Finding an Audience
“Dancers and musicians paraded down Broadway to draw attention to the season. They also made special appearances at the Saratoga Race Course, posing with racehorses for photographers. Often, tickets were given away. [Robert] Maiorano recalls tickets priced as low as $3. The first season, prime seats sold for $18.”
— Wendy Liberatore, Daily Gazette
(left) Photo by Martha Swope, 1967. New York Public Library
(center & right) Arthur B. Rickerby, 1967. LIFE Magazine
Jacques in Saratoga
Jacques d'aAmboise & Suzanne Farrell in Diamonds.
Photos by Arthur B. Rickerby, 1967. LIFE Magazine
“'I like Saratoga. I look forward to dancing here, especially when it gets hot and muggy,' Jacques d’Amboise, a star, was standing in the parking lot outside the stage door of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. He was waiting for his wife, Carrie, who soon would show up driving an old Ford convertible with a bag of groceries on the back seat.”
--John Corry, New York Times, 1976
Suzanne Farrell in Saratoga
"During the first week of July, 1966 the company traveled up the Hudson to Saratoga Springs, New York, to open our inaugural season at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in an enormous outdoor auditorium built on a beautiful grassy incline in the midst of Saratoga State Park, surrounded by public golf courses, a swimming pool, old mineral baths, and a wonderful little town already famous for its water and its racetrack.
"Company morale was high as we chose roommates and proceeded to set up house together in little boxlike apartments at an unfinished complex called the Ash Grove Farms. Those who could drive rented cars to commute from theater to grocery store to home to swimming pool, but those of us who couldn't drive were at the mercy of the occasional bus or a lift from a friend. I asked Eddie Bigelow to teach me to drive and began a summer of dancing and driving lessons, a curious combination of transportation methods that has since become almost a rite of passage for young company members."
"We opened the three week season with Midsummer, still fresh from being filmed but now radically altered when danced with the real moon and stars in the distance, the trickle of nearby running water, real fireflies, dragonflies, and moths mixing themselves up with the children in the ballet who were impersonating them, and the coo right breezes. It was as if Balanchine had always intended this ballet for this theater; the magic was palpable."
--Suzanne Farrell Holding on to the Air
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