Half of the four dances on Pacific Northwest Ballet’s New Works
program are easily forgotten. The first is A Garden, another
pretty, domestic pastoral by Mark Morris (set to Richard Strauss) that
slides right off your brain. The second is an exuberant,
youthful, and slightly callow pastiche by PNB dancer Kiyon Gaines that
folds ballet, modern, tango, jazz, and other dance samples onto a
percussive score by Cristina Spinei.
So far, so what?
The freshness in New Works doesn’t come until a world premiere by
the evocatively named Benjamin Millepied: the
(not-so-evocatively named) 3 Movements, which, at times, looks
like West Side Story on Wall Street. (Millepied danced for
West Side Story choreographer Jerome Robbins at the New York
City Ballet.) Like Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 3
Movements is rigorous, carefully composed, and geometrical, but has
soul.
Men in shirts and ties dance with women in simple secretarial
skirts—everyone in black, muted blue, and gray—to a
layered, minimalist score by Steve Reich. They march past each other as
if on a busy New York sidewalk, with brief bursts of partnering.
If duets are a metaphor for sex (and they usually are), these couplings
are straight from Craigslist: frequent, brief, and casual. The men and
women run into each other, shimmy for a bit, and fly apart to go about
their business. (The lighting design, by Brad Fields, is excellent:
Side lighting creates a weird chiaroscuro on the dancers, then shifts
to stark, almost blinding frontal lighting.) 3 Movements is the
sexiest and darkest piece in New Works, and by its end, the
gentlemen are sweating through their button-up shirts like hot
businessmen on a summer subway.
One Flat Thing, reproduced premiered at PNB in March, and
praise God (and artistic director Peter Boal) for bringing it back.
Performed by 14 dancers on and around 20 gray, evenly spaced aluminum
tables, Thing sounds like rumbling static and looks like a
fit. These couplings are mechanical and calisthenic, entirely
devoid of warmth. The dancers (dressed in bright American
Apparel–type outfits) slide along and under the tables, jump over
and onto them, briefly lock limbs, and disengage. Thing, by
William Forsythe, has angered some (and averages 12 walkouts per
performance): The dance is cold and glittering, with a medicinal taste.
It gives no point of entry and no quarter, and is as brilliant as it is
unrelenting. Forsythe says Thing began as an idea about arctic
expeditions and “baroque machinery.” But as the brightly clad bodies
streak through the gray aluminum grid, they look more like a riot of
metastasizing cancer or a pack of cocaine molecules skipping
through the brain. It is a marvel. 
New Works at Pacific Northwest Ballet, 321 Mercer St,
441-2424, $25–$155. Through Nov 16.
