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Suzanne Farrell on SERENADE

Serenade is the first ballet that Balanchine created for American dancers on American soil. It began, in 1934, as a lesson on technique with students from his School of American Ballet. This was a formative period in the building of Mr. B’s company, so the students he had to work with led to many unique configurations of dancers. He also integrated unexpected events into the choreography, for instance, one girl arriving late for rehearsal and another dancer falling. Over time, the number of dancers changed and the costumes changed (the final version features long blue costumes against the blue background). At one point, Mr. B re-inserted a repeat of the music that he had originally removed. Then in the 1970s, he decided the three girls in the final movement should wear their hair down and loose. But the choreography remains pure and Serenade is considered a cornerstone of the Balanchine repertoire.

As a child, I owned a record of the music—Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade in C for String Orchestra”—and once choreographed my own ballet to the music’s “Russian Dance.” Serenade has four movements in all: Sonatina, Waltz, Russian Dance, and Elegy. I have fond memories of dancing the Dark Angel, one of three ballerinas in the final movement. One of the images that inspired Mr. B for this more “yearning” part of the ballet is a sculpture by Antonio Canova, in which Cupid brings his dying love Psyche back to life with a kiss.

This role, called the Dark Angel, was actually my very first solo. The company was on summer tour at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival in 1962 when Jillana sustained an injury. I had only 72 hours to learn the part and only one chance to perform it, on the last day of the festival. The schedule did not allow me a rehearsal with all the other 20 swirling bodies running in intricate patterns. Even though Mr. B would not be there to see me, I rehearsed it around the clock, working on it backward and forward, choosing places in the music to determine where I’d be at that exact moment.

After the performance, I wrote in my diary: “I was so nervous I could hardly put my make-up on... Once I got out there it was really heaven, even more so with Diana [Adams] dancing with me... At the end of my first entrance Diana said, ‘Very good, Suzanne’.” I wrote a few more notes in there and underlined all of the ballets I performed that week.

I have staged Serenade for my own company and others, and am thrilled that a new generation of dancers have come to know this wonderful ballet. I love watching their eyes light up when they see for the first time how all of Mr. B’s elaborate elements come together and take on life and meaning.

Suzanne Farrell on GOUNOD SYMPHONY

With its large cast of 32 dancers—a central couple joined by 20 women and 10 men from the corps—Gounod Symphony had always been on my list to restage. Prior to 2016, many people had never seen Gounod Symphony before. I sometimes liken reviving one of Balanchine’s “lost” ballets to finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovering a forgotten piece of Mozart’s music, or unearthing a piece of pottery from an ancient culture. The process opens up a whole new understanding of what was going on in dance at the time, and each ballet has its own fascinating story to tell.

Balanchine premiered Gounod Symphony to the world in 1958 with Maria Tallchief and Jacques d’Amboise in the lead roles. I never danced the ballet, and I had only seen it performed a couple of times before I was asked to stage it for the School of American Ballet in 1990. I immediately fell in love with all of its intricate patterns, which highlight the corps in ways that don’t exist in any other Balanchine work. There are also several aspects to the pas de deux that make it unique, including a moment when eight women from the corps enter.

In 1990, I had wanted to showcase Mr. B’s patterns in all their glory by creating costumes in a different palette (they were pink and yellow tulle in the original) and at a shorter length, to better reveal all that the dancers’ legs are doing. But that was not within the realm of possibility at that time. In staging it for my own company, we designed brand-new costumes. I believe Mr. B would have been excited to see the results, as he would occasionally change costumes himself—a prime example: elaborate fashions became black-and-white practice clothes—to exciting effect.

This restaging in 2016 was also the second year in a row that my company performed a work danced to a score by Charles Gounod. (In 2015, we performed Walpurgisnacht Ballet, featuring music from Gounod’s opera, Faust.) As the title suggests, the music is symphonic so it’s all very big and lush. Mr. B clearly knew what he was doing by choreographing this music to so many dancers—otherwise, what the ears hear would outweigh what the eyes see.

Before staging Gounod, I dug out my notes from that School of American Ballet presentation. As Gounod Symphony was one of the first ballets I ever restaged, I had volumes of copious notes on large yellow legal pads—with sketches and diagrams to help me track all of the ever-shifting patterns that continue to divide, morph, and come back together on stage. I drew lines to divide a page in half when a group would split off, sketch a sequence side-by-side with what the principals were doing, and then divide the page yet again when another formation began to take shape. It was all an elaborate puzzle, with steps nested within steps nested within steps; I tried my best to keep all the related actions on the same page!

