The Ballerina Is Boss

By TERRY TEACHOUT

My God, she can't be that young," someone whispered loudly as a svelte Suzanne Farrell slipped through the curtains of the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater. She was there to introduce the first night of Suzanne Farrell Stages the Masters of 20th Century Ballet, a 10-city road show that opened in Washington last month and closes next week in New York City. At 54, Farrell still looks perfectly capable of donning tutu and toe shoes and filling in for any of the women in her 16-member company. But she doesn't need to, and that's the point. Her versions of such classics as George Balanchine's Apollo and Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun, danced by a troupe of near youngsters and up-and-comers, glisten and gleam as though the choreographers had personally stopped backstage to apply one last coat of polish.

Farrell was a star long before any of her dancers were born. She gave more than 2,000 performances with the New York City Ballet before retiring from the stage in 1989, and in the process inspired such ballets as Balanchine's Diamonds, Chaconne and Mozartiana and Robbins' In Memory of... and won international renown as a ballerina of unique virtuosity, at once lyrical and daring. But even though she has staged Balanchine's works for such companies as the Paris Opera Ballet and St. Petersburg's Kirov Ballet, this is the first time she has taken her own group on tour.

The repertory includes two Balanchine miniatures custom-made for Farrell in her glory days--Tzigane, a smoldering piece of Gypsy fireworks set to the music of Ravel; and Meditation, the haunting Tchaikovsky pas de deux that Balanchine choreographed for Farrell and Jacques d'Amboise in 1963. Until now, no other woman has ever danced Meditation, to which Balanchine gave Farrell all rights.

Yet balletomanes have much more to cheer about than Meditation. Farrell's painstaking stagings are to a run-of-the-mill City Ballet performance as a freshly cleaned Old Master canvas is to a fuzzy reproduction. Steps you took for granted--or never really saw before--now stand out in high relief, unexaggerated yet breathtakingly clear and stylish. Most memorable of all are excerpts from Balanchine's Divertimento No. 15, a notoriously difficult dance whose intricate patterns have rarely been realized with such crystalline simplicity.

Farrell is far from the first ex-City Ballet dancer to knock the rust of routine off Balanchine's ballets. Edward Villella's marvelous Miami City Ballet recently gave a performance of Prodigal Son at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark that all but exploded off the stage, and Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet, led by Francia Russell and Kent Stowell, has just mounted a Midsummer Night's Dream that is causing coast-to-coast buzz. But Farrell's ad hoc troupe, whipped into shape with just three weeks of intensive rehearsal, is already impressive enough to suggest that in a better-regulated universe, America's greatest ballerina ever would be running a full-time company of her own.

--By Terry Teachout