A BALANCHINE MUSE RESTAGES HIS BALLETS
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Oct. 24-30,  2011
                                                                  Vol. 14, No. 17
              WASHINGTON, DC---Suzanne Farrell  has often been described as the muse of choreographer George Balanchine (1904-83), dancing with the latter's company in lead roles and introducing his new works over 22 years. Today she directs the 10-year-old Suzanne Farrell Ballet here at the Kennedy Center, keeping alive a lot of Balanchine works lying otherwise forgotten. If regularly reviving time-tested Balanchine has a museum look to it, well, this is the place---Washington has mor museums than you could survey in a single week.
            This is a smart, disciplined, and spirited troupe of 28 blending American dancers with several imported from Bulgaria, mostly notably Violeta Angelova, a marvelously fluid ballerina of soft lines I caught here Oct. 16 in "Sonatine." While most of the colleagues were  strong on technique and precision, Angelova caught the emotion uniquely, paired with her inordinately tall countryman Momchil Mladenov, who was hard put to match her. Her sinuous pas de deux was pure poetry.
            An even rarer Balanchine piece was "Pithopraktika" (1955-56), an ultra-modern array of leaps, thrusts, stretches, dives and pumps to the spiky rhythyms of Xenakis (with a score one patron associated with fingernails-on-blackboard). Elisabeth Holowchuk and Kirk Henning played out the solos, with a dozen others executing a frenzied tribal ritual.
            In the divertimento excerpt from "Le baiser de la fee," Kara Genevieve Cooper was by turns nimble, coy and playful, opposite the youthful but thoroughly confident corps member Matthew Renko, an appealing figure with upward potential. This work harks back to the 1920s, when good ballet males were few and far between; nowadays, the imbalance of 11 women and only one male would be avoided.
            The hit of the night was the opulent finale "Diamonds," with the brilliant Karinska costumes looking like recent priceless jewels just culled from the South African diamond mines. Here the Farrell troupe collaborated with the Sarasota (FL) Ballet---one of a number of  Farrell linkup specialties---borrowing several of the latter's dancers, some of lesser experience. In the import group, I was struck by the highly appealing male lead Ricardo Graziano, who seems headed for ever broader horizons.
            The latter two works featured a pit orchestra under former San Francisco conductor Emil de Cou, an accomplished performer hampered by the acoustics of the Eisenhower Theater where---at least from my orchestra seat at the Oct. 16 performance---the sound was distant and muffled.
            The Farrell company overall has a wholesome, well-rounded set of bodies, in contrast with most of the Balanchine's distaff dancers of yore,  whose impact often seemed to come from  elongated legs boldly sweeping the stage and floor. Evidently, they're dancing to a different drummer these days. 
            Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center Washington DC in an all-Balanchine program, Oct. 12-16. For info on the Farrell ensemble: go online.
        ©D. Rane Danubian 2011

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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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