Imperfect Beauty

Jessica Lang’s “Black Wave,” her first creation as Pacific Northwest Ballet’s new resident choreographer, is an elusive allegory wrapped inside a metaphor wrapped inside a dream. Rarely have I so wanted to ask a choreographer what she intended.

This is surprising because Lang has already rather explicitly described what “Black Wave” is about. The ballet was inspired by “mental health awareness,” the program note she wrote says, and is “rooted in the philosophy” of kintsugi, the Japanese art of piecing cracked objects back together with gold lacquer, thus making beauty of the brokenness rather than hiding it. Lang’s husband, former Ailey dancer Kanji Segawa, is credited as an artistic collaborator. The spare, eerily textured, and deeply compelling music for strings and piano by New Zealand prodigy Salina Fisher begins with a composition actually titled “Kintsugi,” which Lang serendipitously discovered on the radio after already settling on the Kintsugi concept, according to an interview with Fisher published by PNB. So then, Lang is not trying to play coy about the ballet’s meanings. Still, it took me three viewings of “Black Wave” (which I watched on screen thanks to PNB’s digital season offerings) to guess what she might have been up to.

Performance

Pacific Northwest Ballet: Jessica Lang’s “Black Wave,” Edwaard Liang’s “The Veil Between Worlds,” Justin Peck’s “The Times Are Racing”

Place

Digital stream of performance in McCaw Hall, Seattle, WA; captured live on September 20, 2024

Words

Rachel Howard

Pacific Northwest Ballet in Justin Peck's “The Times are Racing.” Photograph by Angela Sterling

I gave “Black Wave” three consecutive views because Lang’s past works for PNB have proven she belongs to a rank of ballet choreographers operating not just as step-makers but as true artists—her “Let Me Mingle Tears with Thee,” a treatment of Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater,” was one of the most memorable ballets I saw in 2023. Lang always works with music of substance; she creates clear but nuanced movement with interest in every phrase; and each ballet she makes draws you into a world apart. In “Black Wave,” this world is the main character’s mind. Wearing a white slip by fashion designer Jillian Lewis that combines the qualities of a nightie, a hospital gown, and an Athenian toga, Leah Terada seems to be moving through the emotional bramble of her own psyche. Beautiful sculptural branches by scenic designer Libby Stadstad hang above in silhouette and later lower to the stage, where Terada can touch them and peer through.

Now for the elusive allegory. Terada’s inner world is populated by groups of dancers that represent . . . something that would be clearer to a viewer with a Ph.D. in psychiatry?

Dylan Wald and Leta Biasucci, in flowing robin’s egg blue, are gentle and harmonious. Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan and Luther DeMeyer, darker-clothed, are anxious, gremlin-esque, their flexed-feet jumps like images from Paul Taylor’s more devious works. Perhaps the two pairs correspond to the Ego and the Id, or positive self-image and negative? Then comes Kuu Sakuragi, leading five dancers in dark brown who swarm about Terada like intrusive thoughts. There is something refreshingly 1940s in all of this (I felt like I’d time-traveled back to some lost Antony Tudor ballet) and I wanted to follow the action closely, to form my own narrative for the stage action, if need be. But all three times I watched “Black Wave,” the work’s energy seemed to dissipate with Sakuragi’s entrance—and his crisp, committed performance was clearly not to blame. Some thread of implied narrative feels weakened as the ballet shifts into its second Fisher composition, an orchestral work rippling with harp passages that fall silent to admit more abrasive sounds.

Leah Terada in “Black Wave” by Jessica Lang. Photograph by Angela Sterling

It was on the third viewing of “Black Wave” that I noticed Brandon Stirling Baker’s lighting effects turning the branches gold as they rise again from the floor. Levitating high overhead as Terada faces down the intrusive thought-creatures, the brambles do seem to transmogrify into a semblance of the shiny lacquer used for kintsugi. Lang seems to be aiming for the kinds of effects we encounter in poetry, one image evolving into another to create an arc of meaning. But for this poetry reader, the connection felt forced upon the dance, exterior.

What never felt forced was Terada’s dancing. Tall, gently dignified, she is a full-bodied mover who makes ballet steps look natural and human. Alone on stage after standing up to the intrusive thoughts, she leaps to kiss the sky, stubs her toe into the ground. As the two couples that seem to represent her essential inner duality re-enter, she again presses her cheek against the floor while teetering on a knee, echoing the ballet’s first solo. The thought-creatures, if that’s what they are, return too, and cluster to anchor her as Sakuragi holds her hand and leads her torso in a circle; when he lets go she flails like a silken “surrender” flag in the wind. This adds yet another image to the ballet’s progression, muddying the dance’s poetry yet further—but as a final impression, it’s certainly beautiful.

Leah Terada and Dammiel Cruz-Garrido in Edwaard Liang’s “The Veil Between Worlds.” Photograph by Angela Sterling

There was nothing to puzzle over in “The Veil Between Worlds,” a soothing pandemic hit by Washington Ballet artistic director Edwaard Liang that has become familiar PNB fare. The miminalist music by Oliver Davis is bright and sweetly lyrical; Liang’s movement alternates between lightly quirky ensemble phrases and meltingly pretty partnering. It was good to see Elle Macy back, more angelic than ever in the final pas de deux with her husband, Dylan Wald, falling on her knees into his arms and sailing benevolently in their lifts.

Justin Peck’s “The Times Are Racing,” made for New York City Ballet in 2017, seems like it should go down just as easy. As pure dance spectacle, it’s enjoyable in those trademark Peck ways: bouncing sneaker-powered phrases, hip music (from Dan Deacon’s “America” album), a cast of 20 buzzing with the promise of youthful energy. But in artistic packaging, it leaves me discomforted, moreso now than ever.

Pacific Northwest Ballet in Justin Peck's “The Times are Racing.” Photograph by Angela Sterling

The high fashion costumes by Humberto Leon dress the dancers in shirts that say FIGHT, PROTEST, CHANGE, and DEFY. The idea of protest is the subject of the ballet, but isolated from any actual, morally complex issues. This surely felt safe enough in the wake of the 2016 election when most ballet patrons were unified in opposition to a certain newly installed leader with autocratic ambitions, but it “hits different,” as the kids say, in the wake of 2023’s fracturing protests over war in the Middle East. All the same, Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan and Lucien Postlewaite were extraordinary in the climactic pas de deux, repeating a phrase where one partner catches the other’s leg for a handstand that pretzel-twists into the floor, finding new wide-eyed wonderment at each other’s abilities in each repetition as Deacon’s glimmering music looped.

Optimism is beautiful and hope is a human necessity, but there’s a fine line between glamorizing protest and insulting the hard day-to-day sacrifice and real risk of true resistance. With less than a month to the U.S. election, it might be easier to get behind “The Times Are Racing” if, instead of DEFY, those t-shirts read VOTE.

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard is the former lead dance critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her dance writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Hudson Review, Ballet Review, San Francisco Magazine and Dance Magazine.

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