Ephemeral Momentum and the Unraveled Soul: PNB's "In the Upper Room, Round Two"

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Christopher D’Ariano and Elizabeth Murphy in Dani Rowe’s The Window. Photo © Angela Sterling.

During the final performance of In the Upper Room at Pacific Northwest Ballet, it seemed that perhaps just this one time, the cast of thirteen might truly be incapable of bringing that raging energy to a still. And yet, miraculously, they did. After the seventh standing ovation of the run, as lights lifted and we turned to leave the theater, the fire alarms, triggered by an unusual amount of haze, began to blare, and marked the end of the run in a most peculiar way. Perhaps only then did we realize the magnitude of the world we’d just been allowed to inhabit. The entire last weekend of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s second repertory program of the season was full of a similar sentiment: awe arising each and every night, fueled by three works as vast and diverse as the company itself.

Perhaps one should be earnestly concerned about a societal development when artists begin to tackle it. In Christopher D’Ariano and Amanda Morgan’s first mainstage work for Pacific Northwest Ballet, they render a post-apocalyptic world that feels unsettlingly real. The consequences of digital systems, which are, as they put it, “designed to outlast us”, are brought into the light in AfterTime, letting us reckon with how much we have already lost as a society.

It is impossible to overestimate the value of seeing a piece more than once, for the work that fell before me on opening night was hardly related to that final one. Our initial response to the things that first catch our eyes are only a fraction of the work’s true image, and with a vision as purposeful as AfterTime, how could one catch it all in one go? AfterTime revealed itself to be one of those marvelous works that, even after two weekends, continues to reveal treasures in the sand; a little wonder here, a revelation of intent there. With a new cast, or a fresh viewpoint, it’s an astonishing thing to watch a work slowly grow in clarity and reveal its full potential over the course of two weekends.

One of the connections that formed during AfterTime’s final performances was the ingenious nature of Fiona Stocks-Lyon and Thomas Nickell’s score. The dichotomy of the music’s live orchestra and recorded sound overlap until we don’t always know where the line lies, just like the frightfully blurred edges of artificial intelligence.

Like this contrast in soul-stirring strings and jarring digital sound, AfterTime arises with a similar division of movement. The protagonists, who first appear before us waterlogged and languid, with a primal need for connection, find their counterparts in the staccato, calculated motion of “the system”. Their sharp-edged, right angles of shifting velocity lack connection in the movement itself. With the intrusion of the protagonist, their movement quality shifts and softens into a human glow in an instant. In some beautiful way, this makes one think that perhaps they remember a day before their immortal uprightness. Later, as they surround the protagonist in a swirl of limbs, a brilliant lighting and scenic effect renders them bathed in a VHS-reminiscent light, as though they’ve become a virtual image before our eyes. 

The second weekend brought two new protagonists to the stage: Larry Lancaster, vast and bold in his urgency, and Rosalyn Hutsell, whose minuscule articulations, nuanced ripple through her limbs, and wild-flung desperation were a haunting sight. A spontaneous pairing of Joh Morrill and Clara Ruf Maldonado during the final performance proved to be an uncanny and overdue partnership, for their clarity, precision, and emotive capacities find a mirror image in each other. Morrill’s reach and gesture, his ability to streak the hazy dusk with raging momentum, are an image of a wordless storyteller beyond his years. In AfterTime, Maldonado’s creaturely raw outpour is potent. She always surrenders so deeply to a work, letting its desired form of expression overtake her own image, and in the final moments of AfterTime, her desperate contortions were chilling in their magnitude.

Like the best works of art, AfterTime holds tiny grains of other works within its folds: glimmers that only some eyes may catch, but that strengthen the work's own vocabulary with their embedded meaning. A William Forsythe-like response to digital sound, and a creaturely physicality reminiscent of Crystal Pite’s own stark brilliance, reveal Christopher D’Ariano and Amanda Morgan as their righteous peers. AfterTime reminds us that artists, and their much-needed creations, have the potential to steer us in the right direction.

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancer Joh Morrill (center) with company dancers in the world premiere of Christopher D’Ariano and Amanda Morgan’s AfterTime. Photo © Angela Sterling.

