The September Dance Magazine has an interesting tidbit (p. 15). In a piece about the new San Francisco International Arts Festival, Allan Ulrich writes: "The second edition of SFIAF is slated for late May 2005....[Andrew] Wood mentions a few possibilities for that festival--the Royal New Zealand Ballet performing work by the controversial Venezuelan-born modernist Javier de Frutos, and a Kennedy Center sponsored reconstruction of George Balanchine's 1965 Don Quixote by the original Dulcinea, Suzanne Farrell."

No further details at present.

I would love to revisit that ballet! :yes: If SuFaBallet (as opposed to SanFr) revives it for Spring '05 on tour, then maybe, maybe we can hope that they do it at Kennedy Ctr and on tour in '05-06 season? Maybe? Please?

This one is worth tracking down. There have been whispers about this for months, but...... :gossip:

I'll check next week to see if anything is concrete -- it may be a matter of funding. I've never seen this Don Q, but from what I've read, it would require more dancers than Farrell usually has at her disposal.

The full ballet would probably require more dancers than she now has, even with lots of doubling up. Is the company expanding, then, I wonder? Or maybe she's mounting excerpts.

And let us not forget the stage effects. There is a giant which requires acts of macropuppetry, a pyrotechnic horse, plus the obligatory ground fogs, collapsing puppet theater, oh, and the pig stampede. Mustn't forget the pig stampede! That and Don Q getting a cream pie in the face at the end of the palace scene.

That pie-in-the-face episode never failed to make me shudder and bring tears to my eyes. I know that Mel also shudders at the thought of Balanchine's Don Q. But I'm excited at the prospect. I hope it happens.

As I think we've established here, Don Q requires the resources of a large company. If the rumors about Farrell staging it are true, then I think it's likely that she's doing it for another company, not her own, although perhaps with the participation of her own small company.

Oh, it is a difficult ballet to sit through. I'm not denying that. And I would not want to see it over and over and over, but I'm so much more perceptive about ballet than I was the last time it was done. I need it for my education.

I'm going to move this into the Ballets forum where I should have put it in the first place. I shouldn't have made the assumption that it will be staged by her company -- the article doesn't say that, just that such a reconstruction is a possibility for the 2005 Festival. There could well be a company involved, or it could be that details aren't yet firm. All we know now is that it's more than a thought.

I've always thought Don Quixote sounds fascinating -- if only because it's so different from anything else I know of Balanchine, if not on its own merits. I'll be among the first in line for this one.

Please be there, with my best wishes. I shall, by that time, have rented out Cedar Island from Farrell as a bomb shelter.

I'd be curious to see it, too, but when even the admirers of a ballet make it sound more like a punishing military exercise than an edifying evening at the theatre, you do have to wonder.

I came across this old thread while perusing the board and thought it might be interesting to reread in light of last week's run...some wishes do come true!

Thanks, AG. It was fascinating to revisit this thread.