This season the Suzanne Farrell Ballet is bidding farewell to its audiences with final performances at the Kennedy Center Opera House, December 7-9. There will be two programs, each featuring a selection of George Balanchine’s choreographic gems...
Tag - Joan Acocella
It’s hard to imagine a better program to showcase the power of ballet as an expressive art than Suzanne Farrell Ballet’s impressive offering for its annual season at the Kennedy Center.
To preserve or to progress? And if the latter, how? These questions seem to come up increasingly often as companies grapple with the death of their founding choreographers, artists who created importantant schools of dance in their own image.
When watching them perform one understands what dance critic Joan Acocella meant when she said: “Every single time Suzanne Farrell sets a Balanchine ballet – it rises from the dead.”
It is something of a cliché to say it, but the guiding principle of Morris’s Dido - as in the more recent Socrates - is simplicity. No single element - musc, words, dance - is privileged above the others.
Unfortunately, I’m not blessed with the gift of predicting the future, but I will go out on a limb and say that by no means is Matthew Bourne finished creating yet, which means we can all look forward to reading the third edition of this book, liberally sprinkled with even more remarkable insights in another ten years time.