AOTF’s Breakfast With a Scholar: The Many Roles of Suzanne Farrell
By Ashley Opp Hofmann
“Ballet has been good to me,” says Suzanne Farrell, ballerina, teacher, and founder and artistic director of The Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. “It brought me great pleasure and was a salvation for me in many cases.”
Farrell spoke at this year’s Breakfast With a Scholar, sponsored by the American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF) at AOTA’s 88th Annual Conference & Expo. There, she talked about life and work “from a dancer’s perspective,” as she puts it.
“The underlying goal of Breakfast With a Scholar is to bring people from other disciplines who are experts in their field, and we had not yet had anyone from the performing arts,” says Martha Kirkland, former AOTF executive director, who arranged to have Farrell speak this year before stepping down. “Not everyone is a grandmaster of ballet, but Farrell’s occupation is the occupation of many people who appreciate her art and their lives are changed by it.”
Setting the Stage
Those familiar with dance will certainly already know of Farrell’s career and her work with choreographer George Balanchine. Farrell joined the New York City Ballet in 1961 and her musicality, technique, and sheer talent quickly caught Balanchine’s notice, effectively launching one of the most remarkable collaborations in dance history. She danced a repertory of more than 100 ballets until her retirement from the stage in 1989.
Farrell had an unparalleled career that broadened the idea of how a ballerina could dance technically (particularly en pointe) and helped to facilitate some of Balanchine’s greatest choreography. In other words, she could do things that audiences had never before seen ballerinas do. Artistically, her understanding of music and the theater of performance helped her to make a very dramatic mark on her roles (many of which Balanchine choreographed specifically for her).
But dance is, as Farrell points out, “a young profession.” Career decisions must be made in childhood and once achieved the time on stage is relatively short. “It’s a very fragile life,” says Farrell, noting the limitations of the human body. Transitioning from the role of performer to the role of shaping performers through teaching and her ballet company was a long process that deepened Farrell’s understanding of what it means to be a dancer.
Listening to the Body
Farrell’s road to “retirement”—a road that eventually resulted in a hip replacement, followed by a second 4 years later—was difficult. “When the pain persisted in my hip and it took longer for messages to get through my leg down to my feet, that was very frightening,” Farrell says.
A dancer’s body, as Farrell points out, is his or her instrument. “Every minute a dancer uses their body for anything, even rehearsing, uses up the instrument,” she says. “It’s important to learn quickly, in the moment, so you don’t have to do unnecessary repetition.”
Farrell’s physical pain was gradual. “I was hesitant to even mention the word ‘arthritis.’ I tried all sorts of things but it just wouldn’t go away,” she says. “I had always been strong-willed and my body would respond to what I asked of it, so it took me a long time to admit that I had a very serious event in front of me.” Farrell eventually agreed to a hip replacement.
Using Ballet to Heal
“I wanted to get well enough to go back on the stage so I could retire on my own terms, which was very important for me, instead of having to retire because of an injury,” Farrell says.
To meet this goal, Farrell put all of her energy into getting well. “I just put myself in a healing sort of mind,” she says. Farrell loved the rehab exercises she did in bed and she could feel progress, but she learned to be still, too. “Even if I was just sitting there, healing would be taking place. Everything has its time and its place and that’s what’s so wonderful about different aspects of therapy,” she says. “Even Mr. Balanchine said, ‘Silence is a beautiful thing.’”
Farrell reconciled physical limitation with her identity as a dancer by using dance as part of her recovery. “Because my body related to dance and to those kinds of movements and had been trained that way all of its life, I think I got better when I started doing dance moves because that’s the language it understands,” she says. “That’s the language my body understands. It was the language I could see and measure my progress in.” She returned to the stage as she desired, retiring on her own terms several years later.
Taking on New Roles
When asked about her career history, Farrell is not nostalgic. “I would be ungrateful if I sat here and said, ‘Gee, I wish I were still dancing,’” she says. “I live in the now. I had my time as a dancer and [it was] very creative and wonderful to be with Mr. Balanchine, but when you can’t go on in the same way as you did, then it’s time to move on. I feel equally creative in this ‘now’ moment of my life. It’s wonderful to dance a Balanchine ballet and it’s also exciting to pass it on to someone else. It’s creative in a different way.”
Farrell has since founded her own ballet company, and The Suzanne Farrell Ballet is nationally recognized as one of the most important efforts in revitalizing and disseminating Balanchine’s works. The company’s new season will start this fall.
She also teaches ballet to serious young students and to beginning adults through a program called “Exploring Ballet.” Yet Farrell eschews the idea that “when you’re young you dance, and when you’re old, you teach. It’s a way of life for me. I still consider myself a dancer; I just dance less.”
Another newer role for Farrell is that of audience member—ironically, the role through which the many people appreciated her art when she performed. “I love watching my dancers now. I know what it’s like to dance those ballets, yet I get such a wonderful feeling for them as well,” Farrell says. The role of the appreciative spectator is not a small one. “Everyone sees a ballet differently, but sometimes you can feel it in the atmosphere when the performance is honest and when the audience is receiving and honest in return. It’s very electrical in that sense,” says Farrell.
In addition to leading a dance company and teaching, Farrell plans to begin choreographing in near future. Through both periods of her physical rehabilitation, Farrell learned how the body produces the movements she holds so dear. As she trains new dancers, restages Balanchine works, and begins her own choreography, ballet will serve as the medium through which she expresses herself. For her, ballet is not about how many turns one can do or how long one stays en pointe. “It’s not about technique,” she says. “It’s about movement. It [is] about moving through space in time and defying gravity.”
If you’d like more information on Suzanne Farrell, read Holding Onto the Air, her autobiography (University Press of Florida, 2002). The Academy Award–nominated documentary Elusive Muse (Winstar, 2001) chronicle’s Farrell’s career with Balanchine.
Ashley Opp Hofmann is AOTA’s senior staff writer.