Preston Singletary, the acclaimed Seattle-based glass artist whose designs merge his Tlingit cultural heritage and contemporary fine art techniques, never thought he’d be designing a ballet.
“It’s a pretty unexpected opportunity that popped up,” he said, at his South Lake Union studio this summer. About two years ago, Pacific Northwest Ballet Artistic Director Peter Boal approached Singletary, asking if he might be interested in designing sets and props for the company’s new production of “The Sleeping Beauty,” due on stage in January 2025.
“I said, ‘Sure, why not!’” Singletary remembered. He joined an acclaimed team that also included costume designer Paul Tazewell (“Hamilton,” PNB’s “Swan Lake”), Broadway projections designer Wendall K. Harrington, PNB’s resident lighting designer Reed Nakayama and New York-based puppet designer Basil Twist. For Singletary, whose work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institute, the British Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Seattle Art Museum (to name only a few), it was a chance to try something quite different — “a great adventure,” as he put it — and to bring his aesthetic to a new art form.
Boal, in a telephone interview, said that he had followed Singletary’s works for some time over the past few years, and was particularly intrigued by “Raven and the Box of Daylight,” an exhibition that debuted at Tacoma’s Museum of Glass in 2018 and has since become a traveling exhibition. The show tells how Raven gave light to the world by begging for boxes, owned by a wealthy man, that contained the sun, the moon and the stars. Boal thought the show, with its glowing glass boxes, showed an eye for scenic design — creating a world on a theater stage — and “that sort of piqued my interest in what the possibility would be for Preston to work as a scenic designer.”
The two men met by chance, at a dinner, “and I just liked Preston at first meeting and thought, this might be interesting.” Boal thought it might be fascinating “for Preston to have his take and his mode of expression, finding where parallels might lie between this old ballet lore and some of the Tlingit heritage and lore.”
Singletary said that the initial brief from Boal was that he wanted to step away from the traditional old-world setting of the fairy tale — “he was thinking ‘Game of Thrones’. . . a look that was kind of classic and European but also modern in a weird way.” Bringing his own cultural references to the mix, Singletary devised the idea of a massive platform in the shape of an eagle that would dominate the stage, with the wings providing stairs on either side, “like a big entrance to some sort of mansion.” The enormous set piece will be on stage for every scene, though during Aurora’s long sleep, it will be concealed with hanging branches.
The eagle, along with the raven, is a key symbol in the Tlingit Nation; the two symbols represent the two moieties, or lineages, into which the nation’s clans are split. When Carabosse, the wicked fairy, arrives at Princess Aurora’s christening, “she’s represented as a raven” in the costume design, Singletary said. “In Tlingit culture, the raven is the trickster, and he has a big role in all the mythologies . . . The eagle is the opposite side, so in a way we have this symbolic balance.” The designs, he said, bring a little Native mythology into the piece.
The idea isn’t to create a world that is entirely recognizable as Native American — this is, ultimately, a fairy tale — but to bring some intriguing cultural references to an old story. Singletary said that a specific Northwest Coast Indigenous design element called formline — in which curving lines outline U-shapes and ovoids — is used on some of the set pieces, and inspired some details on Tazewell’s costumes as well. And the glass boxes of “Raven and the Box of Daylight” inspired the look of the gifts given by the fairies to the infant Aurora — “they’ll have lights inside them, as if they are containing some kind of virtue that they are trying to bestow.” (They’ll be plexiglass, though; real glass is too much of a hazard on stage.)
Though “Sleeping Beauty” won’t open for several months (the production will run from Jan. 31 through Feb. 9, 2025 at McCaw Hall), much of the work is complete, though painting and final details continue. “We thought we had a lot of lead time, but of course, it’s such a huge amount of work!” Singletary said. At a staging rehearsal in mid-September, the eagle was safely landed on the vast McCaw Hall stage, and details — a wooden boat in which the Prince and Lilac Fairy are transported; a sword inspired by a Tlingit dagger; a thicket of painted forest, in vivid greens and browns, framing the stage; an ever-shifting array of projections depicting lush fairy-tale world — were beginning to come together.
Singletary has numerous other projects underway: “Raven and the Box of Daylight” continues to tour, and he’s developing more ideas around the Raven mythology; he’s working with artist David Franklin on a site-specific work of public art in Pioneer Square; and his band Khu.éex’ just released its fifth album, with a documentary about the group soon to be completed.
He’s enjoyed the challenge of taking on something entirely new — something that, as it turns out, isn’t that far from what’s always fascinated him in his work: mythology and storytelling, whether expressed in evocative blown glass or on a ballet stage. “It really fits right in with my thought process,” he said. Like fairy tales, the Tlingit mythologies all teach a moral, and imbue objects with symbolism.
“When you understand the archetypes of things in terms of psychology, in a Joseph Campbell sort of perspective, that’s why it’s been really fun to operate on this level with the ballet, to add to my experience around that,” Singletary said. Comparing the fairy-tale story with Tlingit mythology is “what’s really guided me along this whole process.”