Photos:
1, 3, 4: Pacific Northwest Ballet performing Her Door to the Sky. Photo by Hayim Heron. Dancer in 3: Elizabeth Murphy.
2, 6: Pacific Northwest Ballet performing Her Door to the Sky. Dancers Elle Macy and Dylan Waldin. Photo by Angela Sterling
5: Pacific Northwest Ballet performing Her Door to the Sky. Photo by Christopher Duggan.
7: Pacific Northwest Ballet performing Her Door to the Sky. dancers(l-r) Cecilia Iliesiu, Elle Macy,Angelica Generosa, and Leta Biasucciin. Photo by Angela Sterling.
Video: Pacific Northwest Ballet performing Her Door to the Sky at McCaw Hall, 2017.
Her Door to the Sky
Choreography: Jessica Lang
Music: Benjamin Britten
Set Design: Jessica Lang
Costume Design: Bradon McDonald
Lighting Design: Nicole Pearce
Length: 21 minutes
Number of Dancers: 10
Commissioned by Pacific Northwest Ballet and Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival
World premiere: August 24, 2016 at the Ted Shawn Theater at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.
"The evening opens with “Her Door to the Sky,” inspired by O’Keeffe’s Patio Door paintings. For audience members unfamiliar with O’Keeffe’s work, the reference is by no means a prerequisite. It functions much more as an open invitation. Moreover, the program doesn’t ask that you decode a painting, but to feel the experience of looking through one. It’s a doorway, a frame, a field of color, an opening into space. Lang’s choreography is spacious and luminous, giving the dancers the quality of figures moving through a landscape rather than simply across a stage. Bodies gather, separate, and reform with a painterly sense of composition, and the costumes of differing, vibrant gradients were gorgeous to see in motion.
The work felt abstract, but not inaccessible. Its beauty lies in how clearly it communicates the atmosphere. Even without a plot, the audience could understand the sensation of openness, stillness, and horizon. Ballet here becomes a visual art of its own, translating the feeling of one medium into another."
- Jolene Pollich, The Daily
June 4, 2026 All Lang Program Full Review
"To capture the nature of visual art in physical movement is no easy feat, yet in the clean balance of elements, the sense of light and color, and the steps that erupt with their own whim, Lang paints the spirit of O’Keeffe’s work. Sweeping, arching port de bra (as in one lovely moment where a canon of arms in fifth repeatedly arc across the sky like flowers following the sun) and a plethora of rounded limbs brushing the dear earth and sky, echo O’Keeffe’s forms. Often spatially and rhythmically separated to recall the clean spacing of O’Keeffe’s work, dancers build a lively energy in folk-like prancing and a burst of rhythm, as delicate footwork spurred on by flighty strings pricks the soil and settles into a soulful refrain. Like O’Keeffe’s work itself, Her Door to the Sky contains ancestral forms and a newly-born, fresh-eyed refinement beneath Nicole Pearce’s New Mexican sunshine."
- Seattle Ballet Journal,
June 4, 2026 All Lang Program Full Review
"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."
- Tucker Chovlin, The Sound on Stage
May 29, 2026
"The result is a stately, visually arresting dance that remains beautiful after multiple viewings."
- Marcie Sillman, ... And Another Thing!
June 1, 2026 All Lang Program Full review
"Opening night, Her Door to the Sky by Jessica Lang is a tribute to the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe and more particularly to the series Patio Door realized between 1946 and 1956. Evoking moments of folk dances, this piece is well built, alternating overall movements, duets and solos in a balanced way. Women are at the center of this dance. The dancers of Pacific Northwest Ballet shine with a great intensity, including Sarah Ricard Orza who wins with gentleness but determination. Bradon McDonald's tye-dye fluid dresses swirl and unfurl like flowers to the rhythm of movement, jumps and staves. It is dance that is contemplated... soothing and full of poetry."
- Claudine Colozzi, Danses avec la plumbe, July 6, 2018
“a work that creates a sort of celestial mood, like it's floating on a cloud.”
- Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times
March 20, 2017
“a rushing flow of smooth, kaleidoscopic movement.”
- Philippa Kiraly, The SunBreak
March 19, 2017
“The piece has the feeling of a dream...”
- Deborah Jowitt, ArtsJournal
August 28, 2016
Performance History:
Pacific Northwest Ballet
July 24-28, 2016 in Beckett, MA
March 17-26, 2017 in Seattle, WA
November 3-12, 2017 in Seattle, WA
July 4, 5 & 7, 2018 in Paris, France
May 29 - June 7, 2026 in Seattle, WA (ALL LANG PROGRAM)
Indiana University
April 3-4, 2026 in Bloomington, IN