On the essays shelf:
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
Even if you’re not a ballet fan, you’ve probably heard of Suzanne Farrell. It’s like Gelsey Kirkland, or Darci Kistler, or Margot Fonteyn. Acocella’s essay is fantastic because you get a sense of who Farrell is (you get glimpses of her teaching class, you see how she works with students), but you also really start to understand the true revolution she was for Balanchine, so late in his career. Balanchine made a habit of marrying his lead ballerinas (he did it 3, 4 times), and although he did not marry Farrell, they certainly had some kind of relationship. She says they didn’t sleep together. People who knew Balanchine does not find this surprising. Sex was low on his list of priorities. But artistic connection and work was high up there, and in Farrell he had found his soul mate. They would go out to Dunkin Donuts after one of their triumphant ballets and talk about it. Dunkin Donuts, mkay?
Balanchine had been brought to America to help found the New York City Ballet by Lincoln Kirstein (Acocella wrote an essay about their partnership). With Balanchine creating dances, and running the company, the New York City Ballet put American ballet on the map for the first time. It actually created an American ballet tradition. That was in the 40s and 50s. He was an old man by the time teenager Suzanne Farrell was accepted into the NYCB. She was 16 years old. Her mother was ambitious for her daughter (Acocella is very interesting on “stage moms” who can get a bad name, but Acocella writes: ” ‘Stage mothers’ have a bad reputation, but behind most great ballerinas stand rugged examples of that species.”) Farrell’s mom moved her young daughter to New York, where Farrell enrolled in New York’s School of American Ballet. Farrell’s is a fairy story, the kind of thing young ballerinas dream about. In 1965, Balanchine had created a ballet for one of the star ballerinas, Diana Adams, called Movements for Piano and Orchestra. Right before the premiere, Adams found out she was pregnant. She had to withdraw. Her partner suggested that Suzanne Farrell, in the corps de ballet, could learn the role and go on in Adams’ place. Farrell had danced no lead roles. She was only 17 years old. Balanchine was skeptical but he brought in Farrell to talk to her and see if she could learn it, and fast. (One of the things about Farrell is that she was fast. She was a human robot of ballet steps. She moved at an accelerated pace, not just in her dancing but in her learning process. This is one of the things that Balanchine fell in love with. There was nothing he threw at her that she could not do. She understood “what he meant” without him having to say it.) Farrell danced for Adams, danced for Balanchine, and they must have seen something there, because Balanchine eventually re-made the ballet for Farrell, Farrell made her debut at NYCB and an instant star was born.
Balanchine began creating ballets for Farrell. He only had interest in Farrell. He only watched her dance. He would tell other dancers in the company, “Do it like Suzanne.” Farrell’s style was wild and looked uncontrollable, young and fearless. That became the style Balanchine wanted everyone to emulate. In this sense, Suzanne Farrell can be said to be the most influential ballet dancer in American history. (Acocella’s excerpt below gets into that.) It was a perfect partnership, between an old man (not just older, but old) and a teenager who was blank enough and talented enough to be a total Muse. Her presence invigorated him. Because of Suzanne Farrell, none of the other dancers in the company got to play leads anymore. It was all Farrell Farrell Farrell. Naturally, she was despised. She also didn’t have an ingratiating personality, and was seen as “aloof”, although that doesn’t seem to be totally uncommon with serious young athletes like Farrell. These are nose-to-the-grindstone kids from very early on. They do not worry about being pleasing as people, or happy, or anything like that. They are worker-bees, intent on their goals. They have to be. Ballet is one of the most demanding “sports” there is. Even if you are a star, you still have to take class every day to keep in shape. Farrell was a serious young woman who read Robert Ludlum books and her Bible backstage, did crossword puzzles, and went onstage and dazzled audiences. She had no outside interests. She has said that she is very good at doing nothing. Her life was so insulated as a teenager that the rumor was that she did not know who The Beatles were. I wouldn’t be surprised by that at all, if it were true.
Farrell’s ascent at the NYCB caused tension (to put it mildly). A ton of very talented and valuable dancers left. Why be in a company where there is only one star? Where the head of the company only has interest in one of the dancers? There were other companies out there without Farrell, where they had at least a shot at dancing a lead role. Or dancing at all. Farrell’s rise changed NYCB, and threw it into a crisis of identity (not to mention an issue with keeping other talented dancers there).
And eventually there was a break with Balanchine. He was insanely too old for her, first of all. She would want to go out with other men, and he would throw fits. She wanted to marry Paul Mejia, a friend of hers, a fellow dancer at NYCB. There were those (including her mother) who thought she was insane and killing her career. Marry Balanchine! So he’s 128 years old, who cares, he’s Balanchine!! Farrell couldn’t do it. She married Mejia while Balanchine was out of town. Balanchine was infuriated. Farrell was so much a part of the NYCB that her career didn’t suffer, but her husband’s did. Balanchine refused to give him opportunities. Finally, Farrell resigned.
To give you some perspective, she was only 23 years old at this point.
Amazing.
She moved on and danced with her husband elsewhere. The rest of the essay goes into what follows, her return to NYCB, under the new leadership of Peter Martins, and she eventually was fired.
Farrell is not a bitter person. She seemed to understand why Balanchine acted the way he did, and did not hold it against him. As a matter of fact, she reveres him because he is the one who pulled her out of the corps and made her a star.
One detail I loved: She was about 5’6″, but when on pointe, she was 6’1″. Her feet were huge and beautiful, with giant curves in the instep and arch. Two of the most famous feet in ballet.
Here is an excerpt.
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
Imagine what it meant to him, after the losses he had suffered with his earlier ballerinas, to have this young, strong, gorgeous dancer walk into his life, capable, it seemed, of doing almost anything he asked, and ready to work every day until she dropped. Fate had sent her to him, he believed, and he was not going to turn away. “Watching him teach her,” Adams said, “was like seeing an engineer tuning and revving up a fantastic new machine … He began to make things harder and harder. Suzanne inhaled and kept going.” He made things harder still. She kept up with him. Soon, they had left the rest of the company behind.
Balanchine had always wanted greater amplitude, and soon after Farrell joined the company he desperately needed it, for in 1964 NYCB moved from City Center to the New York State Theater, in the recently opened Lincoln Center. His work now had to occupy one and a half times as much stage space as before. This challenge, and not just Farrell, was the reason he started teaching company class every day, and changed his class. Before, Melissa Hayden, one of the lead dancers of that time, has said, “he had talked for hours about the articulation of the foot.” Now he was less interested in details. He wanted big steps, steps that could fill that echoing stage. 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 – fear-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.
But when Farrell arrived Balanchine didn’t just change his style; he seemed to change his content. Before, in what might be called his classic years – from 1928 (Apollo) to about 1962 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) – his ballets had addressed sex and religion, grief and fate, but those matters, for the most part, were bound in by classicism: tempered, formalized. Now they became pressing and specific. Many of the works that Balanchine made for Farrell in the so-called “Farrell years,” the 1960s, had a sort of jazz-baby sexiness. In these pieces, her costumes tended to be fringed; she tended to be partnered by Arthur Mitchell, the company’s one black man, a pairing that in the sixties had sexual implications. Some observers were taken aback by such directness. In time, the profane yielded to the sacred, and that was even more surprising. Now the supposed abstractionist was filling his stage with angels and gypsies, visions and confessions. Balanchine had embarked upon a “late period”, and it was Farrell who led him there.
