“The performance is now.” – Suzanne Farrell

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Like most people, I have heard of Suzanne Farrell and knew she was a big deal in the world of ballet. Names like Gelsey Kirkland and Allegra Kent and Darci Kistler … well, first of all … aren’t those all just great names? They SOUND like famous people. But their fame is enormous, and while I have never seen any of them perform, I am aware of their status. I’m just doing some ballet catch-up here! I just finished reading Joan Acocella’s essay on Suzanne Farrell, in her book Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (post about the book here). Other essays I completed this long weekend of flu-recovery and regrouping (not to mention plotting and scheming and conniving like a teenager) were essays on Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Twyla Tharp, Martha Graham, Frederick Ashton, and Lincoln Kerstein. FASCINATING. I know just enough about these people to make it even more interesting for me. Well, about Fosse I know a bit more … but I was not aware of Jerome Robbins’ actual journey of life, and the back and forth between Broadway and ballet, and how he did what he did, and the style he came up with … Anyway, these essays are amazing to me and I highly recommend the book. I’m moving now into yet another more intellectual section – essays on Mencken, Dorothy Parker, M.F.K. Fisher, Saul Bellow … I know a lot of these people only through their writing, so I am interested to hear Acocella’s take, and the biographical details that she weaves into her essay in such a graceful manner. This book really came along at the right time for me. Her writing is easy, yet just challenging enough to keep me engaged. I can feel her personality in the writing. This book is the opposite of “dry”.

Acocella’s essay on Suzanne Farrell came out in The New Yorker in 2003, and was focused on the brand new Suzanne Farrell Ballet, a company run by Farrell, the former star-ballerina and muse of George Balanchine (one of the many muses, but perhaps the most important one?? Out of my league here …)

In reviewing the latest offering from the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, Acocella takes the opportunity to give us an entire retrospective of Farrell’s life, and I am sure to ballet fans all of the details are well-known. Farrell and Balanchine were as talked about in the world of ballet as Brad and Angelina! Acocella really captures that time – and what it was like to be a ballet fan in New York City at that time, the excitement, the sense of involvement and personal ownership. My friend Ted, a native New Yorker, told me a little bit about it – because his mother is one of those huge ballet fans. So exciting!

But I was more interested in the character of Suzanne Farrell herself. A small obsessive personality, she, as a teenager, became the primary focus of Balanchine, who basically turned his entire ballet company into a vehicle for HER. He changed his style, he adjusted his taste, he had a vibrant “late period”, which – in a man of his years and experience – is quite extraordinary. Farrell was not well-liked, although respected – there was a lot of envy of course, and she could be aloof and narrow (according to Acocella and the dancers who knew Farrell at the time.) Farrell was 16 when Balanchine plucked her from the barre and made her a prima ballerina. Resentment. But Farrell, like, I am sure, all ballerinas at that level, kept her nose to the grindstone, and didn’t get distracted. I was most interested in that dynamic: the geek, the obsessive, the person who openly admitted doing “nothing” on her days off … she had no interest in any life outside of ballet … but then also the person who was, apparently, so fearless and so willing in rehearsals, that all Balanchine had to do was ASK and she would say “yes”. She had no hesitation, no intellect getting in the way – just sheer physical trust. And so she grew … she grew as an artist in an accelerated manner, and he grew with her … and the entire company basically had to get out of the way. So on the one side, we have the prim nerd who does the crossword at home and reads her Bible every morning, and on the other side, we have the wild gyrating muse of the greatest man in ballet in the 20th century. Extraordinary. But I’ll let Acocella take it from here. It’s a marvelous piece, and I’m glad I got to know Farrell a bit better. One anecdote in particular (her directing another ballerina in her company) brought me to tears. It is just the kind of thing I like to hear: it’s about the work.

From Acocella’s essay on Farrell called “The Second Act”

Farrell was the most influential ballerina of the late twentieth century. Others before her had done what could be called modernist ballet dancing – lean and wild, as opposed to the plump and decorous nineteenth-century model – but Farrell, under Balanchine’s tutelage, carried that project further than anyone else. What she performed was still classical ballet – she got out there with her hair in a bun and did glissade, assemble – but in her the classical style seemed to have sunk to the bones of the dancing. The flesh was something else, an awakened force. When she bent down into an arabesque penchee, you thought she would never stop. (She was the first dancer I ever saw touch her forehead to her knee in penchee.) When she executed a triple pirouette, and tilted as she did it, and then – without ever righting herself – plunged directly into the next jackknife or nosedive, you thought the walls were falling in. As Arlene Croce wrote, Farrell “made audiences sweat”.

