Thanks to a Protégée, Power in Rarely Seen Balanchine

<First published online in the New York Times on November 27, 2007>

WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — The story of the ballerina Suzanne Farrell and the choreographer George Balanchine — so central to the development of the art of ballet from the early 1960s until his death in 1983 — is still in progress. These days Ms. Farrell runs a ballet company based at the Kennedy Center here, and though she has presented works by other choreographers, she is in the vanguard of restoring to the stage ballets by Balanchine that have long passed undanced.

For this “Balanchine Preservation Initiative” and other reasons, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet is one of the most courageous projects in ballet today. Watching the final performances of its presentation from last Tuesday through Sunday, I could not help wishing it were larger, able to rehearse longer and culled from the pick of dancers schooled in Balanchine style and technique.

But I could no less help applauding the way in which dancers, tackling arduous roles for the first time, were delivering them with degrees of energy, scale, detailed nuance and musical sophistication seldom found anywhere. Ron J. Matson, a long-term colleague of Ms. Farrell’s, conducted the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra in scores ranging from Gluck to Xenakis in performances of real eloquence and style.

The company has danced ballets by the two other choreographers who are part of the Farrell story, Maurice Béjart and Jerome Robbins, and an announcement before Friday’s performance noted Mr. Béjart’s recent death by lovingly dedicating the evening to him (“master of 20th-century ballet, mentor and friend to Suzanne Farrell”). These two recent programs, however, were all Balanchine. Their seven ballets included four works new to the repertory, two of which passed out of repertory decades ago.

“Pithoprakta” used to be danced by New York City Ballet as the second half of a 1968 ballet to difficult ’50s music by Iannis Xenakis, “Metastaseis & Pithoprakta.” (The titles were derived from the scores.) Balanchine created the lead roles of “Pithoprakta” for Ms. Farrell and Arthur Mitchell. When Ms. Farrell (who in the 1970s recalled it as “probably the most difficult thing I had ever done”) left the company in 1969, the ballet was never seen again. Until last week at the Kennedy Center, when Elisabeth Holowchuk (a dancer from the corps de ballet) danced Ms. Farrell’s former role with (at successive performances) Matthew Prescott and Kirk Henning, each youthfully glowing.

Immediately you saw the theatrical originality with which Balanchine would respond to musical modernism. While strange tappings of percussion began the music, one, two — no, four — pools of light appeared, showing a corps of seven women and five men in black tights, the two leads (who seldom meet) in white.

The changing, fragmented dramas consist largely of separation. At one moment the man’s hand keeps almost touching the woman’s hand (he seems to trace a halo about her) as she slowly, powerfully, steps through one changing arabesque phrase. At the end, only she remains in the light, holding her splayed fingers down over her eyes and fluttering them like an upended fan.

Balanchine made “Pas Classique Espagnol” as a major supplement to his three-act “Don Quixote” (1965) in 1972, revising it in 1973 and 1978. After the complete ballet was dropped from the New York City Ballet repertory in 1978, this divertissement went undanced — again, until last week. (Ms. Farrell’s 2005 restaging of the three-act ballet was based on the original 1965 text.)

As with the rest of the ballet, the main problem is Nicolas Nabokov’s score, in which pleasant if conventional ideas are contradicted by heavily ugly harmonies or theatrically weak endings. But Balanchine’s choreography — for ballerina, male partner and 12 other women — takes Petipa-conventional Spanish-ballet phrases known from 19th-century ballets like “Coppélia” and “Don Quixote” and fills them with a new expansiveness. As the scene progresses, with a supported adagio for ballerina and partner, one female pas de trois and pas de deux, and an insidious, grand ballerina solo, all framed by an entrée and coda, you feel an increasingly dreamlike power in its energy.

Nothing is more powerful than the concluding moment, in which the ballerina suddenly arrives center-stage with her torso flung back over her partner’s arm, while the members of the female corps all hurl the same pointing gesture at this moment of huge classical abandon. In both the performances I saw, Ashley Hubbard (a company soloist) danced with the kind of sweep and pointed dynamics that light up Balanchine choreography.

None of the Farrell company’s dancers look world-class in terms of physical perfection or technical glory, but all show virtues of absorption and inflection that you often wish more ideally gifted dancers showed. To watch the auburn-haired Bonnie Pickard (another soloist) dance the ballerina roles in “Bugaku” (1963), the fourth movement of “Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet” (1966), “Chaconne” (1976) and “Ballade” (1980) — roles created for Allegra Kent, Ms. Farrell, Ms. Farrell again, and Merrill Ashley — was to see someone lighted up by not just Protean diversity but also self-discovery.

Whether in her accentuation of individual steps or the sense of dramatic involvement with which she shapes entire roles, Ms. Pickard is an entirely admirable example of a dancer who has learned to make the most of herself. Her quality of focus is especially arresting: She made “Chaconne,” which is danced to ballet music from Acts II and III of Gluck’s “Orphée et Eurydice,” a drama about Eurydice’s changing relationship with Orpheus.

Much the same is true of other principal and soloist dancers here, not least Natalia Magnicaballi, whom I saw dance lead roles in “Bugaku” and “Meditation” (1963). Anyone who has watched New York City Ballet’s recent performances of “Bugaku” had only to look at this ballet’s opening scene in these performances, with either Ms. Pickard or Ms. Magnicaballi (the more theatrically assured of the two), to see, in upper-body gesture alone, the wealth of animating detail Ms. Farrell knows how to bring to this repertory.

Neither is a Farrell clone. Nor is Kristi Capps, a very innocent-looking Cincinnati Ballet dancer who alternated with Ms. Pickard in the ballerina part in “Chaconne.” If there was one dance that shone above all others in these two programs, it was the opening duet of “Chaconne,” in which either Ms. Pickard (with Runqiao Du) or Ms. Capps (with Anthony Krutzkamp, another Cincinnati dancer) shaped the mysteriously out-of-time suspension and legato flow.

At first here, male and female dancer move apart, as if sundered. Then they come together: The ballerina now floats on air in her partner’s arms; now has sensational falls that prove, in his arms, not to be falls; and now simply walks with him in blessed peace. In the 1970s and ’80s, I watched Ms. Farrell dance this many times, yet these performances led me still more deeply into its detail and its spell.

@New York Times, 2007