Executive Director’s Notes: THE TIMES ARE RACING
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the fall arts season in Seattle and PNB’s first repertory program of our performing year. We’re so thrilled to welcome Jessica Lang back to PNB to launch her work with us as resident choreographer. She is a phenomenal dance-maker and a truly wonderful person, and her rehearsals with our Company dancers regularly draw a line of appreciative viewers at the studio windows. We commissioned Edwaard Liang’s The Veil Between Worlds first as a dance film during the lockdown phase of the pandemic, and when audiences returned to McCaw Hall we brought it back for what felt like a wholly new in-person experience. This past June we presented Veil as part of 10,000 Dreams: A Festival of Asian Choreography at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Viewers are always deeply moved by Veil and the way this work expresses the transcendence of love and connection over loss, but to see PNB dancers perform it so exquisitely for a new, enraptured audience was a very proud moment for us.
My most recent experience with The Times Are Racing was also in a theater far from Seattle, during part of New York City Ballet’s Winter 2024 program. PNB dancer Ashton Edwards was invited to guest in the piece’s electrifying pas de deux with NYCB dancer Taylor Stanley and NYCB Company members. It is uniquely thrilling to be part of an audience moved to instant standing ovation, and this one felt like a singular moment in time. New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas expressed this moment beautifully: “The times are racing, even more than they were in 2017, when the ballet premiered and found acclaim as a protest dance. While the dance continues to serve as a release, this performance also had much to say about the tolerance born from love – not romantic love, but openness, generosity, kindness. It was bigger than ballet, yet ballet was its container.”
Over the past several weeks at PNB we’ve been talking a lot about what it means to create a space of inspiration, joy, and respite from the anxiety and dislocation of modern life, especially in an election year. We hope that with this program, and the rest of our 2024/25 season, you encounter the warmest welcome from PNB and experience the universal connection and sense of well-being that ballet can so often provide. We deeply appreciate your support and presence in our community – from all of us at PNB, thank you for joining us.
Kind regards,
