Ballerina Assoluta

A Portrait of Suzanne Farrell

David Kalstone

George! That girl! Where did you find her? Everything is so easy. No trouble with the music. ”

"Igor Fyodorovich, this is Suzanne Farrell. Just been bom. ”

—IGOR STRAVINSKY AND GEORGE BALANCHINE, 1963

She is the ultimate version of a fine breed of dancer, the great Balanchine ballerina. She is the last of her kind in her frame of mind, in her way of looking at ballet and how she conceives her place. The new ones think of themselves as dancers, not as ballerinas. They are not concerned with images and do not have a sense of rare privilege. Suzanne Farrell has the great manner and dignity, something we name of the old world. She has the grand style.

—PETER MARTINS, 1982

It was at a dress rehearsal that Igor Stravinsky first saw Suzanne Farrell and asked his Russian colleague George Balanchine who she was, this young girl from the corps who was stepping into the ballerina role in Movements for Piano and Orchestra, Balanchine’s latest exploration of Stravinsky’s music, less than a week before its premiere. Now, twenty years later, Farrell is probably more identified with Balanchine’s choreography than any other dancer; she has herself staged a StravinskyBalanchine ballet, and with the death in April of her master and teacher, she becomes a key figure in keeping his ballets alive.

BALLERINA ASSOLUTA

Farrell was a high school student of seventeen, only a year and a half in the New York City Ballet, when she stepped into Movements. Diana Adams, for whom Balanchine had designed the role, had fallen ill and was under doctor’s orders not to move. Balanchine was ready to cancel the ballet but finally decided at the urging of Adams’s partner, Jacques d’Amboise, to let Farrell try the part. D’Amboise taught her as much of the role as he knew. Adams coached her through the rest from a couch in her living room. No tape of the difficult serial score was available, and Farrell couldn’t wear pointe shoes on the slippery parquet floor of the apartment. With gestures, Adams described the moves for her, counted out the tricky rhythms, and indicated when she would have to be on toe. Somehow Farrell managed to piece together what would be for any dancer an extremely complicated role, full of unfamiliar fragmented movements and poses. That same week she was also premiering another Stravinsky ballet—John Taras’s Arcade, the first ballet ever done for her—and had to learn another of Adams’s roles, in Balanchine’s version of Brahms’s LiebesliederWalzer. At the dress rehearsal of Movements she was letter-perfect.

Prodigious musical and technical proficiency, great powers of concentration, and the sponsorship of genius—Farrell has never betrayed those gifts. Of late, her force and beauty frequently prompted Balanchine to turn to Romantic and postRomantic scores of considerable emotional contradiction and complexity: Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze, Ravel’s Tzigane, Richard Strauss’s waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier. And Farrell always responded in turn with unforgettable images of daring and secrecy and allure.

The energy they gave each other during their twenty-year collaboration seemed unremitting. They never repeated themselves; there was always discovery and surprise. Who would have imagined, after the high romance and abandon in much of the work Balanchine had given her, that he would turn to the subdued intricacy of Mozartiana, Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 4, one of the last of his ballets that it has become essential to see Farrell perform? “Fve never moved that way,” she said, “and in fact I don’t think Balanchine had ever choreographed in that way before: to those sounds, to that look. I feel this is what heaven must be like.”

Part of the initial appeal of Mozartiana was that, like many great Balanchine-Farrell collaborations, it seemed to be a new and exotic dialect of a language one thought one had mastered. Farrell was injured on opening night, so only since her eager return to the part in recent seasons—no one else dances the role— has the ballet fully unfolded. The audience has watched its incandescent progress as Farrell and her partner, lb Andersen, have explored it more and more deeply in successive performances. Beneath Mozart’s classical line is the darker, lusher pressure of his Russian admirer’s orchestral coloring, and the dancing attunes us to these undercurrents. It keeps alive both musical impulses without fusing them: there is Mozartean clarity, intricacy, and wit in the footwork, yet a lavishness of movement as well.

“After having done this ballet,” Farrell has said, “I must say my life has never been the same in any area—offstage and on. The themes run through my mind; the vision goes through my mind. The feeling is very personal. I feel close to all the ballets Balanchine did for me. I get very emotional and sentimental about them. But I don’t have the feeling toward those others that I do toward Mozartiana. It came later on in both of our careers, Balanchine’s and mine.... I sense this tremendous calm—and I’m really a supernervous person before I go onstage, not at all cool or serene. But in this I feel such tremendous calm. It’s wonderful.”

