'Swan Lake' Graces Seattle Stage By BOB HICKS A majestic performance opens Pacific Northwest Ballet's tenure in the splendid McCaw Hall. After a year of exile in a former hockey arena, the Northwest's leading ballet company has come home to Seattle's sparkling new Marion Oliver McCaw Hall with a grand-scale, playful and buoyantly civilized production of "Swan Lake." It's a fitting homecoming for PNB, which, after a season at the rambling Mercer Arts Arena, has moved back into the former Seattle Opera House. McCaw Hall, almost entirely rebuilt in a $127 million renovation that took more than a year to complete, reopened in August with Seattle Opera's Wagnerian spectacle "Parsifal." PNB, which shares residence with the opera in the 2,900-seat hall, followed suit last weekend with its own McCaw debut, a lavish and gorgeously danced production of one of ballet's greatest hits. "Swan Lake," which continues through Sunday, was chosen for the coming-out party partly to help lure back the flock of audience members that bailed out when the company moved to temporary digs. If this production doesn't do the trick, it's hard to tell what might. With its gorgeous costumes, briskly measured pacing and fluent technique, it's a vivid reminder of the power inherent in classical story ballet and the high level of skill that this company possesses. "Swan Lake" is filled with visual dalliances, the kind of bravura character turns that also provide so much of the charm in "The Nutcracker," another story ballet created to a Tchaikovsky score. And like a 19th-century novel, it builds its atmosphere slowly, as if it had all the time in the world. But at its core, both psychologically and choreographically, is the relationship between Siegfried, a young prince under extreme family pressure to choose a wife, and Odette, a young beauty condemned by an enchantment to spend half of each day as a swan. PNB has five teams of dancers revolving through the central roles of Siegfried and Odette/Odile, the "good" white swan and the "evil" black swan, respectively. Kaori Nakamura dances Odette with exquisite delicacy opposite Olivier Wevers' impulsive Siegfried, and shades her portrayal of Odile only slightly, giving the dark swan more vigor, a more assertive attack with just a hint of menace. Performing a classic can actually be a daring move: You have to prove there's still life in the old thing, that it can still connect with today's audiences. It's a question that Portland's Oregon Ballet Theatre faces as it swings sharply toward classicism this season under new artistic director Christopher Stowell after 15 years of James Canfield's damn-the-torpedoes contemporary approach. Seattle's "Swan Lake" handles the task beautifully, making a compelling case for the importance of classicism. Kent Stowell's choreography, based on the 1895 version by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, reasserts the core astonishment of classical ballet: that so much beauty can be discovered within the variations on five basic positions of the feet and arms. And that, like the patina on a Renaissance fresco, an enduring work of art can add layers of meaning as time passes. As you watch the story of Siegfried and the enchanted Odette unfold, you see a style not preserved but revivified. You see the technical clarity, the original movements, but with inevitable historic overlays. You can't see the dance "fresh," nor should you: You know things that Petipa and Ivanov couldn't have in 1895. The sexual undertones of "Swan Lake" are obvious, with Odette representing a romantic ideal, Odile representing unleashed sexuality, and Siegfried straining to understand the difference. You can dismiss him as a twit who thinks with his glands, but the dance demands more. To understand Siegfried, you need to understand the romantic cultural preoccupations of his time. It's where the classical frame of mind, the ability to get inside another cultural or historical worldview, kicks in: A hundred years from now, how perplexed will people be by Madonna and Kurt Cobain unless they understand the venality of global corporate consumerism and the sharply different reactions the two artists took to it? As the first ballet in McCaw Hall, this production has to share the spotlight with the hall itself. The two meld well. Ming Cho Lee's tall-pillared, slightly askew set, with its huge, brooding full moon, establishes an epic mood to match the big room, which is about the size of Portland's Keller Auditorium but is much more advanced technologically. Rich and balanced and slightly reserved, McCaw envelops you like a giant velvet glove. It's still a big house with a big proscenium stage, but you can hear better and see much better than before the renovation. It's not designed for intimacy, and its massive scale has a definite effect on what's produced here. For both the opera and the ballet, the trick will be to work with the hall rather than against it. So far, so good. Source: Oregon Live

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