Dance Review - All Lang (Pacific Northwest Ballet)

Stage Review — All Lang
Presented By: Pacific Northwest Ballet - Seattle, WA
Show Run: May 29 – June 7, 2026
Date Reviewed: May 29, 2026
Run Time: Approximately 2 hours, including two 20 minute intermissions.
Reviewed By: Tucker Cholvin

Pacific Northwest Ballet has reached the beginning of the end of what has been a long goodbye. Over the last nine months, PNB has reminded audiences that it’s the final season for Elizabeth Murphy and Lucien Postlewaite, longtime tentpoles of the company. To send them off, the company presents All Lang, composed exclusively of Jessica’s Lang, with whom they also have a deep rapport.

As PNB’s resident choreographer since 2024, Lang has a deep relationship with the company, ambition, and huge range as a choreographer. Her pieces presented here, Her Door to the Sky, Ghost Variations, and ZigZag, show a choreographer who draws inspiration from every source available, and who is a keen observer – and illustrator – of human emotion.

Her Door to the Sky pays homage to Georgia O’Keefe. The influence is obvious, from the set design to the O’Keefe-esque pastels on the costumes. Long, flowing dresses that swirl and undulate call to mind the lush curves in her paintings of flowers. Lang also uses the set to great effect. Dancers shift from watching to being watched, through square windows cut out in the backdrop. Are they portraits hanging at a gallery? Are we the piece, and they are the visitors, looking in? Lang uses this device to turn the piece upside down over and over again, slipping back and forth through the portal like Alice through the looking glass.

Ghost Variations also highlights Lang’s clever ability to use set design to magnify her choreography. In the first movement, a dancer appears on a dark stage, while the shadows of other dancers play behind him, illuminated on the backdrop. Sometimes they mirror each other, sometimes they diverge; other characters float in and out of the shadow world and the foreground. It’s haunting, and the other movements also seem to speak to the many other ways that people are haunted – by longing, by regret, or paranoid frenzy. Each are depicted with care and precision.

The final piece of the evening, ZigZag, is a sharp turn. The piece, a series of dances set to ten Tony Bennett songs, immediately invites comparison to Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs, which PNB presented earlier this season. The comparison is not always flattering. Some dances fall flat where some dancers seem to lack the theatricality or the charisma to sell a style of dance that is more American Bandstand than ballet. Other overly complicated group numbers called to mind the end of Hairspray more than the ballet.

But towards the end of the piece, the energy intensified and connected more frequently. I would go see this piece again just to see Angelica Generosa and Noah Martzell, both of whom were selling it harder than a used car salesman at the end of the month up there. I also think I said “Oh my God” out loud twice during this piece, which is always a good metric of how much fun one is having at the ballet; it was when Kali Kleiman did the worm onstage, and when Rosalyn Hutsell did much the same thing but while lifted seven feet in the air. It rocked, and moments like these ultimately outshone others when the energy sagged.

PNB is lucky to have Jessica Lang in its corner, and vice versa. Her work is thoughtful and rich, made more so by the depth of the relationship between the choreographer and the company. Though PNB is losing some of its leading lights to retirement after this season, this show leaves you eager to see more when the next begins.

All Lang, from Pacific Northwest Ballet, runs on stage through June 7. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit https://www.pnb.org/.

Photo credit: Angela Sterling