SUZANNE FARRELL STAGES THE MASTERS OF 20TH-CENTURY BALLET.

SUZANNE FARRELL STAGES THE MASTERS OF 20TH-CENTURY BALLET TERRACE THEATER, JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, WASHINGTON, D.C. OCTOBER 21-24, 1999 --AND-- NEW VICTORY THEATER NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK NOVEMBER 27, 1999 REVIEWED BY GEORGE JACKSON

Suzanne Farrell is spreading her wings, staging not just the choreography of her first mentor, George Balanchine. The added choices, ballets by Jerome Robbins and Maurice Bejart, parallel Farrell's career as a dancer. However, only the opening work, the solos and pas de deux portions of Balanchine's Mozart Divertimento No. 15, was danced full-out on opening night. Even so, each piece on the program emerged distinctly. This clarity was due to the sensitive phrasing and attentive spacing of Farrell's stagings. A stickler for detail without losing sight of overall form. Farrell builds ballets from the inside out. Early in the run, the dancers often seemed to be thinking out loud, half counting and adjusting to the stage's small size, but by week's end they had stopped rehearsing and were performing.

Most difficult for this group, with its American experience, was "Scene d'Amour" from Bejart's Romeo and Juliet. To be effective, the work requires a seamlessness and pliancy that could have been at odds with emphatic articulation and step-by-step precision. Both alternate lead pairs, Veronica Lynn with Ben Huys and Christina Fagundes with Philip Neal, were beginning to suffuse passion into movement for the torso and back so that body pulses and arched spans no longer looked like mere wiggles and bends. Properly, though, they still made the choreography's neoclassical components seem etched.

Huys and Lynn, in Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun, didn't let the drama emerge as a surprise at first. This, too, was rectified in their subsequent performances, and by Neal dancing with Fagundes or with Argentina's Natalia Magnicaballi.

Two not entirely different programs alternated. Divertimento, Faun, and Romeo and Juliet were on both. One bill featured Balanchine's Apollo, while the other had his more minor Tzigane and Meditation. In starting roles, Farrell usually cast the best-known of her sixteen dancers--Lynn, Fagundes, Neal and/or Huys. Apollo's grand dimensions emerged by the final performance here, but not quite its playfulness. My favorite Muses were Lynn, Magnicaballi, and Suzanne Goldman (formerly of ABT, formerly of Vienna Opera). Neal and Huys both grew into the god's role, with Neal having the better body for baring his chest and wearing white tights. Fagundes and Huys did admirably as the second cast for Meditation, bringing out its thoughtfulness and not imitating in all its dimensions the tragic aspect Farrell and Jacques d'Amboise established in 1963.

In Tzigane, Boston's Kyra Strasberg didn't get the hang of the tricky opening solo in her first performance, which is more a matter of temperament than technique. Bonnie Pickard (formerly of North Carolina Dance Theatre, formerly of Tulsa Ballet) caught the lilt of Divertimento's first solo and the noble agony of Leto giving birth in Apollo. Kristen Gallagher (Richmond Ballet) overcame technical problems during the run without the effort spoiling her delight in dancing.

How did the Farrell company fare in New York? Reportedly, the first performances on this last stop of the group's first tour were tentative. The final Saturday matinee was not--particularly Apollo. Clarity blossomed into luminosity! Neal and Lynn, with their beautiful bodies but without their habitual reticence, shone like stars. With high-caliber contributions from Magnicaballi, Goldman, and the rest of the cast, even the taped music sounded live.