Podcast #65: Suzanne Farrell on George Balanchine

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Suzanne Farrell is the creative director of her eponymous dance company and has danced over 150 roles with the New York City Ballet. As a dancer, she is best known for her work with the great choreographer George Balanchine, who considered Farrell a muse. Together, they created some of the most formally innovative and also intimate performances of twentieth century ballet. This week, The New York Public Library Podcast is proud to present Suzanne Farrell discussing Balanchine.

Before ever meeting Balanchine, Farrell first encountered his image in a book. As a girl, she loved to look at images of dancers in European books, and by the time she auditioned for Balanchine had already studied the choreographer's work in these texts:

"I would read everything I could about him and naturally dreamt of dancing for him one day and getting everything I could on him, so by the time I went to New York and had my audition on my fifteenth birthday, I already had a—I knew what he looked like with the western shirts and the string tie and his profile and, and there that image was coming down the hallway and getting bigger and bigger. So I already sort of knew what he looked like, but I was unprepared for the reality of seeing him... Mr. Balanchine gave me a short audition. He took me in the little studio and asked me if I had something, a routine, and I said no, because I thought that he would give something to dance, so I was worried that my golden opportunity was already over with so I said, 'But I can do something that I did in the recital,' so I hummed to the music and did what I had done in the recital. But mainly he wanted to check one of my—my left foot because it had been kicked by a horse when I was young, and it wasn’t quite as developed as the other one, it had been flattened, so he was concerned that maybe my foot—would I be able to improve enough, get a more decent foot in time to make it worth their investment? So he just had me sit on the floor and he took my shoe off and he felt my toes, and I resisted, I didn’t know what he wanted, but I resisted and I guess he was testing to see how strong the foot was. And then a couple days later I got a scholarship."

Farrell spoke fondly of Balanchine's pedagogy, describing it as both rigorous and a creative playground of sorts:

"He made the act of learning a lot of fun, you know. We were not—It didn’t matter if you were wrong, it didn’t matter if you were right, it was sort of a discovery and a way of getting to know each other better, and even though you weren’t working for that, I wasn’t working for that purpose, but in retrospect I see that he was learning about all his dancers who were there and so that’s when we started to dance very fast, and oh, you know, we all sort of thought he was a little extreme, asking for a hundred tendus in every direction, you know, he said, 'Before you go to bed at night, you know, do one hundred to the front, one hundred to the side, one hundred to the back,' and I said, 'Well, I better. I don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t do them,' so I’d hang on to the railing and watch TV and do my tendus, you know, and it was—he was trying to go beyond what had already been done, and so we would work very, very fast, and you felt inadequate and now that I teach and I’m older, I think that he wanted us to move very fast and very slow because it opened up new music for him to choreograph to. If you only move a little fast and a little slow, that’s a very small world, but if you move very, very fast and very slow, you have a bigger world to be in and all those possibilities, so he was opening up that to himself and to us and to his audiences and to the art form, so being in his class was a lot of fun. He’d even teach on the free day, you know. He was always accessible to his dancers."

Although Balanchine founded the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet, he studied at the State Academic Theater for Opera and Ballet in St. Petersburg. This training formed a foundation from which he innovated a new style of American ballet:

"Mr. B frequently would say he had wonderful teachers when he was growing up in St. Petersburg. He remembered fondly the teachers that he had, and so he loved that aspect of his life and had great respect for his heritage and took a lot with him to America, you know, and reweaved it into, onto American dancers and developed a different style, but he also would go back and say, people would say, 'Oh, what a wonderful ballet,' and he said, 'It’s pure Petipa.' We are the beneficiary of every dancer that came before us, and so you use that link to continue that chain."

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