Choreography isn’t usually a team sport. While it’s not terribly unusual for a Pacific Northwest Ballet company member to debut a new choreographic work on the company’s mainstage, there is something very different about “AfterTime,” a new ballet making its world premiere in the company’s November repertory program. It’s created by not one but two PNB dancer/choreographers — soloists Christopher D’Ariano and Amanda Morgan — in a rare example of team choreography.
Morgan, in an interview after rehearsal in late October, suggested the reason choreographic duos are rare is because “it takes extra time and communication and brainstorming and collaboration. You want to feel like both your voices are in it.” She described her collaboration with D’Ariano as “a feat in itself. It’s teaching us a lot — how to compromise, how to prepare, how to step back at different points and allow the work to show you what it is.”
Unlike many contemporary ballets, “AfterTime” has a narrative: In a post-apocalyptic future, a pair of protagonists discover a technological system which they switch on. In the rehearsal room, the ballet was beginning to take shape: Lines of dancers, performing sharp, angular movements, formed the system’s “grid,” while the protagonists’ dance style was more flowing and grounded. It was, at this stage, just bits and pieces being rehearsed, with Morgan and D’Ariano moving between groups of dancers, frequently pausing to confer with each other and with Morgan’s detailed handwritten notebook. (She is, as she noted in the interview, “very analog.”)
“If it wasn’t a narrative, I think the process would be much different,” D’Ariano said. Having a story to follow, he said, meant that he and Morgan have the same trajectory, which helps keep them on the same page. “We know what the end goal is … We know where the music is going, it’s all built out. As long as we follow that and then tie it in with feeling and narrative and characters, it gets where it needs to be.” Being working dancers meant they could first create some of the choreography on each other, figuring it out by doing it; other parts were created in rehearsal with the cast.
Morgan and D’Ariano, who have been with PNB since 2016 and 2017, respectively, are longtime friends and experienced choreographers. Both have created work separately for multiple arts organizations around Seattle (including The Seattle Project, for which Morgan is the founding artistic director) and PNB’s NEXT STEP program, an annual choreographic workshop in which PNB company members create new work to be performed by Professional Division students.
Morgan and D’Ariano’s first choreographic collaboration was for NEXT STEP in 2024, a work in suits and sneakers called “DreamCity.” PNB Artistic Director Peter Boal saw that ballet, and “was really struck how I could identify which parts Amanda had created and which parts Christopher had created,” he said. “I saw those two contributions melding together quite successfully.”
Boal acknowledged that it’s “really rare” for two people to successfully choreograph together, remembering from early in his own dance career an “endless” collaboration between Jerome Robbins and Twyla Tharp called “Brahms/Handel” that was, he said diplomatically, “a difficult process.” Nonetheless, he was intrigued by the idea, and asked Morgan and D’Ariano to make a new work together for the company mainstage this season. “I thought these two would complement each other and enhance each other in a way that was worth exploring,” he said. He wanted to give them the opportunity to take the next step in their dancemaking careers at the company.
“A choreographer is an artist without a canvas,” Boal said. “They can’t grow and develop unless they’re given the opportunity to develop an entire work. Studios are fine, but stages are better.”
It’s been an unusually busy time for Morgan and D’Ariano. Though Morgan has the luxury of not performing in the November repertory, she’s just debuted her latest work, “Arrivals,” with The Seattle Project at King Street Station in late October. D’Ariano will perform in the other two ballets in the repertory, Dani Rowe’s “The Window” and Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room,” so he’s in and out of multiple PNB studios, adding more complexity to the company’s already-complicated rehearsal schedules.
“AfterTime” is an opportunity for Morgan and D’Ariano to have a mainstage collaboration with other artists, many of whom they’ve previously worked with: composers Fiona Stocks-Lyon and Thomas Nickell (the ballet’s score will be a combination of live and recorded music), costume designer Janelle Abbott, filmmaker Henry Wurtz, and lighting designer Reed Nakayama. And they will, of course, be collaborating with the artists they know best: their fellow company members, more than two dozen of whom are cast in the ballet. Unlike a choreographer who arrives from out of town and doesn’t know the company well, Morgan and D’Ariano are working with the same people with whom they share a barre at company class every day.
“There are moments when we laugh in the studio because (we’re with) our friends, and other moments when we’re like: ‘We need to be efficient, we need to work today,’” D’Ariano said. Knowing the dancers and their strengths very well is, he said, “just great information for any choreographer to have before you go into a process.”
Morgan added that it’s important for choreographers to care as much about the dancers as the work itself. “Sometimes, a choreographer comes in and they’re focused on the work and they just look at someone and say, ‘OK, do this thing.’ And the dancers feel, ‘I don’t feel seen as myself.’ So that has really given us an advantage with this. They have a love and respect for us, and they want us to succeed, so they’re going to try their best to succeed for the story that we’re trying to tell.”
In the studio, near the end of rehearsal, three couples practiced a complex move, in which one partner is lifted upside down, then exits the move through a dramatic backbend as music builds. The execution wasn’t perfect — not yet — but the entire cast burst into loud applause.
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