I also referred to an archival video that was recorded soon after Gounod Symphony was first choreographed. Even though the recording had no sound, there was Mr. B in the film, snapping his fingers to the rhythms and beats in the music. Whenever there are parts of a ballet that don’t make sense to me musically, I start by going back to the first filming on file—if one exists—to try and seek out more clarity.

In September 2016, I led a working rehearsal of Gounod Symphony at NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, followed by a discussion with founder and director Jennifer Homans. This type of public rehearsal, in front of hundreds of spectators, can be a very vulnerable place for any artist. However, I hoped that, through the work process of simultaneously implementing suggestions and corrections with each repetition, the audience was given deeper insight into what the eyes might see, and ears could hear, in the performance.

Suzanne Farrell on MEDITATION

Meditation was the first ballet that Balanchine made on me, and in 1965, it was the first ballet to which he gave me ownership. (Balanchine assigned the copyright to several of his ballets to various dancers and estates—I am honored that he gave me ownership, as well as, after his death, of Tzigane and his Don Quixote, each of which have been performed by my company.)

A pas de deux of approximately 8 minutes, Meditation is performed to Tchaikovsky’s music of the same name for violin and piano, and orchestrated by Glazounov. The work premiered in December 1963 at the New York City Center of Music and Drama; my partner was Jacques d’Amboise. He and I were both tall, so Balanchine saw us as a good match.

At the time Balanchine was creating Meditation in New York, he was also working on the dance sequence in Orpheus and Eurydice for the Hamburg Opera. Based on the Greek myth, the opera follows Orpheus as he attempts to bring his wife back from the underworld, only to lose her again. Perhaps this theme of “impossible love” inspired Balanchine when he started Meditation. It certainly proved to people that Balanchine was not just an “abstract” or “neo-classical” choreographer, as he had been so often labeled. He could also create something founded on pure emotion.

I first became aware that Balanchine had me in mind for a ballet when we were on tour in Russia, in 1962. I was nursing an injured knee after adjusting to all the steeply raked stages in Europe, so I was unable to dance and was thoroughly frustrated. But when we stopped to perform in Tbilisi—Balanchine’s home town in Georgia—he calmed me. As I recorded in my diary: “The Nutcracker is not so important. Don’t dance,” Balanchine said. “NEXT season, though, you will see…” He pointed his index finger to me, and then upward. I wasn’t really sure what that meant, but by the fall of 1963, we were back in the studio and I was to find out.

At the time, I was 18, and had not yet been in love. So creating a pas de deux around the concept of romance was the farthest thing from my mind. Yet it evolved into an evocation of passion, love, and loss. A man, kneeling, his head in his hands, begins and ends the ballet alone. In between, he is visited by a young girl in a white, translucent gown and long, flowing hair. (This was the beginning of a career of loose hair for me, one of Balanchine’s signature breaks from tradition.) She invites him into a duet, tender at first, but increasingly passionate and reckless as the dance continues. Many people have filled in their own story here, and I eventually discovered mine. But I don’t believe you need to explain everything in a ballet. A sense of mystery can be very powerful. The more you reveal to an audience, the more mysterious you become.

Tchaikovsky’s violin gives Meditation a certain Russian sensibility. I remember Jacques d’Amboise, after a performance once, innocently suggested that Balanchine created Meditation because “every Russian likes to suffer.” But Balanchine—who was generally a happy person—immediately diffused this maudlin notion. “No!” he said. “That’s not true! Who wants to suffer? Suffering comes into our lives whether we like it or not!” I believe Balanchine choreographed life on stage. His ballets reflect and celebrate life and love in all its poignancy.

Balanchine gave Meditation to me saying he didn’t want anyone else to dance it, and I was loyal to his wishes for more than 35 years after it premiered. (At one time, Mikhail Baryshnikov asked to perform it—of course he understood it was not possible, once I explained Balanchine’s request.) But when I began teaching, a few years after Balanchine passed away, I thought, what good is a ballet if it’s never seen? Leaving these works “in the vault” wasn’t preserving them—it was destroying them. So I decided to teach Meditation to a new generation. In 1999, several decades after the ballet’s world premiere, I staged a special program called Suzanne Farrell Stages the Masters of 20th Century Ballet (with an ensemble that eventually became The Suzanne Farrell Ballet). Then, audiences saw my dancers perform Meditation for the first time, and I was seeing it for the first time as well. We are the only company in the world to perform it.

