Just two years ago, during Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 2021–22 season opener, some real existential questions loomed over McCaw Hall: Would audiences return to ballet after Covid-19 put a worrying pause on all live events? Would live performance art even continue to exist? And could the company bounce back after losing a large swath of its principal dancers to retirement and relocation?

The answer to each of those questions was, thankfully, yes. So now what? Having undergone a few years of transition, PNB heads into its third post-lockdown season riding on what feels like a bit of tailwind. The newer additions to the principal cohort, tasked with filling the shoes of some of the company’s most beloved veterans, are coming into their own. And behind them is an exciting group of dancers, now more than 50 percent Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, according to reporting in Crosscut.

They’re young. They’re fun. They’re diverse. The three performances in PNB’s 2023–24 season opener highlight the company’s strengths, and make for a loose, crowd-pleasing night of ballet.

In previous seasons, opening night typically saw a pre-show speech from PNB artistic director Peter Boal, in which he’d welcome the audience to the new season and preview what was to come. This year, there was an immediacy to the proceedings. The curtains instead rose on six shirtless male dancers holding swords. Always a good sign.

The swords were in fact fencing foils, and in these opening moments of Jiří Kylián’s Petite Mort, the dancers—anchored by one of the few remaining veteran principals Lucien Postlewaite—cut through the air like children playing pretend, rolled the foils with their feet in fascination, negotiated around them like fellow dancing partners, dangled them by fingertips, all set to a wistful Mozart piano concerto; like boys playing in front of a bedroom mirror, innocently examining their, well, weapons.

When the dancers’ real partners appeared from the shadows, in costuming reminiscent of bustiers, Petite Mort fully became a ballet with bedroom eyes: soft light and sharp shadows, like candlelight, carving out muscle contours with negative space. Different pairings each brought their own unique dynamic. Like corps members Mark Cuddihee and Ashton Edwards, with Edwards—who is nonbinary—dancing the traditionally female role, reaching angles with striking grace and athleticism. Or Dammiel Cruz-Garrido, one of the company’s more physically imposing dancers, moving beautifully with the petite but no-less-powerful Clara Ruf Maldonado, together hitting one of the memorable moments of the night: Maldonado holding up Cruz-Garrido by her legs, their arms outstretched to form a shape reminiscent of a full set of lips.

Not to make the opener to PNB’s 51st season, or this reviewer for that matter, sound too hot and bothered. Petite Mort would set the tone for the rest of the evening by remaining laugh-out-loud funny throughout. Particularly when ridiculous black dresses got wheeled out as props, dancers’ heads popping up above the necklines like photo op dioramas at some sort of baroque tourist attraction.

The black dresses made an appearance in the middle performance as well, a second Mozart ballet from Kylián, in conversation with the first. Where Petite Mort held a private playfulness, Sechs Tänze (Six Dances) had the bawdiness of a lewd eighteenth century play. The portrayal of Mozart in the film Amadeus comes to mind, all farce and unselfconscious body humor. Gone were Petite Mort’s negligees, in favor of dancers who seemed to have been caught somewhere in the middle of undress: breeches and powdered wigs that would poof a cloud of white with every leap, and petticoats to twirl and lift in faux shock.

PNB leveraged some of its most charismatic dancers here. Miles Pertl, Elle Macy, and Leta Biasucci really played for the back of the house with their movements and big theater kid energy. There were bubbles. And at the end dancers struck a shrug, as if to say, “We did our best!” The two preteen boys sitting a few rows behind me ate this one up. And you certainly can’t always say that for a triple bill of modern ballet.

And the headliner of the night, Alexander Ekman’s Cacti, was some real capital M modern ballet: art in conversation with itself, composed to question the search for meaning and deny that meaning via absurdity. What will the critics write, the ballet asks, literally, in voiceover, about the symbolism of this dance filled with phallic desert flora. If that sounds like a snore, Cacti leaps over its own pretentiousness by being broadly funny. At one point, a cat literally falls from the rafters.

The standout of the piece, and of the night at-large, was the pas de deux featuring Christian Poppe and Sarah-Gabrielle Ryan. Set to another pre-recorded voiceover, the pair "talk" through their rehearsal of sorts. “Put your head here,” Poppe says, plopping Ryan’s head on his arm. “How about I put my knee...there!” Ryan retorts. “This part’s weird,” Poppe muses, and then does a part that is, in fact, weird.

Their dance really nailed the messiness of both creative collaboration with another person and of negotiating with your own brain in the creative process. And its playfulness and personality, present throughout Cacti, put a nice capstone on a night that really was pretty damn silly. That’s not a pejorative. The opposite!

PNB opened its previous season with Carmina Burana, a piece of music that is shorthand for epic, complete with a full choir on stage. This year PNB’s opener ended with professional dancers frozen in rigid positions holding cacti like visiting aliens trying to blend into the landscape at Joshua Tree.

For a season that will feature plenty of “serious” ballet, this opening statement felt refreshing, loose, and confident. The energy was palpable leaving McCaw Hall into the clear Friday night. Ballet is back!