Q&A: Peter Boal talks Red Angels
Knowing the late choreographer Ulysses Dove created Red Angels on our Artistic Director (then a New York City Ballet principal dancer) Peter Boal, we were eager for an inside look. We asked him to reveal the process behind Red Angels – both as a dancer and a staging artist. Peter Boal: We became very close to Ulysses during the multi-week process […]
Q&A: Giselle Designer Jérôme Kaplan
Peter Boal’s radiant staging of Giselle returns with all-new scenery and costumes by award-winning designer Jérôme Kaplan (above) who is best known to PNB audiences for his designs for Don Quixote, Roméo et Juliette. Q: What steps were critical to your process in creating designs for sets and costumes for PNB’s Giselle? A: I definitely think that the most critical […]
PNB Artistic Director Peter Boal’s Staging of Giselle
Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 2011 production of Giselle has been staged by PNB artistic director Peter Boal, based in part on primary sources from Paris and St. Petersburg, with the assistance of dance historians Marian Smith and Doug Fullington. In 2014, new scenery and costumes designed by Jérôme Kaplan will be added to the production. Giselle is widely acknowledged […]
Local Color: Painting Sets for a New Giselle
We’ve all noticed the shift: from artisanal breads and cheeses to homemade cider and chickens in backyards, what’s old is new again. Here in Seattle, urban farming is chic. And, at least at PNB, the old-world way of hand-painting large scenery (AKA “drops”) has never gone out of style. Nearly every set piece you see on stage at a PNB […]
A History of Giselle
“In Westphalia, the former Saxony, all is not dead which lies buried. When we wander there through the old oak groves we can hear the voices of the olden time, and the re-echoes of those deeply mysterious magic spells in which there gushes a [great] fullness of life …A mysterious awe thrilled my soul—when…wandering through […]