Dance Review — Ghost Stories
Presented By: Pacific Northwest Ballet
Show Run: November 06 – November 15, 2026
Date Reviewed: November 6, 2026 (Opening Night)
Run Time: 2 Hours, 6 Minutes (including two 20 minute intermissions)
Reviewed By: Tucker Cholvin
Each year on the day after Halloween, Americans observe a tradition as widespread and culturally significant as Halloween itself. On November 1, every single drugstore and big box store jettisons their candy and spooky décor, and starts hawking Christmas decorations and gifts. It’s like Halloween never even happened. So Pacific Northwest Ballet’s choice to double down on spooky season with their latest bill, Ghost Stories, cuts against the seasonal grain. Combining more modern pieces, a new work by a PNB dancer, and a rarely staged Balanchine piece, it’s a variety mix.
The program is on its strongest footing with its two pieces by Alejandro Cerrudo, starting with the aptly named Silent Ghost. Dancers shift quickly through patterns and moods, sometimes fluid, sometimes jerky and angular; the constant change grabs and holds attention. For much of the piece, the dancers fall in and out tight unison. When they dance together, it’s mesmerizing and lovely; when they fall out, the piece feels lonely and isolated. Special mention should go here to the lighting design by Michael Korsch, which is practically an onstage character in itself. Liminal, and dusky, it elevated the entire piece.
So, if you liked that, and you also really enjoy male nudity, PACOPEPEPLUTO is going to be the highlight of your night. This short piece features three male dancers twisting around the stage to the swingy crooning of Dean Martin, clad in what would, in any other context, be described as very skimpy thongs. For a sizeable segment of PNB’s audience (of which I count myself a member), this alone would justify the ticket price. Helpfully, the dancing is very good too. Some moments in this piece felt like dancing drunk and alone in your kitchen at 1AM: woozy, private, and saturated in sappy emotion. Other moments had the frantic, bouncing energy that I can only imagine is what it must be like to be very high on crystal meth. The contrast and intensity of emotion had me under a brief spell, and Friday night’s dancers (Noah Martzall, Christopher D’Ariano, and Jonathan Batista) nailed it.
Unfortunately, this was the night’s high-water mark. A new adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, choreographed by PNB’s own Kyle Davis, is a very earnest work that struggles to find its footing, narratively and visually. A few times, dancers seemed to struggle to execute some of the lifts that Davis had assigned them; in other cases, the choreography given to them is very repetitive, or dancers are merely standing around, watching other dancers. The piece seemed to leave a lot of the emotional depth and mania available in the poem untapped.
Balanchine’s La Sonnambula rounds out the night on a mysterious note. Balanchine is not chiefly remembered for narrative ballets and maybe this is why. There are a few classically Balanchine notes in the piece: big group tableaux, presented in pleasing geometries. But the piece itself is wrapped inside of a plot that is opaque, and which can challenge modern tastes. A divertissement featuring two dancers in cartoonish Middle Eastern garb did not sit comfortably, and the central plotline a man of romancing a woman who is ostensibly asleep also doesn’t align easily with modern cultural mores. If the work itself was more interesting, these concerns would be easier to paper over.
As a whole, the show is more strange than spooky. In offering a little bit of everything, the program ends up feeling a bit incoherent. Much like the CVS Pharmacy up Mercer Street from PNB, maybe it’s best to just put out the Christmas lights as soon as possible.
Ghost Stories, presented by the Pacific Northwest Ballet, runs on stage at McCaw Hall in Seattle through November 15. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit https://www.pnb.org/.
Photo credit: Angela Sterling
