Hip-hop's energy and vitality stayed with choreographer as he moved into ballet

Victor Quijada, whose "Suspension of Disbelief" will be premiered Thursday night by Pacific Northwest Ballet, is articulate, passionate, committed about dance. And from all accounts, possesses plenty of talent. However, that is not what makes him stand apart from the basic pool of young and ambitious choreographers.

COMING UP

PACIFIC NORTHWEST BALLET

PROGRAM: Ulysses Dove's "Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven," Peter Martins' "Valse Triste," Victor Quijada's "Suspension of Disbelief" and Twyla Tharp's "Waterbaby Bagatelles"

WHEN: Thursday through Nov. 12

WHERE: McCaw Hall

TICKETS: $18-$145; 206-441-2424 or www.pnb.org

What does are his beginnings as a hip-hop dancer in Los Angeles, without a thought of modern dance much less ballet. He was very young and imaginative, spinning out his ideas on the street and in clubs before hip-hop became as popular as it is today. His epiphany came when he entered Los Angeles High School for the Arts, where he discovered the sort of music and dance he had not previously encountered. He was transfixed and transformed. But the energy and vitality of hip-hop stayed with him.

"It still influences me," he said, as he has moved as a dancer in companies like Twyla Tharp, Eliot Feld, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal to his own company, Rubberbanddance Group, a name taken from a nickname -- Rubberband -- given to him when he was 15 because he was so flexible.

He choreographed along the way, winning prizes and commissions. His first connection with Peter Boal, now artistic director of PNB, came when they shared a dressing room in New York for a benefit, and Quijada, smelling an opportunity, managed to get a tape of his work to him. That landed the choreographer a commission with Peter Boal & Company, then PNB.

Hip-hop's influence on him, Quijada said, was not just its movement style but how it shaped his view of the world. "In hip-hop, I found a way to express myself. This is hard to explain because hip-hop evolved into a mass culture media frenzy. What I mean when I use the word is the way we identified our passion -- that we had something to say. It was something out of nothing, out of necessity to move and to say something.

"If I had been born a few years earlier (Quijada is about 30), it would have been punk rock or rock 'n' roll or, if earlier, jazz or bebop. For my generation it was hip-hop, a very specific moment in time. Sometimes I try to shy away from using that word because it doesn't make sense anymore."

Among the differences he found between the ballet he discovered and the hip-hop he knew was that the classical world represents "an ideal," while the latter was raw. The interesting thing, he added, is how those two experiences "blended through him so that the refined is now mixed with the raw."

One of the hardest things he has ever done, the choreographer said, is to learn the complex language of ballet. "This represents 300 years of technique that has been refined and built upon. There is a perfect way of doing it. In contrast, the place -- street dancing -- where I came from we did what we did: The most important point is what you had in you and how you did it."

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