An Impossible (Or at Least Difficult) Dream

"I didn't think I was ready to tackle something like that," she says. "I had to un-become a dancer and become something else in order to teach and stage ballets. When I retired, I didn't know if I'd like doing that. You know, there's nothing in life that prepares you for being an ex-ballerina." She flips her hand as if she's serving possibilities on a tea tray. "Maybe I'd be too nostalgic. Maybe I couldn't let go of my parts."

Yet letting go, she adds, proved not as difficult as she had imagined, especially since she began working with hand-picked dancers she can call her own. Though it is far from a year-round operation, for the past five years her company has coalesced at the Kennedy Center for a few performances a season and occasional tours. As a measure of her dedication, Farrell recently moved into a Washington apartment within walking distance of the center. Yet while she is clearly committed to her group, its impermanence troubles her; she speaks of "our fragile seasons" and the difficulty of eliciting "smoothness" in performance when the dancers are together for only a few weeks each year.

'Amazingly Calm'

Wearing a hot-pink satin jacket over a red top and black slacks, the tall, slender Farrell, who will turn 60 in August -- nearly Balanchine's age at the 1965 premiere -- stands out against her surroundings like a hothouse orchid. She has pulled her caramel-color hair loose from the ponytail she wore earlier in the studio, and she looks relaxed, though a bit weary. Asked how she feels about the production so far, Farrell answers with a laugh. "Well, I'm pretty calm -- I think I'm amazingly calm. Though it was a little scary turning the calendar from May to June.

"That doesn't mean I'm overly secure; it just means I have to think clearly," she continues. When she was a dancer, she says, "all I had to worry about were steps. Now it's props, scenery, designers, spacing, scrims, production staff. I used to like to do crossword puzzles, and this is like that kind of a puzzle. But it's part of my growth as well, something I never would have gotten from teaching another Balanchine ballet."

No other Balanchine ballet is quite like this one. Balanchine made a lasting mark on the dance world by departing from the same heavily decorated story ballets that "Don Quixote" epitomizes. Though he had choreographed a handful of other narrative works -- among them "The Nutcracker," "Coppelia" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" -- most of his ballets involve neither story nor fancy sets. Costumes are often reduced to simple leotards and tights. Dance for dance's sake was his credo. In such neoclassical masterpieces as "Agon," "The Four Temperaments" and "Concerto Barocco," what bowls the viewer over is the impact of the movement alone, matched to superb music.

All that changed in "Don Quixote." Balanchine's version has nothing in common with the hard-driving 19th-century "Don Quixote" of Russian fame -- a version that the Kirov-trained Balanchine grew up with -- in which the title figure is only briefly onstage for comic relief between bouts of bravura technical displays. Balanchine's work takes a more serious, poignant tone, and contains a good deal of religious imagery. Yet with dancers dressed as royalty, villagers, tavern owners, priests, monks and even pigs, his production incorporates the storytelling and character development of old-fashioned full-length ballets.

It was perfecting the mix of mime, atmosphere, exposition and dancing that Balanchine struggled with, making changes to the ballet each season it was performed. His constant tinkering, and the four days it took to hang the elaborate sets before the curtain went up for a half-dozen performances, made it an ordeal for the company, recalls Barbara Horgan, Balanchine's former assistant.

"It was a nightmare, an absolute nightmare," says Horgan, head of the Balanchine Trust, which licenses the choreographer's works. "I dreaded the last week of the winter season. People would get sick, something would happen to the scenery. Finally, on the sixth performance it went well, and that was it." Yet she is left with a memory of many vivid moments, she says, particularly Farrell's fearlessness.

The new sets, designed by Zack Brown, and costumes by Holly Hynes have been constructed for easier setup. (Kennedy Center officials are planning to take the ballet on tour, though details have not been confirmed.) The costumes are based more or less on the originals by City Ballet's famed designer Barbara Karinska, but Brown's sets are his own creation, overseen by Farrell.

Farrell also had a hand in the choreography. To fill in what she doesn't recall, she has referred to a bootleg black-and-white film of the premiere and a silent video of a later performance. (She has forbidden her dancers to see them, preferring them to come to the ballet fresh.) But neither record shows much of the action beyond the principals. So Farrell has made some educated guesses when it comes to the corps de ballet.

"I believe Mr. Balanchine would expect me to," Farrell says. "That's why he gave me the ballet. . . . It's all in keeping with the world he already choreographed."

That world, she says, was ingeniously created around the notion of being off balance. It was her own hallmark in the ballet, a way of dancing off axis, seemingly out of control yet splendidly in control. Balanchine wove that effect into the entire production, she says.