Mélange des danses

It's always interesting how Washington, D.C., has a way of helping people see just how small the world is.

I was born in a town back in Oklahoma that straddles the border between the Osage Indian Nation and the Cherokee Indian Nation. For several years, I lived out in the country on the Osage, and I love going to the annual Osage religious ceremonial dances in the summer. Well, the Osages have three beloved women—all in their 80s now—who were internationally famous ballerinas. One of those Osage ballerinas is Maria Tallchief, the first prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet, the country's preeminent ballet company. During her reign there, she fell in love with and married George Balanchine, one of the most famous ballet choreographers of the 20th century who was also the founder and director of NYCB.

Balanchine, as much as his name is spoken of in awe in ballet circles, had this bad habit of falling in love with his latest beautiful and talented ballerina and then creating his best work for them. His marriage to Maria only lasted about five or six years, and she ended up leaving NYCB because of another beautiful and talented ballerina who joined NYCB in 1961, Suzanne Farrell. Well, he fell in love with her, but Miss Farrell ended up marrying another dancer because Balanchine was married to yet another ballerina at the time; I think it's probably the fact that she was never an ex-wife that allowed Farrell to maintain her close friendship and association with Balanchine. She had a long, distinguished, international career through NYCB, and dozens of major works were created and choreographed specifically for her. At his death, he willed her the rights to the choreography of several of his great works, and she has since worked with the George Balanchine Trust.

Then, in 2000, Farrell formally created the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, the resident ballet company of the Kennedy Center in Washington. We went to one of their dance concerts last night at the Kennedy Center, a dance concert that was based entirely on the works of George Balanchine. And hence we come full circle to see the small world.

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It was an interesting concert, to say the least. They presented five ballets in three acts.

The evening opened with Bugaku, a stylized representation of a Japanese marriage. Some very unusual music by Toshiro Mayuzumi made up the accompaniment, played by the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra with Ron Matson conducting. Mayuzumi was a fan of blending the avant garde of modern 20th century music with Japanese sensibilities.

The set was a striking three-sided rectangular, red barre with Japanese architectural lines that was suspended by thick ropes. Costumes were gauzy white overlays that trailed behind both male and female dancers as they moved. In the short first scene, the women wore classical tutus such as the one in the photograph that graces the cover of this month's Kennedy Center Playbill.

The dance was rather slow, with movements and postures designed to evoke Japanese theater and geisha traditions. At times, that stylized movement seemed almost robotic to me.

In act 2, they opened with Ballade, set to the music of Gabriel Fauré with a very romantic piano and orchestra score. This ballet featured their up and coming star ballerina Bonnie Pickard, partnered with principal Runqiao Du (who we would later see in the fourth ballet pas de deux). The company danced on a bare stage with only a cyclorama backdrop illuminated in midnight blue.

The third ballet was my favorite of the evening. Pithoprakta is a starkly modern study in binary black and white, complete with black and white costumes and a large backdrop with mathematical numbers and a graph. Music was by 20th century Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, from his work Pithoprakta. Xenakis originally trained and worked as an architect before turning to musical composition, and that mathematical nature can be heard in his music; this work has a lot of random plucked notes and is freeform, even for modernism. The dancers were very angular in their movements and much of the company rolled around a lot on the floor. We particularly noticed featured dancer, soloist Matthew Prescott, who's a tall, tossled-headed blond man who was required to dance a very physical performance.

Tchaikovsky's Meditation, Op. 42, from his Souvenir d'un Lieu Cher provided the backdrop for the fourth ballet and opening of the third act, Meditation, a simple pas de deux for principals Du and Natalia Magnicaballi. This was one of those ballets that Balenchine created especially for Farrell. While I think the focus was to be on the male dancer, the real work and choreography was all with the female dancer. They also danced to a bare stage, and Du was costumed in street clothes and Magnicaballi was in a simple, unadorned, romantic tutu.

The final work of the evening used Arnold Schoenberg's orchestration of Johannes Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25, as the background for a ballet called, simply, Fourth Movement of Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet. This was their big company finale number, starring Miss Pickard and Bulgarian principal dancer Momchil Mladenov. It seems to have been inspired by Eastern European folk dance, and the costumes had a Hungarian look to them. Mladenov was the first male dancer of the evening to have any particularly challenging choreography, and Pickard was very well received with her dancing en pointe.

We sat in an interesting location on the third row of the opera house in the center of the left side orchestra section. We were surrounded by a bunch of balletomanes who knew dance and had definite opinions. There was a very elderly couple to my right who shared many of my thoughts and opinions, while a man in front of me was incredulous that I liked the third ballet better than the first. I also ran into someone on the first row who was recruiting me to work again with the Kirov Ballet when they come back to Washington in January, and then he looked at me and queried, "Have you gained weight?" Not wanting to admit it, I blamed it on my sweater.....you know how sweaters can make you look bigger....it's true! Really! However, if I'm going to try to dance again, I'm going to have to go on a massive weight loss campaign between now and then, since even the last time I danced, I was too heavy, and my feet and knees were killing me!

Anyway, it's nice to see someone working on preserving the Balanchine choreography. The women were all fine technical dancers, though none of them had me enraptured (that's hard to do, though, with these short ballets—you need a full-length production to develop the character). I was, though, a bit disappointed with the men, though disappointed is probably too strong a word and it really wasn't their fault.

Farrell certainly does not expect much from her men. Most of the time, she just has her men moving in rhythm, promenading, and partnering (lifting the girls). In the second ballet, the guy had one little sauté (small leap), and in the fifth, the danseur did some entrechats (jump with feet beating the air), and some single tours en l'air (spin in the air) and pirouettes, but not a single grand jeté (splits in mid-air) and not even any real tours chaînés déboulés. There were no "star" moments for the men.

I was trying to explain this to Ryan (who'd never before seen live ballet) using ice skating analogies. You know how when you watch those Olympic competitions and the really really top skaters do a "triple lutz" or a "triple toe loop," and if something goes wrong and the skater only does a double—or, heaven forbid, a single!—the commentators just jump all over it? That's how I felt with the men's dance performances, except they weren't scripted to do anything but singles, and very few of those to begin with.

The ballerinas, though, had plenty to do, and I'd imagine that Farrell—having been an international star herself—is very demanding with them. They, at least, got the opportunity to shine and display their grace, strength, and balance.

While I tend to prefer full-length productions, it will be interesting to watch the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, and I'm sure I'll be going to many of their concerts in the future.