It wasn’t until the final performance of The Window that I began to see an inkling of “Maillotic” freedom in Dani Rowe’s choreography. Like Jean-Christophe Maillot, known for his deeply human Roméo et Juliette, Rowe lets gestures of genuine humanity break through her work. Like Maillot, her stage is rendered minimally; no furniture to build their rooms, only light and the dancers' bodies moving through that space as though they know where each chair lies. Like Maillot, she lets light take hold of the tale when movement is stilled. Like Maillot, it is not a chain of steps that form the ballet, but rather impulses and clarified emotion that define narrative and let each character be shaped by striking physicality.

Rowe has the same potent power to make you forget you’re watching a ballet. Drawing us into those rooms swelled with light, one forgets that anything lies beyond the shrouded shadows. Perhaps most beautiful of all, in The Window, each physical declaration makes one forget, if only briefly, that these visceral expressions are not the world’s main mode of communication. These gestures are carved with such authenticity that they become vast truths in a different hue. 

The distinctive language of The Window is formed in the moments that somehow resonate as echoes of our own world: the watcher drawn up onto fluttering pointe, a tangible unrest filling her; a line broken by a flexed foot; an arabesque that dissolves into angularity; the pure content that can fill a bourée. A dancer drawn from earth to pointe with a kind of defiant determination; a palm pounded against invisible glass; confliction sounding in heavy-heeled steps; the hands and feet that beat the earth as though to turn back time; a singular, jagged finger coiling in the dark.

The Window may be small in scale, but it is tremendous in scope. Like Maillot, Rowe’s characters don’t seem to know they’re being watched. They burst into the light, oblivious that we, like the watcher, peer with eyes that cannot tear themselves away. Shannon Rugani’s score cradles the story in a cinematic way, carrying it even when motion cannot. It is a soul-stirring manifestation of tribulations that has the power to break one's heart repeatedly with its swelling orchestration.

From the first glimmer of light upon The Watcher, Rugani and Rowe spring her to life with urgency. Melisa Guilliams pounces upon that urgency with piercing focus and with a quality that makes one forget that there is choreography behind all those troubled, aching steps. She brings a deeply empathetic tenderness to The Watcher through every twisted flurry and yearning gesture. Near the end, as The Woman traces memory’s sweet shadows behind her, simply the intensity that fills Guilliams' weighted steps shows her as an artist who can tumble with full presence into a character as though she’ll never find her way out.

Elizabeth Murphy and Christopher D’Ariano are nothing but sublime in their worryless days. Her glee and velveteen fluidity, his lively eagerness, their tender connection…it’s all a swooning content that fills their intimate curlings. But, when the spry passion comes to a still, Murphy’s ability to define character becomes a startling force. She is unmoored, overcome by grief, unraveling before our eyes. In her devastated hands that reach for a familiar form to find only air, in the chilling emptiness that rounds her spine, Rowe’s ability to compress denial and rage into palpable expressions of grief is undeniably efficacious.

The sincerity that enraptures Angelica Generosa and Lucien Postlewaite’s portrayal of youth’s radiant hope and all consuming grief made one final performance of The Window a startling act of genuine loss. The shards of truth that they weave into their work–Postlewaite coiled with pain, fading into stillness, Generosa full of frigid despair–render them unrecognizable. Simply the look in her eyes as he withers before her is enough to convince one of the present moment’s verity. Floundered by emotion, Generosa’s taut, wrenching constriction, wild-flung rage, and resonant arabesque as she weaves through memory is a staggering portrayal of loss.

In a rep of remarkable triple-bill performances for Clara Ruf Maldonado, it was her performance in The Window that clarified her gift as an artist. Her Watcher is a deeply dynamic one: willowy, jagged, spry, austere, and hollowed beyond recognition. Though it is one of The Watcher’s more quiet moments, as Maldonado crept her emotive fingers around the edge of an invisible window, visibly tormented by the desire to peer, it was an astonishing sight to see such distilled feeling within a single person.

It must be a ballet of great magnitude if one is still dumbfounded by its design and execution after two weekends of performances. In the Upper Room, Twyla Tharp weaves a heavenly cathedral where dancers emerge and disappear through veils of mist as if their momentum is never-ending. The entire thing has fire under its feet, possessing both the air of a serious affair and of some carefree thrill within its tightly-packed design. It is a powerhouse of a work that demonstrates the strength and camaraderie of its dancers, as well as the company’s versatile vitality. 

