Pacific Northwest Ballet

Latest Articles

Review: Dancing Across Borders

Dancing beyond conventions, also
Anne Bass’s documentary about a 16-year-old Cambodian boy whom she brought to the US to study at the School of American Ballet looks at first to be limited by its feel-good story arc, but it dances beyond that.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | April 21, 2010

Here’s looking at you

Boston Ballet sees into the heart of Coppélia
Set in the usual small village — this one in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe — Coppélia might look like just another pleasant 19th-century ballet about a boy, a girl, and another girl. But appearances can be deceiving — and that’s theme of this work, whose title character is a life-size mechanical doll.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | April 30, 2010

New stuff

Pacific Northwest Ballet, Twyla Tharp, and much more in New York
One thing that impressed me was that dance invention seems to be making a comeback as a major challenge for young choreographers after years of being stirred into the multimedia stew.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | January 19, 2010

Not so great

San Francisco's Nutcracker on PBS
Way back in 1977, PBS gave us a Nutcracker with a difference: Mikhail Baryshnikov as an electrifying Nutcracker/Cavalier and willowy Gelsey Kirkland as an older-than-usual Clara, as the Sugar Plum Fairy.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | December 02, 2008

Moonbeams

Boston Ballet illumines George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a dizzy dance of a drama, meandering mystifyingly between May Eve and Midsummer Eve under a moon that goes from new to full swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | January 24, 2008

Dreaming and remembrance

Boston Ballet’s Midsummer, Boston Conservatory’s Dark Elegies
Two momentous revivals in town showed us how big the category of classical ballet really is.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | February 21, 2007

Lambarena redux

Pacific Northwest Ballet and Choreftes at JP, plus BB 2006 – 2007 and a DVD surprise
All summer long I’ve had the phrase “Do the Lambarena” running through my head, as if it were a dance craze, like the la-dee-dah or the lambada.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | August 23, 2006