PNB’s ‘Swan Lake’ review: Going wild for ballet

Dance review

Watching Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Swan Lake” can leave you a little drunk on ballet. Everything about this classic work, choreographed by Kent Stowell, is irresistibly larger than life: the glorious Tchaikovsky score; the story of a woman trapped in a swan body, at once absurd and heartbreakingly poignant; the seemingly endless line of ethereal-yet-mighty tutu’d dancers, moving as one; the famous Act III pas de deux that feels like a ballet dance battle; the devastating ending, in which a dancer seemingly becomes a swan before our eyes. Though it hasn’t been long — just two years — since PNB previously presented this work, McCaw Hall was crowded with cheering ballet lovers; clearly, what a lot of us need right now is to get lost in a doomed, gorgeous love story.

“Swan Lake,” with its two wickedly difficult central roles, is also a showcase for the two dancers playing Odette/Odile (a dual role of the swan woman and her evil, black-clad doppelgänger) and the lovesick Prince Siegfried. Over opening weekend, I watched four brilliant principal dancers make the ballet their own. Lucien Postlewaite, on Friday’s opening night, played Siegfried in Act I as world-weary and a little bored, at one point sadly staring into a glass as if wishing it held some magic elixir. That magic comes in Act II, in the form of the remarkable Leta Biasucci, whose melancholy Odette was so delicate, so exquisitely tentative in her movements that you instantly believed she was part bird; her arms, with precise angles and isolations, movingly became wings. Their Act II pas de deux — him thunderstruck by love — was beautifully careful; she seemed so fragile that a touch might break her.

In Act III, she utterly transformed as a mocking, laughing Odile, pulling Siegfried into her web like a graceful spider, her legs pointed like talons. Their farewell in Act IV was haunting, filled with embraces and longing. Biasucci and Postlewaite, remarkably, made us forget about the beauty of their technique — though it was there, at every step — and wallow happily in the emotion the two created.

Saturday night brought Angelica Generosa and Jonathan Batista in the leading roles, and a vibe very different but every bit as mesmerizing. Generosa’s Odette was subtler, softer than Biasucci’s — more woman than bird, with Generosa (a dancer with a remarkable gift for exuding joy) finding a journey of happiness for the character as her movements become more human. She and Batista — a prince both lovestruck and dignified — have an electric chemistry, and this exploded in Act III; his lightning-quick pirouettes and her sparkling fouetté turns felt like fireworks being exchanged in a taunting, thrilling duel. (The audience went wild, in a way I’ve never seen at “Swan Lake” before.) And the beauty of their simple press lift in Act IV, with his long arms raising her to the sky, felt like a glorious gift.

As is all of this “Swan Lake”: a beautifully designed production of which I never tire. (Among its many elements worth singling out: the masterful lighting design by the late Randall G. Chiarelli, particularly in Act II and IV, with the dancers hauntingly caught in lakeside shadow.) There’s one more weekend left, with an array of duos to see: Cecilia Iliesiu and Dylan Wald on Thursday night, Postlewaite with Biasucci on Friday night and Sunday afternoon, Elle Macy and James Kirby Rogers on Saturday afternoon, Generosa and Batista repeating Saturday night. Catch them, in this dream of a ballet, before they fly away.

Editor’s note: Pacific Northwest Ballet has changed its schedule of performers. Leta Biasucci and Lucien Postlewaite will perform Friday night and Sunday afternoon.