Firebird is back after a 20-year hiatus! Ming Cho Lee’s breathtaking sets, the epic Stravinsky score, and choreography from PNB Founding Artistic Director Kent Stowell work in harmony in this theatrical one-act ballet. Balanced perfectly by Alejandro Cerrudo‘s most playful work, Little mortal jump, and the rock ‘n roll drama of Ulysses Dove‘s Red Angels, this fiery production will keep you on your toes from start to finish.
Little mortal jump
Little mortal jump, resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo‘s tenth piece for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, is a bubbling blend of different styles and genres that distills into a fluid, cohesive whole. As a dance, it fuses the technicality of movement, the theatricality of the stage, and the dark humor inherent in relationships. As an experience, Cerrudo aims to transport his audience—to “make them forget what they did today, and what they will do tomorrow,” he says. From cubes that serve as frames and obstructions to diversely characterized couples to vastly contrasting music, Little mortal jump is layered with unexpected twists and turns. This work is a step in the evolution of Cerrudo’s choreographic style, of which he says, “I challenge myself to create more complex works and to do things that I haven’t done before.”
Red Angels
Red Angels is a ballet of intense dramatic impact that is calculated to charge all the senses. Dressed in scarlet leotards and bathed in white and red hot light, four dancers perform with powerful athleticism to a riveting score for electric violin. Ulysses Dove commented on working with the dancers of New York City Ballet: “I wanted to deal with aspects of the Balanchine aesthetic I find appealing: the speed, legginess, the formality. As for the title, I think the dancers are angelic. And for me, the angels of the senses are red.” Composer Richard Einhorn has described Maxwell’s Demon as “a conscious attempt…to transmute American popular music into art…with a nod towards direct expression and to an audience steeped in American rock ‘n roll.”
Firebird
Ever since 1910, when the impresario Serge Diaghilev masterminded the original Firebird for the second Paris season of his Ballets Russes, the story of the legendary creature who helps two noble lovers overcome an evil wizard has captivated audiences and artists alike. With an iridescent score by Igor Stravinsky (his first for ballet), opulent sets and costumes by Alexander Golovin and Léon Bakst, and startlingly innovative choreography by Michel Fokine, that first Firebird was a multi-media extravaganza which, like other Ballets Russes productions to follow, helped to shape ballet’s modern identity and to establish it unequivocally as a serious art form.
Pacific Northwest Ballet‘s production, which Kent Stowell conceived in 1989 in collaboration with designers Ming Cho Lee and Theoni Aldredge, both honors and revitalizes that tradition. Lee’s sets, Aldredge’s costumes, and Stowell’s choreography combine with Stravinsky’s matchless score to create a spectacle that, while entirely new, is faithful to the aesthetic spirit of the original. But the scenario has been modified somewhat so as to eliminate a weakness that, for all its popularity, has always beset the ballet, whether in Fokine’s original version or in numerous later revivals, including several by Balanchine. In all of these, Tsarevich Ivan’s relationship with the Firebird is what engages us most, and the human drama of his love for the Princess is of lesser emotional and theatrical interest. As a result, according to Stowell, when the grand wedding/coronation finale occurs, it is unsatisfying because we have no sense of what the lovers have risked to achieve this victory.
In PNB’s production, the balance has been righted. The love between Ivan and the Princess is more poignant and tender from its inception, and it now clearly motivates the couple during the skirmish with the monsters and Kastchei. During the scenes when the Firebird is absent, there is no falling off of power, as there was in earlier versions, because we are engrossed in the dynamics and consequences of the love relationship. When the Firebird does return to help the lovers, she seems less a supernatural agent acting independently of human effort than a source of inspiration deep within Ivan himself that he draws on to complete the battle. As a result, the grand finale, which in all versions is so impressive musically and visually, is now also psychologically powerful for modern audiences, because it is the earned reward for love’s ordeal.
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