Here’s the current-day anecdote that brought tears to my eyes:

A constant theme of her teaching is symbol-making. Susan Jaffe, formerly a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, told me about working with Farrell on Mozartiana for the 1995 season at the Kennedy Center. Balanchine made Mozartiana two years before his death, and many people believe that it is about his death. The music for the first section is Tchaikovsky’s resetting of Mozart’s Ave, Verum Corpus, a musical prayer, and as the curtain opens the lead woman (Farrell in the original), dressed in black, comes forward in bourree – the gliding-on-point step – meanwhile raising her arms very slowly. In learning the ballet, Jaffe was having trouble with the arms, so Farrell spoke to her. She told her that Balanchine had taken those arms from a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Church of the Blessed Sacrament on West Seventy-first Street, a few blocks from where he lived. Jaffe, who also lived near there, knew the statue, which is actually a rather ordinary marble Madonna, but with lovely arms, which she holds out to us softly, as if she were giving us something nice. No surprises here: death, prayer, Madonna, mercy. And maybe it was the memory of the statue which enabled Jaffe, when she finally performed Mozartiana, to use her arms as wonderfully as she did. I don’t think so, though. “In that arm movement,” Jaffe said to me later, “you bring your fingers together, and then open your arms. So this movement opens up into art and history – the neighborhood Balanchine lived in, and what he saw, and the history of the world.” What Jaffe got from Farrell, it seems, was not so much a description as a suggestion, an idea: of something small, and one’s own, opening out into something great, which then becomes one’s own, too. With Farrell, Jaffe says, you work “from pictures in your mind, rather than ‘Is this a good fifth position?'”

God, I find that so moving. Directors who use suggestion like that … as opposed to something too literal, or corrective … are my favorites, and always helped me feel totally free, like I could do this, I could do this on my own.

Obviously Jaffe’s technique was fine. Farrell didn’t need to work with her on that. She needed her to think about something, that would help her bring out the idea of the moment – and that is something that is very difficult to describe or pass on. Directors who can do that have a gift.

A couple more excerpts:

Farrell, as a dancer, had certain technical shortcomings – she wasn’t a jumper, and she couldn’t really do allegro (fast, small, fine-cut steps) – but no one in the world was more musical. Her connection to music seemed to be something acutely neurological. (“Even in rehearsal,” she says, “when the pianist would start to play, I would get nervous, agitated.”) As she sees it, music and dance are much the same thing. “There’s sound in movement,” she says, and space in sound. The dancer’s job is to show – or make – the relation between the two: “There’s a clarinet cadenza in Mozartiana that’s very hard to count, but say you count it out, and it’s thirteen counts. So you tell yourself, ‘All right, I’ve got time for three pirouettes.’ But what about the music’s internal time? What if one note is louder, so it needs a bigger response from you, and that takes longer? What if the clarinettist doesn’t have as much breath that night, so the music sort of fades in and out? You can’t really dance to counts, or I couldn’t. On any given night, at any given point, I didn’t know if I was going to do three turns, or two, or four. You have to dance in the drama of the music, in that timing, at that moment.”

And lastly:

[Balanchine] wanted big steps, steps that could fill that echoing stage [at the new theatre at Lincoln Center]. But he was certainly influenced by the fact that he now had, in Farrell, a young wildcat who was dying to do big steps. And so, in collaboration with her, he developed a new style. Farrell calls it “off-balance” dancing, and its off-balance qualities – the reckless tilts and lunges – were indeed the first thing one noticed about it, but it was also new in its utterly plastic musicality and, above all, in its scale. Farrell’s movement came in bolts, in waves, in tearing trajectories. (Balanchine rarely sent her out onstage without an expert partner, one who could prevent her from hurling herself into the orchestra pit.) Even when her dancing was slow, it was wild: pooling, flooding. And she performed this way not just in Balanchine’s new ballets but in his old ones as well. She changed the repertory, and, as other dancers emulated her, she changed the company. In time, she affected every American company. If, today, American ballet dancers are notably headlong – feat-doers, ear-kickers – that is due in part to Farrell. And if, when they are also profound, they are profound in a cool, exalted, unactory way, that, too, in large measure is Farrell speaking, or Farrell and Balanchine.

Some images below of this teenage phenom, who was so young at the time of her great triumphant debut, that Balanchine had to take her out to Dunkin Donuts afterwards to celebrate. Amazing.


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10 Responses to “The performance is now.” – Suzanne Farrell

  1. ted says:

    Great stuff – I love how into this whole new scene you are!!

  2. ted says:

    Now it’s time for you to go to the Dance Collection at the Performing Arts library and see a couple of these guys do their thing!

  3. red says:

    I definitely need to do that! Youtube has not been sufficient in this regard!

  4. jackie says:

    I have always wanted to be one of Balenchine’s muses … too big boned I guess. I read “Dancing on My Grave” by Gelsey Kirkland years ago. It’s a great trashy read. I am in awe of the bony ballerinas.

  5. Stevie says:

    Sheila, there’s an excellent video biography of Farrell available at Netflix. I had never really known about her except that she was the quintessential doe-eyed, ballerina. But the video was revelatory to me and made me appreciate the whole artist-muse relationship so much more. I think you’d enjoy seeing it. xxx Stevie

  6. red says:

    Ooh Stevie – I must watch that immediately!

  7. Catherine says:

    Ballet is something I know absolutely diddly-squat about. Lemme see, I read Ballet Shoes, obviously, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge. But I adore those pictures. Especially the 2nd from the bottom.

  8. red says:

    I love that one, too. She just looks so concentrated there.

  9. melissa says:

    I grew up loving Dance… I wanted to be a ballerina in the worst way – I only had 2 strikes against me. I’m horribly clumsy, and I am 5’10”, and not waif-like in the least. Just 2 small issues…

  10. A says:

    I love the 2nd from the bottom too. She’s obviously just learning the steps, but there’s a sense of abandon just waiting to break out.

    These posts are wonderful. I love ballet and it’s on my enormous list of things to research in depth.

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