Washington Ballet’s Frontier

This may appeal to others besides myself. I wish I could see it. From the Washington Post:

“Okay, you walk — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven — and kneel on eight,” Stiefel tells Sarah Steele, a willowy, dark-eyed 22-year-old. She was recently hired as an apprentice, and Stiefel plucked her from that bottom rank to star in his ballet. Her courage at the outset of rehearsals attracted him. She possesses, he says, “the essence of a strong, brave artist.”

“You have a full eight counts to zip,” he continues. “Then you’ll get lifted. Turn on four, arms on five. Four counts for the gloves. . . . Lift on five; six, you get into the backpack.”

Steele and the dancer-crew members who are helping her dress eye him intently, tallying up the counts in their heads. The first few run-throughs are rocky — Steele’s zipper snags on the waistband of her tights, the gloves don’t cooperate. The helmet strap must be snapped — oh, where is it, where’s that dang other end? — and, meanwhile, the cyber beats in the commissioned music are racing on. Ah, at last, success! Well, the helmet’s a little askew. But Steele stands triumphant, ready for takeoff, fists clenched at her sides in the ready position.

“This is going to work,” Stiefel assures his dancers. “This will be absolutely no problem. We have two weeks to work on it.”

[. . .]

Ethan Stiefel’s new work for the Washington Ballet, “Frontier,” is about astronauts and space travel. The dancers wear spacesuits. They’re sleek, tailored, zip-up affairs, vaguely authentic looking, as though NASA and New York’s Seventh Avenue met and made a onesie.

In fact, that is what happened. Stiefel calls it “a wild, serendipitous coming-together” that led to his collaboration with Ted Southern, owner of a company that creates spacesuits and safety garments, and Southern’s wife, fashion designer Flora Gill, who founded the womenswear label Ohne Titel and once designed for Karl Lagerfeld.

“Frontier” will have its world premiere May 25, with performances continuing through May 27 at the Kennedy Center Opera House. It tells the story of a group of ASCANS — the NASA acronym for astronaut candidates — and flight technicians preparing for a mission, and the stage effects include a rocket launch and travel to a distant planet.

Just 25 minutes long, the ballet is a big event for everyone involved, but especially for Stiefel, the retired American Ballet Theatre star who is unveiling his first major commission as a choreographer, and for Washington Ballet Artistic Director Julie Kent, who asked Stiefel, her friend and former dance partner, to tie his ballet to the Kennedy Center’s John F. Kennedy centennial celebration. That’s where the space theme came from, reflecting the former president’s expansion of the space program.

[. . .]

With spacesuits, it’s easy to get into the sci-fi aesthetic or wander too far in the David Bowie direction. At the get-go, Stiefel told the designers that he wasn’t after glitter gods and that they should avoid design details on the shoulders and hips, please — no dancer wants to draw attention there.

More at the Washington Post.