Farrell's art still being choreographed by Balanchine.

WASHINGTON - "MR. B has always choreographed my life, and still is," Suzanne Farrell told an audience of D.C. ballet afficionados, national critics, and one of her successors at New York City Ballet. The occasion was a preperformance lecture and demonstration at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The performance was night number five of Suzanne Farrell Stages Balanchine, a festival of seven ballets presented October 17-22, 1995 [See Reviews/National, page 100].

While the talk may not have been presided over by George Balanchine - Dance Magazine correspondent George Jackson did the honors - Farrell's late director and mentor seemed to hover in the room. Indeed, by her account, he was an invisible consultant during the five weeks she worked with the dancers.

"I speak to him," said Farrell, who, at fifty, still looked in dancing form dressed in a smart dark blue suit, her hair long and loose. "I speak to Mr. B, just as he used to speak to the company, and I feel so alive with his presence here. He loves the energy onstage."

Also onstage for the lecture and demonstration, part of the Kennedy Center's Performance Plus adult arts education program, was New York City Ballet principal dancer Helene Alexopoulos, who demonstrated the quirkily designed solo from Tzigane, originated by Farrell. In her autobiography, Holding On to the Air, Farrell described the movement as including "a lot of strangely intricate arm and hand flourishes and many toe-heel-toe, turned-in czardas steps." The cadenza - and the dancer's solo - is sometimes four minutes long, sometimes six, depending on how fast the violinist plays it. Farrell directed Alexopoulos to perform the dance first in four minutes and then in six, with pianist Glenn Sales varying the tempo.

"It's an incredible opportunity for a ballerina," Farrell said, "the first time somebody allowed a dancer to go onstage for an (extended) violin cadenza. It's the loneliest moment in the world - the conductor isn't even conducting."

After stating that Tzigane was the first ballet Balanchine set on her when she returned to City Ballet from Europe, Farrell quickly added that in setting his ballets on others, "I want the ballerina to be herself, not me. Mr. B said `It's on this dancer and [for] this audience in this moment of time.' I don't want to teach them an opinion."

While it could be said that no dancer alive knows Balanchine's ballets as thoroughly as Farrell, staging them has given her further illumination. "I never realized there were so many other people onstage besides me," she said, recalling the days when the ballets were set on her. "How intricately dependent everyone is. He must have had a really good time choreographing all this."

If Balanchine pushed the dancers, the dancers made it possible for him to push the boundaries of his creativity. "The reason he wanted us to move fast," Farrell said, "is that it opened up a whole new world of music he could choreograph to, as well as a new way of looking at ballet."

Farrell also discussed Chaconne, recalling that in setting the pas de deux, Balanchine likened aspects of the lifts to swimming. To guide the dancers to an expressive port de bras, he suggested they visualize "opening the window on the Mediterranean," she said. In addition, "he always wanted us to use all our fingers, not only the index finger, which a lot of dancers do."

The seven performances of Suzanne Farrell Stages Balanchine were close to sold out, according to a Kennedy Center spokeswoman. The next big question for Farrell and for the ballet world is whether there will be a return engagement, at Kennedy Center or elsewhere. Asked about her plans for the immediate future, Farrell again evoked her mentor. "I'm going back to see my dog," she said. "Mr. B liked cats and dogs, and I'm going back to my dog."