BALLERM ASSOLUTA

Balanchine rearranged the suite’s four movements so that the Prayer section, Tchaikovsky’s setting of Mozart’s Ave Verum, opens the ballet. “Doing the Prayer first,” Farrell remarked, “is a wonderful way to start off your life in front of the audience. It sets the whole mood of the ballet, even though we get off that track. I sang it when I was a little girl at church. I always thought it was such a beautiful piece of music. Knowing we were going to sing that was the only thing that would get me to church on time—I was such a misbehaving little girl. I had no idea that that music was part of Mozartiana. When I heard the music, I thought how wonderful that it comes back into my life years and years later.”

Farrell talks about what she has accomplished as if it had been done by someone else. The voice is flat, matter-of-fact, fiercely serious when speaking of Balanchine and dance— and then, with perfect timing to catch you off balance, it becomes playful or ironic. The eyes are blue (“Mr. B. said ‘Mediterranean blue,’ ” she’ll add, because it gives her enormous pleasure to quote him). She can be mischievous or dismissive if complimented on her technique. At a recent performance of Mozartiana, dancing with a bad cold, Farrell, prompted by some new emphasis in the music, kept spinning in a pirouette beyond the usual number of turns. Was it four, five, even six spins, the first ones rapid, the last a lingering, controlled turn that brought her to a sumptuous close rather than the usual sudden stop. “I was just trying to keep up with my nose,” she remarked.

By temperament she is solitary. She doesn’t make a habit of parties, doesn’t go to other dance events, doesn’t linger at the State Theater as many other dancers do, even when they are not performing or rehearsing. In the summer, after the company season at Saratoga, she retreats with her husband, Paul Mejia, the artistic director of the Chicago City Ballet, to a small island they own in upstate New York. Not that she is in any way a recluse. Her reserve seems to have sharpened her, when she is in company, to a special relish for sociability. Ask a question: the lovely direct glance hovers for a moment; she seems to dive for an answer. You don’t feel any restraint in her thoughtfulness and candor. Her mystery is somewhere else; what is most private is in a way what is most public, and it is to be seen in her dancing.

She has been at the heart of the New York City Ballet for twenty years, even though from 1969 to 1975 she was not actually in the company. Talking about Farrell one inevitably speaks in terms of before and after—before she left the company and after she returned. At twenty-three she broke with the New York City Ballet, presumably for good, and soon found a place in Brussels with Maurice Bejart’s Ballet of the Twentieth Century. In leaving City Ballet she was the victim of her own youth and rapid development, as well as of her privileged and isolating relationship with Balanchine, in whose imagination she had come to hold a preeminent place.

Ancient history now, this must have been the most painful and sobering episode in her career. She had become very close to Balanchine during the preparation of Don Quixote in 1965 and during the seasons that followed. Balanchine had wanted to do a Don Quixote for twenty-five years, and in Farrell had at last found the proper Dulcinea. (At the gala preview the choreographer himself, then sixty-one, took the character role of the Don.) “There are many things that make a relationship,” Farrell remarked. “One rare thing makes a special relationship. That’s what we had. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Mr. B. taught me how to be, not just how to dance.” Their rapport could not, however, survive Farrell’s marriage to Mejia, at that time a young soloist in the company and also one of Balanchine’s favorite young dancers. Looking back, (continued on page 119) Farrell sees how essential it was to leave. Balanchine’s accelerating interest in her onand offstage, and then her own marriage, had put the three of them—and the company— under enormous strain.

Continued from page 84

By the time Farrell left she had already accomplished wonders. “No one has ever worked as hard for Balanchine or extended herself to him in the way she has,” Diana Adams commented in Ballet Review in 1982. From 1963 on, Balanchine had made one or two new ballets a year for her. As Adams pointed out, it is usual for a dancer, once she discovers her strengths, to type herself as soubrette, lyric, adagio, dramatic, etc., and to groom herself in that image. “Suzanne didn’t; she bypassed the idea of self-classification according to type as if the idea never existed, which meant that every ounce of her talent was available to Balanchine.” Once when Adams reminded Balanchine that Farrell had performed, in addition to her own roles, “ballets from the repertories of virtually every important dancer he’d ever worked with,” the choreographer shrugged and replied, “Well, you see, dear, Suzanne never resisted.”

If Farrell had not returned to City Ballet, her image would still have been impressed strongly upon it, not just in the roles Balanchine had created for her but in the new ballets that contained a whiff of her presence, as well as in changes of company style and in a series of leggy, hyperextended dancers who seemed like copies or parodies of her. The Farrell who came back in 1975 was grander, more womanly, more beautiful in her arm and hand gestures. She was the great ballerina she had always promised to be—and something more: a great dramatic presence. Lincoln Kirstein, the general director of the company, spoke of how she had “heightened her emotional projection, which up to then seemed smoldering.”

