PNB revisits ‘The Seasons’ Canon,’ and it’s a joy

Dance review

There’s a moment, while watching Crystal Pite’s glorious “The Seasons’ Canon” at Pacific Northwest Ballet, when you suddenly forget to breathe, dazzled by a vision of bodies caught in light. The particular movement in that moment is simplicity itself: A long line of dancers perpendicular to the audience — it seems to be endlessly stretching, upstage and beyond — raise their arms in unison, and drop them on different beats. And yet, the shapes made by those arms, falling like lacy dominoes, seem beautiful in an otherworldly way, creating a sort of creature that briefly comes to life, making from a group of bodies something you could never have imagined. That’s the wonder of dance, and it’s what Pite’s so good at here: creating a language of movement, making dancers seem not mortal but magical.

“The Seasons’ Canon,” the showpiece of PNB’s current contemporary program (also titled “The Seasons’ Canon”), made its PNB premiere in 2022, set to Max Richter’s revisioning of Vivaldi’s iconic “The Four Seasons” and structured as four movements: spring, summer, autumn, winter. But nothing about it is that literal, other than some lovely, light-flecked snowflakes in the final movement. Instead, it’s a series of urgent, fluid pas de deux (James Yoichi Moore and Angelica Generosa’s, shifting from waterlike slow-motion to staccato movement, was particularly mesmerizing), group sculptures (Amanda Morgan, in “Summer,” seemed to beautifully shape a small mountain of dancers, flowing around and behind her like extensions of her limbs), and the stunning spectacle of seeing 50-plus dancers on stage together, moving in quirky unison or complex harmony. Watching them arrayed in rows, standing in second position and simply shifting weight from one foot to the other, I could have sworn the earth moved. This work is Pite’s masterpiece; go see it, as we don’t know when it will return.

It’s the focal point of an evening relatively light on content; the three works together added up to not quite an hour of dancing time. (Couldn’t PNB have tossed one more ballet in? It’s odd to be home by 9:30.) Twyla Tharp’s “Sweet Fields” opened the program on a calm note, with a dozen dancers accompanied by Doug Fullington’s Tudor Choir beautifully singing 18^th– and 19^th-century American hymns. Though overall a fairly sedate work, there’s a joyous recklessness to much of the movement — dancers run backward or hop with one foot flexed — with a somber section in the middle, in which five men carry a sixth as if he’s lying in a coffin, body perfectly straight.  

And Jessica Lang’s haunting “The Calling,” in which a solo dancer performs encumbered by an enormous circular skirt, is an exercise in presence; its dancer barely takes a step (other than one exquisite arabesque, elongated by the folds of the skirt), but uses arms and torso to create a sense of gentle abandon, of freedom within confines. Dylan Wald on Friday and Moore on Saturday both seemed to melt into the floor, and to reach toward an endless, hopeful sky.