PNB's "Caught" in the act of flying — kind of

David Parsons' "Caught," part of Pacific Northwest Ballet's upcoming "Contemporary Classics" program, is only six minutes long — but it's a stunner.

This 1982 piece opens with a solo dancer moving from spotlight to spotlight through an assortment of "test movements," trying out a rapping motion, a spin or two, an "attacking monster" pose, a dream of flight ...

And then flight happens. Literally. With no strings or wires attached.

In a series of strobe-lit "snapshots," the dancer levitates across the stage without touching it once. Leaps, tilts and midair splits are "caught" as if no effort led up to them. To Robert Fripp's score of phased electric guitars, the dancer appears to stay impossibly airborne.

Parsons Dance Company brought the work to town earlier this year, and you can watch Parsons himself perform it on DVD, over and over again if you like, on "The Parsons Dance Company" (Image Entertainment, $24.99).

You won't get tired of it.

And you won't be able to stop wondering: How'd they do that?

One clue: Turn up the sound on the DVD, and you'll hear some gymnastic-hard thumping going on during those dark intervals.

I wanted to see what happened in the dark for myself, and two weeks ago I had the luck to sit in on a rehearsal of "Caught" at PNB's headquarters at Seattle Center. Three dancers — Noelani Pantastico, Jonathan Porretta, Olivier Wevers — went through it one after another, sans strobe light, with ballet master Otto Neubert.

Wevers, who danced it at PNB's season-opening gala in September, gave tips to Pantastico, who is newer to the role. Porretta, who attacked it with knife-sharp precision and at lightning speed, was occasionally instructed by Neubert to slow down certain movements.

Without a strobe light, the cue for the piece's "snapshot" moments was supplied by the dancer's own fingersnapping. The dancers "marked" or feinted some of the bolder leaps but took others full on, including four levitational splits in rapid succession.

There was good reason for the dancers to conserve their energy in this early stage of rehearsal. "Caught" requires something like 70 jumps in its last three minutes, Neubert said, and the effort needed to keep the dancer "airborne" is phenomenal.

"You don't have to jump so high," Neubert noted. "But you do have to travel."

There's a lot of stage to cover as the dancer "flies" in the last half of the piece.

Wevers, getting ahead of the music at one point, took a break — and then grinned at how "easy" all those jumps would be if you had a five-minute intermission in the middle of the piece. He also suggested a way to make the traveling between jumps more of a shuffle than a leap.

"We'll just rechoreograph it," he joked.

"I try to use absolutely no energy in the whole beginning," Porretta said.

In his DVD commentary, Parsons explains that "Caught" emanated from his enjoyment of technology and photography, his "fascination with catching time" and his desire to employ "whole different vocabularies for every piece that I create."

"I knew there must be some way to catch a dancer in the air," he adds. "It's a technological piece."

Jaime Martinez, former associate artistic director of Parsons Dance Company, staged the piece for PNB, and the dancers were guided in part by a video of Martinez performing it. Porretta added that some of the dancers went to YouTube to track down Parsons' own performance.

"Caught" is such a signature work for Parsons Dance Company that Parsons is a little "possessive" about it, Neubert admitted. Not that many other dance companies perform it. And some of the piece's technical mysteries stay firmly in place.

After Porretta comments that the piece will be easier to do once he and his colleagues have the strobe light to work with, I ask the dancers what kind of "snapshot" cue will replace their own fingersnapping once they're up onstage.

"We're not allowed to say," Porretta grins at me.

"It's a secret," Pantastico confirms.

"But we take bribes," Wevers smiles.

"I call it witchery," Porretta concludes with relish.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com