The Suzanne Farrell Ballet

[femmina]

"Beautiful Ballet": Suzanne Farrell Ballet at Kennedy Center
By Jeremy D. Birch
27 Oct 2010



The Suzanne Farrell Ballet’s Bonnie Pickard and Kirk Henning in La Sonnambula, photo by Carol Pratt

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet returns to Kennedy Center this November with two mixed repertory programs including work by Balanchine, Bjart and Robbins.

Each season, The Suzanne Farrell Ballet is known for taking on the responsibility of preserving great works of ballet, and achieves so much more by bringing these works fresh, new life that soars above where memory leaves off. This season, the company performs the works of Ms. Farrell’s mentors and contemporaries: Jerome Robbins, Paul Mejia, Maurice Bjart, and George Balanchine. The company, “too distinctive, too juicy, too fabulously fearless to pass up” (The Washington Post), will present two programs of mixed repertory November 17–21 in the Eisenhower Theater.
The programs feature ballets by Balanchine, including two works fused with music by Igor Stravinsky, the grave and reverential Monumentum Pro Gesualdo and Movements for Piano and Orchestra, which Stravinsky once remarked should have been called “Electric Currents,” as well as La Sonnambula, a dance of intrigue set in a shadowy and mysterious masquerade ball, and La Source, an homage to French Romantic ballet to music by Delibes.
Robbins’s In Memory of..., a ballet created for and premiered by Suzanne Farrell, is a poignant struggle between the beautiful earthly soul and death come to take it. Following its 1985 premiere, the New York Times praised its “admirable purity and refinement. Its drama is distilled through a prism of dance values rather than narrative terms.”
Bjart’s Sonate No. 5 takes its title from Bach’s Sonata No. 5.
The company will perform its first work by Paul Mejia, entitled Eight by Adler. Choreographed for Suzanne Farrell, Eight by Adler is full of the kind of Broadway bravado that wins over audiences and which won Ms. Farrell an Emmy Award in 1984 for its televised debut. A jazzy piece choreographed by Mejia in the spirit of Balanchine’s Who Cares?, it’s danced to songs from the Richard Adler/Jerry Ross musicals The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees.
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PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
Program A: Nov. 17, 18, & 20 at
7:30 p.m., Nov. 21 at 1:30 p.m.
La Source (Balanchine/Delibes)
Sonate No. 5 (Béjart/Bach)
In Memory Of… (Robbins/Berg)


Program B: Nov. 19 & 21 at
7:30 p.m., Nov. 20 at 1:30 p.m.
La Sonnambula (Balanchine/Rieti)
Monumentum Pro Gesualdo
(Balanchine/Stravinsky)
Movements for Piano and Orchestra
(Balanchine/Stravinsky)
Eight by Adler (Mejia/Adler)



Jeremy D. Birch is the writer/editor of Kennedy Center News.