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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Suzanne Farrell: Ballet, by George

By Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to the Washington Post
October 25, 2002

Starting a ballet company from scratch in today's inhospitable climate is harder than planting a garden on rock in a drought. The financial barriers alone are prohibitive, and the American establishment's crashing disinterest in anything that isn't mass market or pop culture sinks nascent ventures before they're born.

Suzanne Farrell had a simple idea: stage the ballets of her mentor George Balanchine the way she felt the great choreographer intended them to be staged, teach dancers to hear music as he did, coach them to serve the work, and challenge them as artists. The artistic vision has been steadfast; what the company has needed is administrative structure and support, and this, as it opens its third season, it's finally getting.

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet is now "an ongoing project of the Kennedy Center." (The Center's President, Michael Kaiser, describes himself as Farrell's "strategic consultant and champion"). Although the week at the Kennedy Center is the company's only engagement this year, there are plans for extensive touring next season. More important, for the first time, the company is dancing to live music.

Past seasons have been uneven, with a dancers-in-Candyland approach to casting: everybody gets to do everything. The results have varied widely, from workshop quality one night to transcendent the next. This year, things have settled down, and from the moment the curtain went up on Balanchine's "Raymonda Variations" (1961) Wednesday night in the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater, despite opening night nerves and a few raggedy moments by the corps, the company looked like a company.

"Raymonda Variations," with its small corps of women in fluffy pink ballet skirts, dancing classical variations to the lush, late 19th century music of Glazunov, looks like a cotton candy ballet. But the variations are killers, and the young soloists went for it-- big jumps, every movement danced to the fullest -- in true Balanchine style.

Choo Hon Goh, on loan from the National Ballet of Canada, and Peter Boal, of New York City Ballet and one of the great male classical dancers of the age, took the leading roles. Goh is a delicate and subtle dancer, not ideally suited to such a bravura role, but her dancing was beautifully articulated. Boal was as courtly as one could wish as her cavalier, and danced his solos with clean lines and a beautiful legato flow.

Having set the table for classical ballet, Farrell then changed gears and served up a modern dance work, by Canadian choreographer Anthony Morgan, as the season's novelty. Morgan is also on the faculty of the University of Florida, where Farrell teaches, and his "A Farewell to Music" (threat or promise?), to the adagio movement of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A major, was created for his students there. And that's just what it looks like -- a pleasant, inoffensive piece that lets the dancers run around barelegged and barefoot, with their hair unbound, and lunge, roll, and slide on the floor.

Morgan's technique is Graham-based, and this dance looks like something made in 1950. The four women and one man, in little white dresses, coped with the material very well, considering modern dance's use of weight and balance is foreign to their training.

The work that caused the most comment was Farrell's staging of Balanchine's last ballet, "Variations for Orchestra" (1982). This is a solo for Farrell (an earlier work to the same music, played three times, had been for Farrell and a male corps) that used all her qualities as a dancer: her flexibility and remarkable off-center balances, as well as personal idiosyncrasies.

Farrell has said that she felt it was difficult to remain interesting dancing alone for eight minutes, and perhaps this is why she's added a virtual friend for the soloist (the excellent Bonnie Picard). A projection of a dancer -- looking eerily like Farrell, although it is not -- appears behind Pickard. At times their movements are so synchronized that the projection looks like Pickard's shadow, at others the Shadow looms above Picard, three times life-sized, and the movement is just a bit off--different timing, a different angle. Is the Shadow playing with Pickard? Commenting on the dancing? Guiding her?

At the end, the shadow takes the final bow. It's quite witty, though some may think Farrell has taken an unwarranted liberty.

The program closed with Balanchine's Broadway ballet, "Who Cares?" set to Gershwin songs, orchestrated by Hershy Kay, with costumes (the unbeloved screaming lime and aqua ones) and scenery on loan from the San Francisco Ballet. It's a great showpiece for an ensemble; five couples open the ballet and have a considerable amount of Broadway-inflected dancing . But the heart of the "Who Cares?" belongs to three female and one male soloist, and here, there were casting problems.

Asking Runqiao Du to dance the male lead--a softshoe man who's all big jumps and big teeth--is like asking a cat to bark. Du was technically fine as a partner in the three difficult duets,, but his soft, clean dancing just doesn't work in that solo Natalia Magnicaballi looked lost in "My One and Only;" Jennifer Fournier danced well, if woodenly, in "The Man I Love." The one soloist who looked as though she was having a good time was Shannon Parsley, a big, bold dancer, who tore through "Stairway to Paradise" like a Broadway ballerina.

The company dances through Sunday afternoon.