Debuts - Olympic Ballet Theatre

Edmonds Center for the Arts is a long way, literally, from ballet’s origins in the courts and then the grand opera houses of Europe. But, from the performance I watched, the work that Olympic Ballet Theatre are doing there and across the region is not dissimilar to the audience-building tours undertaken by companies like Les Ballets Russes travelling around the US in 1916/17, the Sadler’s Well Ballet (later to become Britain’s Royal Ballet) performing in village halls and provincial theaters during WWII, and Ballet Theater (later to become American Ballet Theater) criss-crossing the country in the 1940s and 50s.  In each case, the gesture was both pragmatic and quietly radical: to bring rigorously trained dancers, newly minted choreography, and carefully wrought production values into communities for whom the metropolitan center was geographically distant, financially prohibitive, or culturally opaque.  More than that, since Olympic Ballet Theatre is based in Edmonds, it signals that professional ballet is a thing that happens here, rather than always a thing that happens over there. 

What’s happening here is a double bill of new works by artists with national reputations and strong local connections. 

 

Birds chirrup softly at the beginning of Our Tender Distance and a pack of dancers, stationery in the downstage corner, gesture minimally, ripple their torsos, shift their weight. Uniformly blank expressions match uniform costuming—knee-length pewter board shorts and pale form-fitting tank tops that hew closely to dancers’ skin-tones. The dancers rock and twitch like an organism with a single consciousness but many independent parts. The musical score by Gasper Claus (I wish there’d been more information about the music) eases in under the birdsong and soon propels the dance out from its quiet corner and across the stage in a series of duets, solos and small group studies. My mind drifts here, surfing the familiar crests and barrels, troughs and pockets of contemporary ballet vocabulary. Portentous, ponderous cello gives the impression that something important is happening but I fail to fathom it. 

 

The strongest, most satisfying sections for me were the passages of unison and I yearned to see these developed into extended explorations of group forms. The economics of contemporary dance frequently limit the choreographer to a scant handful of dancers. When ten or more people are on stage together I desire a kind of kaleidoscopic revelation. More so when it’s apparent that Twigs can deftly compose counterpoint, variation, spatial canon and so forth. No matter. The choreographer creates the dance they want to make and are not bidden to make the dance I want to see.  

 

The dance ends, at first, with a woman center stage facing the audience, her peers lying on their left sides, facing upstage. The cellos give way to bird calls. A ‘moment’ registers. I feel myself sigh. Then, deliberately but without apparent motivation, a dancer stands, approaches another who is still lying, takes a knee behind them and proffers a caring hand upon a shoulder. This happens four or five more times and then it’s all over. 

 

I scribbled a note to myself in the dark. “It looks like everything. It feels like everything.”  These are heavy times. This dance, like so many others, feels weighted, unfairly freighted with the impossible burden of relevance and meaning at a time when many of us—certainly I speak here for myself—feel utterly hopeless in the face of oligarchies, tech bros, AI job destruction, the callousness of capitalism, the horrifying carnal churn of war.

 

In Letters for a Restless World, Price shares with Twigs a certain debt to Crystal Pite. It’s understandable. Pite’s work has created a benchmark for contemporary ballet in the 21st century and ingenious artists absorb influences and reshape them to meet their own ends. When a column of dancers canons out of and back into formation, it’s not that no-one did that before Pite but she’s used the technique to such striking effect, most particularly in The Season’s Canon, that she inevitably springs to mind. Price’s dancers bristle like a blossoming cactus and I am wholly delighted to add a new sparkling moment to the little catalog of momentary dance vignettes I carry in my mind.

 

It’s not the only passage from this work that moves me. Five women and two men execute a shifting sequence of solos, duets, small group studies. Elegant partnering, a loftily floating grand jeté de côté, a trio of tightly percussive bourrées in counterpoint to a silky duet.  Gorgeous and memorable. But the quiet heart of the piece, for me, was Taylor Lim’s very slow, quite pedestrian walk downstage. There’s action all around her, but she’s grounded, assured, present in a way that holds my gaze and fixes my interest. Price seems to suggest that with all the clatter and clamor of the here and now, respite can come. Calm can find you.