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Suzanne Farrell Ballet on Millennium Stage - FREE!


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Every day at 6 PM Eastern time, there is a free performance lasting about 45 minutes at the Kennedy Center for the performing arts, usually on the Millennium Stage at one end of the foyer along the western side of the building. (Sometimes the performance gets moved, for example to the Family Theater upstairs; the Farrell Ballet itself has performed in that superior venue a few times.) On 23rd September, dancers from the company will preview their upcoming 10th Anniversary season, 12-16 October. Admission is free - no ticket required for this event, although sometimes Millennium Stage events are ticketed - and if I could go, I'd go early.

I expect to watch the live webcast while in Chicago instead, but, having said that, I should add that in my experience, these are sometimes pretty good, such as the one of 30th September 2010, and sometimes, sad to say, they can be amateur in the worse sense, which may be the reason the last ones of the Farrell Ballet, from 19th and 20th September 2009, if I remember correctly, aren't available in the archive. (I saw the webcasts as they happened, and I remember that one of the camera operators had a good eye, but the rest of it was a shambles - a disservice to the performers and the audience. I guess some one at the Kennedy Center agreed.)

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Every day at 6 PM Eastern time, there is a free performance lasting about 45 minutes at the Kennedy Center for the performing arts, usually on the Millennium Stage at one end of the foyer along the western side of the building. (Sometimes the performance gets moved, for example to the Family Theater upstairs; the Farrell Ballet itself has performed in that superior venue a few times.) On 23rd September, dancers from the company will preview their upcoming 10th Anniversary season, 12-16 October. Admission is free - no ticket required for this event, although sometimes Millennium Stage events are ticketed - and if I could go, I'd go early.

I expect to watch the live webcast while in Chicago instead, but, having said that, I should add that in my experience, these are sometimes pretty good, such as the one of 30th September 2010, and sometimes, sad to say, they can be amateur in the worse sense, which may be the reason the last ones of the Farrell Ballet, from 19th and 20th September 2009, if I remember correctly, aren't available in the archive. (I saw the webcasts as they happened, and I remember that one of the camera operators had a good eye, but the rest of it was a shambles - a disservice to the performers and the audience. I guess some one at the Kennedy Center agreed.)

Are all performances webcasted live or just Farrell? Can you provide a link for the webcast?

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I've noticed nearly all Millennium Stage performances are webcast live; I've also noticed it's easy to get tangled up going around in circles on the Kennedy Center website, but the first link in this sentence should take you to the main page for those performances and the videos of them, live and archived.

You might like to "practice" watching once or twice with whatever tonight's performance is, if you've never tried this before, so everything works right for you when the event you really want to see is on. If I remember correctly - I haven't tried this very often, because they don't do a lot of dance - the live webcast sometimes starts up slightly after the performance begins, so we miss the very beginning. I try not to fret if that's what happens! At least we get what we get.

The archived webcast I linked to in my first post shows about how well it can go, and if you try this and want some details about what you see, I've posted a guide to that video here.

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Well, the transmission finished about half an hour ago, and it was so good I haven't really recovered yet. The dancing - after some classroom stuff, with some expressive bits along the way - was very good, if a little contained. It looked like a very small space, but we could actually relate to the space, because the camera work, the directing, was pretty sensitive, straightforward, clear, and simple. Former dancer Bonnie Pickard Scofield returned to introduce the excerpts part of the program, and whoever wrote her script got things in an odd order - Farrell has a sure sense of how to put any program together, and we actually got excerpts from Sonatine, Serenade ("Elegy"), and Diamonds (the pas de deux), in that order, which was a program which built to a climax; Pickard's notes had the order reversed, anticlimactically.

I would have liked to have heard the applause, but this must have been a minimal setup, and the main things got across well. Everybody involved should be proud of showing the world how Balanchine's art lives on still today.

Edited by Jack Reed
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