The revelation in those first seasons after her return—quite apart from the new dances Balanchine made for her—was to watch Farrell revisit one after another the roles she had never thought she would have the chance to come back to. She danced those parts as if on a long, considered exploration. They had originally come to her so swiftly that, as she said, “It would have been hard for a young person to put it all into perspective.” The Balanchine repertory was recharged much as nineteenth-century bel canto opera had once been revealed by Maria Callas. And, of course, because of Balanchine’s presence, it was a repertory that was still evolving, one that could absorb and rechannel the energy Farrell was releasing.

When Kirstein talks about Farrell’s heightened emotional projection, he means something more than the isolated stage images we usually associate with the term “dramatic.” But those too are part of our riveted response to her, in white silk, alone, “revolving a moment in remembered arms” through the darkened, mirrored ballroom of Vienna Waltzes', or, in Monumentum pro Gesualdo, tautly sailing, in arabesque, from her partner to other waiting arms. I remember her, not long after her return, as the Japanese bride in Balanchine’s Bugaku, staring with pale, womanly defiance into the audience—an image that reflected all the vulnerability and pride involved in her coming back to the company.

Her years with Bejart helped her: “I had a wonderful time. He did some wonderful ballets for me .. .but some of the things weren’t, of course, up to my repertory, the kind of dancing I was used to, the amount of dancing. Sometimes you’d be required to stand onstage all night long and not do anything. You’d do your dance, and then you’d still have to be present as a character and make yourself seen and known and felt, but not be obnoxious, since you’re in the background.” She learned to “saturate” a role.

Theatrical presence means even more to Farrell in a repertory stripped to the essentials of movement. “Even though Balanchine ballets are very demanding and our company is the most proficient in the world—still, it’s very easy to hide behind such masterpieces.”

Farrell dismisses false distinctions between plotted and plotless ballets. “With all respect to the classics, say Giselle (if it ever came my way, I’d like to try it...my way), the story is already written in the program. Everybody knows what is going to happen. The poor girl is going to get jilted by her lover and kill herself. There’s absolutely no convincing that needs to be done; yes, you act, but the audience is already in your corner. Whereas in something like [Balanchine’s] Serenade or Diamonds, it’s a lot more difficult to get any sort of feeling across without a story and without words. Yet people feel there’s been a powerful performance. But you do it through your musicality, your intensity, your energy. Even in Stravinsky ballets. There’s no story. People think they’re ‘abstract’ and cold. It takes a lot of fire and intensity and acting to put a ballet like that across and not look silly or banal.”

She remembers a rehearsal when a dancer, out of the blue, did something technically prodigious, probably unrepeatable in performance. “One of those wonderful moments in a dancer’s life, something you can relish, something your ego needs every once in a while.” The rehearsal stopped dead. All the dancers applauded. And then Farrell noticed a visitor leaning over to ask someone what the girl had done. “I thought to myself, ‘Aha, Miss Farrell, w know what happened.’ But it was a world of knowledge to me to see that, as wonderful as it was—I would like to have done it—it didn’t mean anything to the spectator, had no impact on a nondancer.”

In performance, Farrell says, “a step is only good, musically, if visually you make it interesting in relation to the music.” Making a step visually interesting is a more than teasing way of describing her recent high-density performances. Their sumptuous flow of body images is something the impulse of steps and music has created but into which steps are completely absorbed. It all happens so fast. The reflex of a step is assimilated into gesture: a flashing lift of the head, a hypnotic glance at her partner, the swell and ebb of shapes inscribed around her by arms and hands, a fluidity of images that is her way of organizing steps into an exploration of the music. The music will crystallize momentarily the ingredients of drama—and not always the same drama. With Peter Martins, dancing to the Tchaikovsky score of the plotless Diamonds, Farrell can shape the dance image to look like a series of evasions of her partner. In another performance, different inflections will make it look like a reluctant separation, or as if Martins were setting her into the motion that pulls them apart. A whirl of chaine turns will appear to invite a partner, and then something in the tempo or dynamics will prompt an expanding cone of protecting wrists that delays him. She might well say that a story ballet limits the dancer to one line of plot, one range of images. For her, Balanchine’s plotless dances will support multiple dramas.

