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Those who are old enough to have seen her may
remember a slender, blonde wisp of a girl with a beautiful smile and lightening bolts in
her toe shoes. Suzanne Farrell, for 25 years something of an icon in the world of dance,
hung up those shoes in 1989 and moved on.
Characterized as a Balanchine
“muse” ad nauseum, she has nevertheless happily accepted the label and devoted
her subsequent career to staging the works of her late mentor (and lover), George
Balanchine, for dance companies around the world as one of a handful of repetiteurs
approved by the Balanchine Trust. Three years ago, she went into business for herself.
The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, resident at the Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts in Washington, DC, made its first visit to the West Coast this week on a
current national tour. From the way things looked Friday night at Zellerbach Hall in
Berkeley, the legacy is in good hands. Farrell’s company of 34 dancers, many of them
with the company since its inception, several of them principals of other prestigious
dance troupes, did Mr. B’s ballets proud. And, if there was a certain repetition to
the choreography – as well as the music, which was three-quarters Tchaikovsky, you
often do get what you pay for. The Berkeley opening was a red-letter event for Farrell in
a way that went far beyond the enthusiastic audience applause. Two days earlier it was
announced that she was one of the recipients of the coveted National Medal of Arts awards
for 2003.
The program opened with
Balanchine’s 1956 Divertimento No. 15, set to the Mozart work of the same
name (K. 287). This was an exercise in not judging a book by its cover. It began
inauspiciously, to say the least, with three men partnering a gaggle of girls in pink
tutus, twirling like so many figurines atop a music box. All very pretty but decidedly
lacking in edge. The choreography becomes more interesting after this full-company
Allegro. Two men (Momchil Mladenov and Alexander Ritter) state the theme, ushering in a
series of six solo variations, each wholly original in a way that made the music seem
visible. Outstanding among these were Frances Katzen’s first variation and the fifth,
performed by danseur Runquiao Du. After a brief minuet by those tutu girls again, we segue
into the Andante, which becomes a kind of pas de six, with three couples taking turns in a
melting and ultimately mesmerizing duet. The ballet concluded with a sprightly finale that
had the company skipping and hopping like kids at play.
Tempo di Valse (1954) is
done to the "Waltz of the Flowers” from The Nutcracker and those
familiar Tchaikovsky strains are a reminder that the season of grumbling Scrooges and
dancing dolls is nearly upon us. The music, however, is just about all this ballet has in
common with the ubiquitous holiday classic. It’s really about time, as the title
suggests, with the corps in diaphanous pink (again) interacting with three soloists,
Bonnie Pickard in white and Katzen and Cheryl Sladkin in blue, in circle dances and joyous
jetes. It was a thing of gossamer beauty.
It was worth the ticket just to
see Jennifer Fournier and Peter Boal in Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, the brief piece
that followed. Fournier is a principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada and Boal
is a principal with New York City Ballet. Both are in their third season of collaboration
with the Farrell troupe. Boal was dazzling in his effortless elevation and electrifying
entrechats. Fournier was his match with quicksilver footwork and dizzying turns. If the
audience needed a shot in the arm after all that pink prettiness, this was it.
But the best was saved for the
last. After a full feast of Balanchine, there could be no better dessert than the 1934 Serenade
to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. This superb ballet certainly
doesn’t show its age and one can only wonder how it struck audiences almost 70 years
ago. The curtain rises on a darkened stage with the corps in filmy white that turns out to
be pale blue when the lights come up. These are no swans or sylphs, however. The movement
is vaguely elegiac and the arms extremely evident, sometimes the only thing moving. Groups
form and re-form with one or two dancers breaking away in interesting patterns.
Eventually, a hint of a plot is thrown out as a couple (Chan Hon Goh and Natalia
Magnicaballi) dance a love duet. Then there is mystery. He leaves and she falls in a faint
and unbinds her long hair. He returns, his eyes covered by another woman in unbound hair
and eventually they are joined by a third. He partners them all, as if trying to choose
between them and then is escorted, sightless, out again. His first love grieves and is
borne off the stage by some men. Did she die or was she abandoned? Is it a re-telling of
the Orpheus legend? It matters little. The dancing was all.
November 15, 2003 – Suzanne Weiss
