Where Were You Sitting?

Mixed Messages

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet
"Mozartiana," “Divertimento Brillante ," “Scene d’amour” from Bejart’s “Romeo et Juliet,” and "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue"
Opera House
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
June 8, 2007

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 2007 by Alexandra Tomalonis

Suzanne Farrell is taking the slow, careful road to building a ballet company. Rather than bringing in stars and have them dance whatever they dance, she’s training dancers to support her vision for the troupe, and it’s beginning to pay off. Every year, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet looks more like a company. This year, in “Scotch Symphony,” the corps was much stronger than it’s been on previous outings, and danced cohesively. It's beginning to develop an identity, a School. Couple this with Farrell’s gifts as a stager, her ability to show the outline of a ballet clearly from its first outing (and fill in the details later, if necessary), and an evening at the Suzanne Farrell Ballet is a wonderful way to enjoy sophisticated choreography. The downside is that, until these dancers develop into principals, or Farrell can, or will, use established dancers as part of her ensemble, those details are sometimes marred by underpowered dancing, and that was, unfortunately, often the case this week.

A Nearly Lost Masterpiece Settles In: "Balanchine's Don Quixote"

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet (with The National Ballet of Canada)
Opera House, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC, USA
June 23 and June 25, 2005 (matinee)

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright ©2005 by Alexandra Tomalonis

For those of us who hadn’t seen Balanchine’s “Don Quixote” when it was in the repertory of the New York City Ballet in the 1960s and ‘70s, this week was a wonderful opportunity to discover a “new” Balanchine ballet. It’s a very rich, complex work, and it’s not surprising that the opening night performance lacked detail. The ballet had begun to tighten at its second performance Thursday; by the Saturday matinee (the last I saw) it was definitely beginning to jell.

Starting Over

Suzanne Farrell Ballet
Eisenhower Theater
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
December 2-7, 2003

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 2003 by Alexandra Tomalonis

Watching the Suzanne Farrell Ballet this past week, I kept thinking that what Farrell is doing goes beyond starting a ballet company from scratch. She's reminding us of why Balanchine's New York City Ballet was so treasured and so important. I don't mean to say that she's doing this deliberately. It's more likely she's merely trying to produce dance as though the aesthetic atmosphere Balanchine built were still in place.  For her, it clearly is. But the rest of us have lived through two decades during which not only his ballets, but also many of Balanchine's precepts, have become misunderstood or distorted. "Just dance it, dear," for example, once an instruction to resist layering artificial acting onto movement whose meaning was built in, now seems to mean, "just do the steps; nothing else matters," and is applied religiously to ballets that, indeed, contain nothing but steps. Everything is so overhyped that Balanchine's, and Farrell's, modest way of simply doing and letting the rest of the world figure out what they're doing—or not—can seem naive. It's hard enough to be heard when you're whispering. It's impossible when everyone around you is screaming.

Dancing to Tchaikovsky

All Tchaikovsky Evening
Suzanne Farrell Ballet
Eisenhower Theater
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
[December 2-7, 2003]
December 2, 2003

by Alexandra Tomalonis
copyright © 2003 by Alexandra Tomalonis

"For dancing, always Tchaikovsky,” Balanchine is said to have said once, and Tchaikovsky’s music certainly figures prominently in his work. From Serenade, the first ballet he choreographed in America, to Mozartiana, which received its premiere at the New York City Ballet’s Tchaikovsky Festival in 1981, Tchaikovsky’s music inspired some of Balanchine’s most beautiful ballets.