To Farrell, working on a new ballet with Balanchine became an almost intuitive collaboration, a heightened version of what he had always wanted from his privileged dancers. “As great as he is,” she once said, “he’s looking for a challenge too. He’s often just as surprised at what he sees from me. We derive a special joy from working together. I give him a lot of energy, I think—not that other people don’t— it’s just an energy that we both understand. You know, you give to somebody so that you can give again...I don’t like to know the music well before I work on a piece. If I know it too well, I’ll have an already preconceived idea of what I would like to do. Then I’m limiting him because I’m forcing him to do that. I’ve seen that happen in the studio many times. People know how they want to look or what they do well, and they’ll paint him into a corner instead of.. .being the paint.” How did it all start? Farrell remembers her early discouragement on joining the company. The things Balanchine asked of them in class seemed so extreme that even the senior ballerinas couldn’t do them. “He asked for hard technical things—a turn from an unusually wide position. Why did we have to do it that way and not the way we were accustomed? A turn’s a turn.” He urged her to keep trying, and when she succeeded she immediately felt the sensation he was aiming for, felt and saw the difference. From that moment on, as she says, she never held back. In those years she lived in constant fear of losing her job. She had come to New York, accompanied by her mother and sister, on a pilot Ford Foundation scholarship to the School of American Ballet. “Failure there or when I got into the company. . .we couldn’t afford to have a thing like that happen, couldn’t financially afford or mentally cope.” Outsiders saw it differently. As Diana Adams has said, “Watching him teach her was like seeing an engineer tuning and revving up a fantastic new machine. The intensity of her concentration was almost terrifying to watch.”

One of the technical skills Balanchine and Farrell discovered and developed was her ability to dance securely through off-balance positions, something almost unheard-of in classical training. There were moments of it in Clarinade, the first Balanchine work to premiere in the newly opened New York State Theater in 1964. In a slinky pas de deux for Farrell and Anthony Blum, Balanchine wanted the look of an exhausted couple in the last moments of a dance marathon. Some of the new moves intimidated the young Farrell, but within a year her security off balance had been incorporated into her complicated role in Don Quixote. At its most memorable her Dulcinea seemed largely unpartnered; in the final act she appeared to be a solo figure taking on more and more of the desperation of the crazed Don. Farrell, looking recently at films of the work, has remarked how much more daring and dramatic her dancing has become since then. But the role was the foundation of that independent performing force—one that demands relatively little support—which is identifiably and uniquely hers. “Partners didn’t exist for me in those days. It was my way. I suppose, of keeping myself open for Mr. B. Mr. B. was the only one who mattered to me.” This does not mean—especially in the light of her splendid dancing with Peter Martins since her return to the company— that Farrell is not excited with and challenged by her partners. But it does mean that there is a freedom and strength in her performing that is for Balanchine alone. He made wonderful dances for her and her partners after she came back to the company, but he had her to himself for the great solos that only she could perform: the solitary Rosenkavalier waltzes, the Gypsy soloist in Tzigane, the serene figure in the opening Prayer of Mozartiana.

Peter Martins, a partner who matches Farrell in glamour, prowess and understanding of Balanchine’s enterprise, noticed that on returning to City Ballet, Farrell seemed to have “taken over for herself the protective, nurturing role that Balanchine had assumed for her in her early years.” Now, by another twist of circumstance, these resources are increasingly put to the test. Because of Balanchine’s prolonged illness, his absence during this whole season, and the realization that he will not return to the company, Farrell’s high level of performance in his ballets has been especially charged. Farrell, with her ever varying performances, each one growing from the one before it, keeps showing how even the rarest dancer can go back again and again to the repertory for nourishment.

There is always a danger, when a choreographer is absent from his work, that the repertory will not be kept up. The steps may be properly taught; the technical ability of company dancers doing difficult combinations may be higher than ever. But the future of the Balanchine performing style—as Farrell shows over and over again—rests not in isolated details but in the pulse that governs them, the heartbeat of Balanchine’s patterns: his musicality. An awareness of this has already prompted Farrell to try her hand at staging Balanchine ballets, her first effort being Apollo for Maria Tallchief’s Chicago City Ballet. Even working with other choreographers—her husband in the Chicago City Ballet’s Cinderella and Peter Martins in Rossini Quartets—she has been able to provide not just Balanchine’s trademark movements but an infusion of Balanchine’s spirit, which makes her less an instrument and more a collaborator for these aspiring choreographers.

In the summer of 1974, on vacation from Bejart’s company, Farrell saw the Balanchine company at Saratoga; it was the first time she’d seen La Valse—or indeed almost any of the ballets she had danced—from the audience. She wrote Balanchine a brief note along these lines: “As nice as it is to see La Valse, it is even more wonderful to dance it. Is this impossible?” Balanchine must have appreciated the tact and challenge of that “impossible.” They met shortly afterward in New York, and when beauty and genius and common sense came together there wasn’t so much as a “Would you like to come?” or a “Will you take me back?” All that was said was, “When do we get back to work?”