judge people who read this way.
I feel shitty for a lot of judgy things I did in the past. It was easy to categorize people, to label them as Soccer Mom or Suit or Ave Rat or Christian Goth (yes, you read that right, and they're really pretty cool). It's more simple to put people in a box than to reflect on the intricacies of the experiences that make up who they are. In the first chapters of Ng's book, her descriptions of a white suburban professional mother are cloaked in shades of disapproval and negativity, the woman's wealth and privilege are used to discredit any depth her character might actually have and we are made to hate her from the moment we meet her. Maybe there's a great reason for this--I'm barely into the book--but it rubs me the wrong way. We already do this to each other in real life, particularly in motherhood, and I'm sick of it. I catch myself doing it all the time. And it's dangerous. There's a fine line between recognizing personal failure and privilege and judging the shit out of other people for not living up to our own expectations. I'd like to teach my son to know this line and walk it. I'll let you know when I figure out how the hell to find it.