Suzanne Farrell
Perhaps you’ve never seen Suzanne Farrell dance.
Perhaps you’ve never even heard of her. She’s sixty-six now and retired from performing for over twenty years. But in her heyday she was unique, and choreographer George Balanchine was besotted with her.
Farrell came to the New York City Ballet, Balanchine’s company, as a teenager and began performing as a soloist very quickly. Just as quickly, the very-much-older Balanchine fell in love with her, divorced his wife Tanaquil LeClerc (once another of his ballerinas, LeClerc had tragically been forced to retire very early in her career because she’d contracted polio), and hoped to marry Farrell. She refused, and declined to have an affair with him, either, although he kept on choreographing ballet after ballet for her. At 23, she married another NYCB dancer and they both left the company, although she returned many years later.
I saw her dance quite a few times, mostly when she was achingly young. I attended a performance of the famous 1965 production of “Don Quixote” in which Farrell was Dulcinea and the 61-year-old Balanchine danced a worshipful Don Quixote. I didn’t much like it, but Farrell was extraordinary. Although slender, she was never emaciated. She had a tiny head and a longish torso. Taller than most, her body didn’t have that steely, muscled quality so many dancers get, even female ones. She looked softer, gentler, and had a way of moving that I can only describe as liquid (and that’s a compliment, although it might not sound that way).
Farrell didn’t mind being off-balance, but she made off-balance into a kind of balance. Her dancing was almost eccentric; nothing she ever did was ordinary or expected, especially her flowing and flexible upper body and arms.
But perhaps Farrell herself said it best:
A lot of dancers don’t want to move, they just want to pose. I’m not a poser.
Watch:
Well about two minutes of Tzigane and one can completely understand why Balanchine was obsessed with her.
In an interview over on Youtube the older Ferrell points out something interesting about technique. She says, “You have to be fascinating before you enter. Then the technique is just the icing on the cake.”
And as proof of this watch what she does with a turn of the head at around 1:20 of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHzPiXNuyO8&feature=related
“A lot of dancers don’t want to move, they just want to pose.”
I don’t know what to make of this — it is anti-intuitive. This may be some great insight of the professional or the trained dancer that is lost on me. For example in the video Tzigane the dance/role seems to call for the pose – as accent or emphasis or something. And overall and generally speaking, the guys seem even more the posers, positioning themselves for the embrace, lift, toss, etc.
George Pal: that’s just the first minute or two of Tzigane, where the choreography happens to feature poses rather than dancing. Once the real dancing starts, Farrell is extremely fluid, unusually so. Her quote means that for too many dancers, choreography that is supposed to be fluid and seamless turns into a series of poses instead, as though they’re looking at themselves in the mirror in a classroom rather than paying attention to the flow of movement and the music.
I see that sort of thing in dancers all the time, but I never see it in Farrell (except for moments such as the beginning of Tzigane, where the choreography calls for exaggerated posing).
In my local newspaper, in a synopsis of a movie entitled “First Position”:
Beautiful.