Watching Suzanne Farrell Dance

I think what I loved about watching Suzanne Farrell dance was her musicality. The music seemed to take her over and I think Balanchine knew that about her.
It was as if the music was the puppeteer, and it pulled the strings that inspired her dance. I believe that Balanchine’s choreography was also inspired by the beat of the music, the fire in the rhythm, and the angularity that certain sounds compelled through the body, and the passion that it ignited within him.
Balanchine saw dancers as the tool to make music alive.
He was less interested in the personality of the dancer but the personality that came out when the dancer felt into the music and allowed the choreography to take him or her over.
Balanchine saw dancers as the extension of the music, and he saw his choreography as the link between the dancers and that music.
Balanchine ballets (to some) were lacking emotion or character. But that just meant that such an observer was not seeing or feeling how Balanchine wanted the body to tell the story of the music … not the face.
He wanted the body to express a type of detached emotionality that created a tone and flow within the form of physical existence. His style was considered very modern, but I saw it as a critical step to life up ballet from the slap-stick caricature of some ballet performances from the classical past and instead lift it out of the mundane and into a type of neoclassical higher awareness.
What I loved about Balanchine ballets was that in his work, the body told the story of the music.
Whereas, classically in ballet, the music told the emotional story of a character. For hundreds of years, music was composed specifically for certain ballets and certain stories. They were tailored to fit into the choreography that would best describe that ballets storyline. At that time ballets, were designed to fit into the technique that was currently the style, the fashion, and it reflected the capacity of the dancers’ techniques at that moment historically.
But Balanchine took music that he loved and made the dancer conform to that musical structure … rather than the other way around. And that was a type of technical breakthrough that was perfect for moving ballet out of the Romantic phase and into the more modern era.
Classical ballet was the art form of making fairy tales real.
Balanchine was a style that allowed the sensuous and erotic qualities of the human body to be celebrated while seducing the audience into mystical questioning of the meaning of our human existence and then allow that humanity to become the art itself.
Balanchine dancers tended to have a cool, almost aloof, persona. The music was the conductor and it set the tone and movement quality.
Suzanne Farrell was the personification of all of those qualities with a musicality that was genius in that she was not trying to look perfect as a ballerina, she was trying to give over her control and power to the music itself. She let it dictate her movements styles, sharp angles and turns, sudden leaps, and angular shapes that formed through her movements as that symphony inside her soul took over her form and let the music become shape and give it density and depth.
Watching her dance Stravinsky Variations of Orchestra, to me is the personification of her unique and particular ways of moving. She is not trying to look like image so many have about a ballerina. Stravinsky is odd music, angular and unpredictable. Much like humanity.
She danced this ballet with an ability to be quirky, to reflect the chaos of the sounds and to allow something from the mind of Stravinsky to have shape not just sound.
She showed me how the arm initiates the movement in the body of a dancer.
Balanchine understood that I believe that Suzanne Farrell understood the power of isolation in movements. She liked the contrasts from a strong step to a powerful leap out of nowhere that rode on the musicality of emptiness.
She understood that while the older ballets try to disguise the difficulty of certain motions, often the works of Balanchine exaggerate the strain and the stresses of certain positions and how one wanted to get into them and out of them. To him, the strain of the positions invoked the emotional pathos of being human.
Balanchine loved to play with the concepts of what or who initiates the movement. And he loved to play with that quality and bounce it back and forth between dancers, and between the corps de ballet and the principals.
Suzanne Farrell showed me that while the music is a map, the choreographer made that into a topographical map. But it was the dancer that gave that map the ability to become real and show us the scenery inside that environment and space. That dancer shows us how it feels to breathe that illusive air and wander in the landscape of sounds as they become creation.
Suzanne Farrell wanted to make the music interesting for the dancer not necessarily herself. But in doing it that way, there is a great fulfillment as the body learns to twist and turn in unusual ways. This stretches the tools of classical technique and this gave her the expression of shapes that up to that point had not been explored or expressed.
Suzanne Farrell’s movements expressed a joyous explosion that was life and music as it honed itself to become art.

~Suzanne Wagner~