During the 25-year-arc of her life onstage, ballerina Suzanne Farrell was often described as George Balanchine’s muse. With her bold dancing and profound musicality inspiring some of the greatest works of Mr. Balanchine’s later years, she was at the very epicenter of a golden age in dance.
Her rise as a dancer was meteoric. When she was just 17, she was thrust into the premiere of a difficult Igor Stravinsky ballet, substituting for an ailing dancer. Mr. Balanchine famously introduced her to Mr. Stravinsky saying, “This is Suzanne Farrell, just been born.”
That same year, 1963, the choreographer created a passionate, yearning pas de deux for her, “Meditation,” set to a Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky score. Then followed a string of other works created for her, including the luminous lead in “Diamonds” and the central figure of Dulcinea in Mr. Balanchine’s intensely personal full-length “Don Quixote.”
Miss Farrell was breathtaking. Her beauty and strong, free dancing and limpid response to the music brought new excitement to the New York City Ballet.
Inside and outside the studio, the romance between choreographer and muse was building, despite the 41-year difference in their ages. Their emotional involvement came to a wrenching halt. Caught up in something she was too young to cope with, Miss Farrell found friendship and then love with a fellow dancer, Paul Mejia, which led to her dismissal from Mr. Balanchine’s company.
Miss Farrell and her husband were invited by Maurice Bejart to join his Belgian-based company — a highly dramatic, almost flamboyant group.
Young and untried in the world, she built a life for herself based on lessons she had learned from Mr. Balanchine.
“Mr. B had this philosophy of living in the now,” Miss Farrell says. “As a young dancer, I embraced that. It’s very easy to live in the now when your life is going along swimmingly, everything is beautiful and you’re doing all his wonderful ballets. You can’t abandon that belief just because you don’t like your now. I could live in the now with Bejart and be happy because that’s where I was. I don’t brood — it wastes time.
“I continued doing my Balanchine barres in the dark of the theater because I had learned to work that way and with that speed. I had a wonderful time in Europe, and Bejart was very kind and interesting to work with — even Mr. B said he brought something out in me that was different. I think some of it was technical, some of it was theatrical, some of it was having to make all my own decisions, some of it was the lack of Balanchine.”
In other words, in her years in Europe, Miss Farrell grew up.
Several years later, she wrote a note to Mr. Balanchine, saying, “As wonderful as it is to see your ballets, it is even more wonderful to dance them. Is this impossible? Love, Suzi.”
A reconciliation ensued — their reasons for collaborating artistically were as strong as ever. They continued in the studio as if nothing had happened; no mention was made of their rupture, although Miss Farrell says that toward the end of his life, Mr. Balanchine told her he was wrong to have been involved with her, that he was too old for her. In the film “Suzanne Farrell, Elusive Muse,” she recalls that she had longed for him to say those words, but when they came they were not what she wanted to hear — “I never thought of him as an old man.”
In the years that followed, more masterworks emerged from their collaboration — “Tzigane,” “Chaconne,” the mysterious solo in the finale of “Vienna Waltzes,” “Mozartiana.”
After Mr. Balanchine’s death in 1983 and her own retirement six years later, Miss Farrell’s life entered a new chapter. She set ballets for the Balanchine Trust all over the world — from Paris to St. Petersburg — and began teaching an annual summer class for dancers sponsored by the Kennedy Center.
Five years ago, she committed to organizing a company supported by the Kennedy Center, in one of its most creative, long-term ventures. Just last Sunday, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet finished a highly successful week of Balanchine ballets in the Eisenhower Theater that underscored her talent for drawing out inspired performances from her dancers.
“I tell the dancers I work with today, ’You have to keep yourself vulnerable and new every time you come into the studio,’” she says.
Her company has been invited to perform at the Edinborough Festival next summer. For the future, Miss Farrell expects to expand her company to 40, with a couple of seasons a year at the Kennedy Center and more extensive touring. To accomplish all this and other Kennedy Center projects, she has recently moved to Washington.
The most celebrated ballerina this country has produced feels this latest stage in her career was preordained.
“I think Mr. B knew that I’d eventually do this,” she says. “I would sit with him in the theater, listening to him at work just because I wanted to be near him. It was sort of an unconscious way of learning about lighting and directing.
“But I wasn’t there taking notes, because that wasn’t my now. But here I am, now, with lots of ideas for the future.”
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