Pacific Northwest Ballet Artistic Director, Peter Boal examines the works on the current repertoire.
Welcome to Marion Oliver McCaw Hall and Pacific Northwest Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker®. Thank you, from all of us at PNB, for choosing to celebrate the season with us. We hear from many ballet-goers whose first experience with PNB and the artform of ballet is through The Nutcracker...
Welcome to George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker®. We debuted this whimsical production, designed by children’s book author Ian Falconer, in 2015. After almost a decade, we are closing in on 400 performances. Perhaps this is your first time seeing the show, or maybe you have seen it often enough to know when the bunny pulls the Mouse King’s tail, or when Mother Ginger shows off her flock of dancing children, or when the pair of prancing reindeer take flight...
To capture Balanchine’s contribution to ballet in America in a few paragraphs is impossible, but I’ll attempt to scratch the surface. Balanchine, often in partnership with benefactor and arts impresario Lincoln Kirstein, founded the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet. These institutions served as his dance laboratories. In these humble studios, with the help of dancers, musicians, and fellow artists, revelatory discoveries in ballet technique and dance-making came to life. Dancers hold Balanchine’s ballets in a place of reverence. That is especially true of PNB dancers, who enjoy a wealth of Balanchine repertoire and possess an innate technique and musicality acquired at schools like ours...
Welcome to the fall arts season in Seattle and PNB’s first repertory program of our performing 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.
Welcome to the first program of the new season. What a season it promises to be with the unveiling of our much-anticipated new production of The Sleeping Beauty, the return of Roméo et Juliette, and three world premieres. There are also plenty of fan favorites like Crystal Pite’s Emergence, Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun, Marco Goecke’s Mopey, and Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs. The excitement starts right here – right now, with Rep I!
Welcome to Coppélia, PNB’s final repertory program of the 2023/24 season. It’s been several years since we last presented the luminous, lighthearted world of Coppélia, and it’s a joy to bring this beautiful production back to life. If you joined us for our most recent two programs, you may find it hard to believe that the company of classical dancers onstage before you could possibly be the same group of artists who so totally committed to the contemporary choreography of Crystal Pite, Alejandro Cerrudo, Matthew Neenan, Twyla Tharp, and Jessica Lang in March and April.
Almost fifty years ago, I attended a New York City Ballet performance of George Balanchine’s Coppélia. Somewhere in the middle of the first act, I decided I wanted to dance. You know the rest of this story. Coppélia is all about the dancing, and the music, and the laughter, colors, costumes, and scenery. It may have the same effect on you as it did on me all those years ago.
"What goes into planning a season? There are more factors to list than my word count allows."
"We all have our harrowing stories from mid-March of 2020. Naturally, mine involves PNB. On the morning of March 12th Executive Director Ellen Walker informed me all theaters on Seattle Center campus had been asked to suspend any further activity. I told her I needed twelve more hours. That night we were scheduled to take the stage for the dress rehearsal of David Dawson’s Empire Noir and Alejandro Cerrudo’s One Thousand Pieces. Though we were able to run and film the dress rehearsal before retreating to our homes, PNB has never performed the complete One Thousand Pieces for a live audience. How grateful we are to finally bring this piece to the stage with you in the audience.
Welcome to Swan Lake, one of Kent Stowell’s most stunning contributions to PNB’s repertoire. This production of Swan Lake and I arrived at PNB at the same time, in the summer of 2003. I was struck by the magnitude of the physical production, and still find new details in Ming Cho Lee’s magnificent sets and Paul Tazewell’s opulent costumes. For a new-to-PNB arts administrator, I could not have encountered a more beautiful ballet beginning.