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Page Notes

I’ve never thought about program notes and how much they help or hinder connecting to a new dance as much as I have since watching Jessica Lang’s creative association unfold with Pacific Northwest Ballet. In the case of 2020’s “Ghost Variations,” Lang’s response to the music of Clara and Robert Schumann, the program notes were wonderfully unnecessary: Even viewers who knew nothing of the married composers’ relationship could get teary watching that tender final pas de deux, though context enhanced it. Four years later, Lang’s PNB commission “Black Wave” was quite different: I finished it baffled, and found a bit of guidance in Lang’s personally written notes on the Japanese art of Kintsugi as a metaphor for how a psyche repairs itself. These notes prompted me to watch “Black Wave” a second and third time, and as Lang’s intentions became clearer, so did my admiration for the ballet’s strangeness.

Performance

Pacific Northwest Ballet: Jessica Lang’s “Pages,” George Balanchine’s “Serenade,” Alexei Ratmansky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”

Place

Digital stream of performance in McCaw Hall, Seattle, captured live on September 15, 2026

Words

Rachel Howard

Pacific Northwest Ballet in Alexei Ratmansky's “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Photograph by Angela Sterling

But now the former Twyla Tharp Company member, in the middle of a three-year stint as choreographer in residence at PNB, has unveiled “Pages,” a co-commission with Ballet Sun Valley, released online as part of PNB’s digital subscription season. And in this case, her program notes don’t help.

“Pages,” Lang explains, was created after a weeklong residency at the home where Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote in Idaho. It explores, she says, “the private landscape of artistic creation” and constitutes “a meditation on the contrast between silence and inner noise.” What we see on the stage “embodies the hesitation, repetition, obsession, interruption, and memory that shape the creative mind,” investigating “what happens to consciousness when a person devotes themselves to making something.”

Having first watched “Pages” without reading Lang’s notes, I wish she hadn’t mentioned the residency at the Hemingway House. Suddenly, the intentions behind “Pages” felt both too specific and too vague at once, much like the work’s title. I almost wish the ballet had been left, for the viewer, entirely cryptic. 

Which is not to say that the ballet doesn’t evince Lang’s usual virtues: the musical choices are unusual and sophisticated, and the scenic elements (which she designed) are abstract yet suggestive. A rectangular block sits stage right—in another ballet it might suggest a bed, but here let’s presume it’s meant to evoke a manuscript—which the ensemble dances on top of, like figments of imagination. The diaphanous white costumes by Jillian Lewis bear a random letter here, a semi-colon there, with a few words like “thou” discernible. The black space around the dancers is vast, like the caverns of a consciousness in solitude. (Brandon Stirling Baker did the lighting.) A chair—the creator’s seat?—floats surrealistically stage left.

Dylan Wald with Pacific Northwest Ballet in Jessica Lang’s “Pages.” Photograph by Angela Sterling

Dylan Wald with Pacific Northwest Ballet in Jessica Lang’s “Pages.” Photograph by Angela Sterling

The music is by Bang On a Can collective co-founder David Lang, no relation to the choreographer, but a composer she’s drawn on in the past. As the mumbled phrases extracted from internet searches bubble up from singers in the pit—among them, “I’d rather be with people who see in the dark,” and some ramblings involving cottage cheese and jam—the wonderfully natural Leah Terada rushes about in a nightgown, her feet sans pointe shoes, the thick braid of her hair flying. Her interactions with the other dancers are full of wonder, curiosity, and nervousness, and I wanted so badly to connect this in a meaningful way to Lang’s program notes about the “intersection between characters’ lives and readers’ lives,” but I couldn’t manage it. 

Terada seemed to be the heroine of the piece, the creator letting the banal blips of consciousness float by in order to reach a new thought. But what Dylan Wald and Christopher D’Ariano’s role in partnering her and then abandoning her was, I couldn’t tell, and why other dancers appeared in shorter skirts and pointe shoes as the music transitioned to a tensely lyrical score for strings and piccolo I also couldn’t say. At least the soloist Ashton Edwards got to fly by in brilliantly fast turning sequences, a welcome shot of fierce virtuosity. And Terada was a vision of surrender as a white scroll unfurled and she stepped onto it in a lusciously descending arabesque. 

I’m guessing Terada’s final motions of grabbing a red pen and writing “TRUST” on the wall were a comment on how much faith any artist needs to have during the dark groping process of creation. It came across like an overblown epiphany.

Pacific Northwest Ballet in “Serenade” by George Balanchine. Photograph by Angela Sterling

Pacific Northwest Ballet in “Serenade” by George Balanchine. Photograph by Angela Sterling

The company was wise to market this program, instead, around George Balanchine’s eternally stirring “Serenade.” With newly sewn costumes faithfully reproducing Karinska’s moonlight blue tulle, and a fresh staging by former PNB principal Carla Korbes and former New York City Ballet corps member Dana Hanson, this was a crisp and perfectly cast performance well-tended by the next generation of Balanchine Trust repetiteurs. 

Leta Biasucci, PNB’s best dancer in the Balanchine style, brought authentic vulnerability to the heroine abandoned by a man (Dammiel Cruz-Garrido) led blindly onwards by the figure known as the “Dark Angel” (Terada, refreshingly tender in a role that is often played with glamorous aloofness.) But the revelation was Angelica Generosa in the role often called the “jumper” or the “Russian Girl”—she was sweeping, free, precise but expressive. Conductor Emil de Cou kept the tempi from the orchestra vivacious.

Alexei Ratmansky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” rounded out the bill with another clutch of top performances. This is one of those rare ballets that uses an iconic score—the Mussorgsky, of course, played with wonderful levity by pianist Christina Simens—without any strain or forced quality. For forty minutes, we simply watch the dancers be playful, gamboling versions of themselves, the inventive partnering coming across with the ease of a playground game. Along with the established leading lights of the company—D’Ariano, Generosa, Jonathan Bautista, and Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan—it was also delightful to discover such tender stage chemistry between Yuki Takahashi and Dylan Wald. 

The soloist Amanda Morgan moved with an attractively mischievous energy, while the emerging corps talent Jory Luther held his own with the tricky little technical feats Ratmansky’s choreography always oh-so-casually demands. PNB may be looking thin in its principal ranks these days, but the talent is rising. Lang is very fortunate to be in residence there, and one can only hope the remaining year and a half of her tenure brings a bit more organic inspiration to her.  

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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