If tickets are scarce at the Joyce Theater this week, it’s because of two illustrious names: George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell. These performances by the Suzanne Farrell Ballet are the 10-year-old troupe’s first proper Manhattan showcase; there was a brief run at the New Victory Theater in 1999 by an earlier, more freelance version of her ensemble. The wonderfully satisfying all-Balanchine program includes four works created between 1947 and 1967. Two were created for Farrell—a leading, utterly individual Balanchine ballerina from the early 1960s through the 1980s—in her heyday; another is one in which she gave many memorable performances. The fourth is an early rarity that New York City Ballet has performed only sporadically.
Elisabeth Holowchuk & Kirk Henning in 'Haieff Divertimento.' Photo by Carol Pratt.
Farrell’s company has long been based at, and nurtured by, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and it performed there last week, receiving high praise from the New York Times’ Alastair Macaulay. For those two programs—six Balanchine works in all—it was accompanied by the Kennedy Center’s orchestra. At the Joyce, the repertory is completely different, no work requires more than 12 dancers and the music is on tape—certainly a loss when it comes to Balanchine, where the musical impulse is so crucial. But the opportunity to catch up with Farrell’s dancers, and to see how she has communicated her insight into the finer points of the master’s choreography, is highly welcome.
Haieff Divertimento, from 1947, pre-dates the founding of NYCB, and was made early in an amazing year that also saw the premieres of Balanchine’s Symphony in C and Theme and Variations. A fascinating 15-minute chamber ballet in which one can spot many elements of his later choreography, it blends youthful brio, jazzy insouciance and reflective delicacy. The Alexei Haieff score sounds a lot like Stravinsky in his Danses Concertantes mode, and is very dance-friendly. The four men and four women of the ensemble have plenty of brisk, demanding allegro choreography that requires precision and buoyancy, and Farrell’s dancers delivered on both counts. The men were impressive in their rapid-fire series of solos in the third movement, and the women demonstrated a bracingly crisp, clean attack. Elisabeth Holowchuk and Kirk Henning were the central couple, whose duet veers into moments of mystery with its intriguing arm positions and the way they rock gently from side to side while in an aborted embrace.
Haieff Divertimento suggests a whiff of unattainable romance with the lead woman’s late arrival, and her sudden, playful departure just before the final notes. But elusive unattainability—evoking deep romance at soul-searing loss—is the essence of Meditation, one of the earliest works Balanchine created for Farrell’s distinctive abilities and stage persona. Holowchuk took on the role of the white-clad, loose-haired woman whom Michael Cook recalls—or perhaps conjures—to engage in a yearningly romantic encounter tinged with melancholy. Left alone, seemingly without hope at the end, he senses his loss is now permanent.
Meditation is set to Tchaikovsky, as is Diamonds, the 1967 ballet in which Farrell reigned supreme as the ultimate contemporary distillation of the grand classical ballerina. Its central pas de deux followed Meditation, and was the evening’s least persuasive performance. A harsh recording of Tchaikovsky’s lush, thrilling music didn’t help, and Violeta Angelova was tentative and lacking in grandeur. Momchil Mladenov, a longtime mainstay of Farrell’s troupe, was her courtly, supportive partner.
The evening concluded with one of the greatest of Balanchine’s many enduring Stravinsky ballets: Agon. More than 50 years after its premiere, it still comes across as more contemporary and challenging than most of what is churned out today, and Farrell’s dancers dug into its complex rhythms with bracing directness and clarity. As often as one sees this intricate work, there is always more to discover, and even on the compact Joyce stage, Farrell’s staging enabled me to appreciate new details of the ensemble patterning in the outer sections. Cook made the Sarabande male solo entirely his own. In the pas de deux, Holowchuk and Mladenov let the vivid choreography speak for itself, rather than push it to extremes as some dancers tend to do.
Washington audiences have been able to observe the development of Farrell’s company—and its sizable repertory—on a regular basis. This week’s season is overdue and most welcome, and hopefully before long a New York season of the more expansive works, with orchestra, might become possible.
Suzanne Farrell Ballet
Through Oct. 23, Joyce Theater, 175 8th Ave. (at W. 19th St.), www.joyce.org.