Pacific Northwest Ballet corps de ballet dancer Destiny Wimpye and soloist Kuu Sakuragi in Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room.. Photo © Angela Sterling

Tharp plays with the forms in her repertory and twists their inflection until they glow like an act of her own invention. “In her work, we have the wish, and the proof, that dissimilar and divergent elements can be marvelously and distinctly united,” Nancy Dalva reflected in 1994 on Tharp’s ability to blend genres. In the Upper Room, Tharp searches for and finds what these forms all have in common. We see elements of everything from ballet to swing dancing and martial arts, casually pedestrian stances, and an athlete’s determined drive. It is rich with variance, a cross-pollination of style, and yet, all of this inspiration is not nearly as interesting as what she makes of the raw ingredients of motion. She’s not borrowing from other styles so much as simply using what is in her well-stocked pantry of diverse physical knowledge. 

She plays with repetition in a similar way. Each section is built of unrelated patterns, but in the finale, as momentum builds to untouchable heights, dancers roar through repeated phrases with heightened pace. Higher, faster, bigger, looser, bolder: the same steps, which were already an exuberant affair in their tempered state, become an overpowering substance. 

As Twyla Tharp was commissioning the score for In the Upper Room, she suppodedly told Glass to keep composing until she ran out of money, and thus In the Upper Room landed at fourty minutes. Had she had more money, perhaps it would have been two hours long, for her ability to invent, layer, and refrase is unbound.

In the Upper Room is formed by surging, dashing, telescoped focus; intoxicating joy and inversions of jaunty steps that build to ecstasy. It’s built of spiraling determination and bodies billowing up as though the ground has been kicked out from beneath them; a pointe shoes held an inch from an eye, synchronicity’s bright beauty, and all the lovely softened balletic intricacies that they fall into so easily. The task at hand is immense, and Tharp has spatial genius through every near collision, daring test of trust, and merciless velocity.

Balanchine famously asked his dancers, “What are you saving it for? Now is all there is”, and in the Upper Room, Tharp gives her dancers a similar task, one that finds them consuming space and oxygen like it’s a spiritual endeavor. Peter Boal recently stated that “Twyla’s works are oddly spiritual,” and indeed, there is a transcendence in the Upper Room that by its final breath, leaves the world far more luminescent than it was a mere forty minutes ago.

It’s a rare thing for a single cast to carry a ballet (particularly such a demanding one) for the entirety of the run, but to see the same thirteen dancers sprint through Tharp’s endeavors show after show, only growing stronger and bolder was a tremendous gift. Their wild abandon, their balletic forms softened, loosened, mellowed, and the pure satisfaction that glows off of them…forgetting such impactful determination is no worry of mine.

Perhaps by round eight, one’s own amazement should begin to taper, but during the final push of the run, there I was, still shaking my head in disbelief. Clara Ruf Maldonado and Yuki Takahashi’s fierce attack lets their ecstatic unison blare across the stage in a blur of baffling articulation, momentum, and pep. Joh Morrill’s intense command of the music and wild relinquishment is filled with a constant, beautiful hunger for “more”. Lucien Postlewaite, always defined with such ease, softer than a cloud in his nimble steps upon the earth, is a striking figure of form and composure through every Tharpian demand. In softly rendered bliss, Madison Rayn Abeo’s heaven-directed gaze in breath-stilling balances and dreaming intricacies simply glows. Propelled to great heights and caught mid-air, Destiny Wimpye is a feat of glorious ebullience. And in the pure elation of that transcendent finale, Postlewaite and Kuu Sakuragi consume space with unquellable voracity until even McCaw Hall’s wide span seems insufficient for their vast flight. To watch them leave it all there in the layered fog is a reviving source of levity that I wish one could bottle.

The silence they leave in their wake is charged with electricity. Not a silence at all, but an echoing of their triumphant resolve. Nutcracker may be just around the corner, but as Twyla Tharp’s brilliance surged across the stage, I wished for a moment that we could stay here, in a hazy and mighty celebration of life coursing through their limbs and into ours.

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Leta Biasucci and Lucien Postlewaite (center) with corps de ballet dancers (L-R) Destiny Wimpye and Genevieve Waldorf in Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room. . Photo © Angela Sterling.

The run may be over, but “In the Upper Room” streams November 20th-24th for digital subscribers. Learn more here.