NEW YORK, NY.- A cross-country visit from a major American ballet company is almost always of interest; after so much pandemic upheaval, it merits appreciation just as a logistical feat. For the first time in six years, Pacific Northwest Ballet, from Seattle, has made its way to New York with a full-fledged season, which originally was scheduled for June 2020. The company even brought its orchestra.

Presented by the Joyce Theater Foundation at the David H. Koch Theater, the engagement includes two mixed repertory programs. The first of these, on Thursday (after a special opening-night Joyce gala program Wednesday) featured Ulysses Dove’s “Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven: Odes to Love and Loss,” Crystal Pite’s “Plot Point” and the New York premiere of Twyla Tharp’s “Waiting at the Station.”

While introducing New York audiences to some fabulous West Coast dancers, the 2 1/2-hour evening (including two long intermissions) felt oddly anticlimactic. Maybe it had to do with the sparse crowd Thursday. Or maybe it was just the choice of repertory, much of which seemed selected to lift or lighten our collective mood but didn’t quite do the trick.

The most arresting and emotionally resonant work came first, Dove’s prayerlike ballet for six dancers, to Arvo Pärt’s spacious and somber “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.” Created for the Royal Swedish Ballet in 1993, in the thick of the AIDS epidemic, “Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven” depicts a series of relationships marked by longing, within a framework of communal ritual. Dove would die from AIDS-related complications just three years later, and it’s hard to watch this work without wishing we had had more time with him.

The dancers — three men and three women, all in white unitards — begin in a circle at the center of the stage, linking hands around a bright-white spotlight. They repeatedly disperse from this arrangement, into other pools of light, and flock back to it, their foundation.

Against the echo of tolling bells, angular poses and plunging plies conjure their own urgent rhythm. And as much as the dancers reach out for one another — with a splayed hand shooting forward, or bourrees contracting backward — we also see their wholeness as individuals. At the intersection of two corridors of light, Jonathan Batista pirouettes with breathtaking equanimity. Juliet Prine delivers every move with precise assurance, and Amanda Morgan’s long limbs bloom out from her center, communicating both freedom and devotion. When, in the end, the dancers find themselves each in separate spotlights, they are isolated but still together.




“Plot Point” (2010) swings in a different direction, a deliberately exaggerated extrapolation of film noir, whose 14 impressive dancers comprise a double cast of “real life” characters and their shadowy “replicas.” Set to Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (with additional sound by Owen Belton), the work accentuates the comedy of horror, in scene after scene of over-the-top conflict and intrigue, at times resembling stop-motion animation. It’s fleetingly funny and — thanks in large part to the stark, evocative set by Jay Gower Taylor — visually handsome. But for all its meandering and doubling back, little seems to lie beneath its stylish surfaces.

“Waiting at the Station,” choreographed for the company in 2013, doubles down on a more wholesome kind of fun, bringing us to 1940s New Orleans via colorful costumes and sets by Santo Loquasto and a soulful medley of music by R&B artist Allen Toussaint. Although you might not know it without the program notes, the ballet tells the story of a father (James Yoichi Moore) imparting dance steps to his son (Kuu Sakuragi) before he dies. Both dancers nail their roles with polish and charisma; their solos and interactions are the ballet’s highlights.

With lots of rollicking ensemble work, “Waiting” plateaus on a kind of relentlessly jolly note, even in its funeral scene. Sometimes leaning into loss, as Dove’s work does, feels truer.

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Pacific Northwest Ballet

Through Sunday at David H. Koch Theater; joyce.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.