Suzanne Farrell on TZIGANE

Upon my return to Balanchine’s company in early 1975, a Ravel Festival was in the works for the spring season. In the frantic weeks of rehearsal leading up to the celebration, Balanchine brought me a record of Ravel’s Tzigane, explaining that the first ballet he wanted to make on me upon my return would be choreographed to this music. As the music was not very “classical”—more a kind of gypsy dance that sounded like Ravel’s answer to the 19th century American folk tune “Turkey in the Straw”—I was concerned that my grand homecoming would be something very different than what the public was used to seeing of Balanchine’s and my work together. But knowing that by trusting him, one always landed in the right place, I dove into our first rehearsal, scheduled only a week before the premiere, in a small studio with rehearsal pianist Gordon Boelzner and a characteristically calm Mr. B.

Calling for a ballet nine minutes in total, the music begins with a plaintive, drawn-out violin solo and then slowly builds to more rapid rhythms and variations. Working that day in the studio, we began with one of my signature entrances: entering from the back left wing: no steps, no pointe work, no pirouettes, just a sultry, languid walk. Much of Mr. B’s choreographic direction seemed improvised as we worked to establish the mood of the piece. As the tempo of the music picked up, so did the speed of the steps, and suddenly here he was, running all around the studio with me following behind, imitating and attempting to memorize his movements at the same time. What followed were several intricate arm and hand flourishes and many toe-heel-toe, turned-in czardas steps.

Soon the flavor of Tzigane began to take shape. Mr. B finally suggested an actual ballet step—a big, bold arabesque—so I went into a diving arabesque penché. “I know you can do that,” he said. “But what else can you do?” So I went way down into an arabesque penché and flipped over to a deep back bend. At last, we were back to experimenting again, just like my earlier days in the company. In that first hour-and-a-half rehearsal, we completed the entirety of my solo, all five minutes of it.

Mr. B’s directive to Lamar Alsop, the violin soloist for the premiere, was to not play with a classical approach but with a brash, rather shameless one marked with a brazen wit: “It’s like Hungarian restaurant music, a goulash,” I remember him saying. This helped me realize that my training with Maurice Béjart—for whose company I danced prior to my New York City Ballet return, an experience that taught me how to fill a stage with drama and spectacle as only a force of one—was now benefiting the situation more than my fast Balanchine tendus! Mr. B was capitalizing on what I had learned over the five years I had been away from his company. This was the first of several instances where I drew from this indispensable collection of theatrical movements, hints, and looks—what I called my “Béjart bag of tricks.”

The last four minutes of the ballet was choreographed over the remainder of the week. My partner enters from a back wing (for the premiere this was Peter Martins, in what would be the first and only complete ballet that Mr. B ever made on us)—and then there we are, dancing, the lights brightening, the music broadening to a full orchestra, and four additional couples come on stage for the finale. For costuming, initially the designer presented a somewhat uninspired, solid red and drapey outfit. Mr. B and I headed down to the storage rooms of the theater and instead found an old costume designed for John Clifford’s Kodály Dances, with a skirt made of red, gold, and black shredded ribbons. The wardrobe mistress then attached the burgundy-and-beige blousy bodice from my long-lost Zoraida gypsy costume in Don Quixote—a character Mr. B added but then later dropped. The combination was perfect, and when I looked in my dressing room mirror, the outfit finally gave me an indication of who this character was and how she was supposed to move and be. It was as if Mr. B’s discarded Zoraida had found her true self a decade later.

The first performance was a great success. In the opening solo, since there were several places where Mr. B chose not to choreograph and instead just asked me to “do something,” I found myself with more music than usual before a final series of fast chaîné turns. So I held out my palm, fingers splayed, and pointed to its center with the forefinger of my other hand, as if telling my fortune. It was a very public moment but also a very personal one. I was pointing to my own lifeline, not only the power of the moment but of my reunion with Mr. B. About a month after Mr. B’s death, in 1983, I opened my mailbox to find a letter from his estate saying he had left me two ballets in his will: Tzigane and Don Quixote. (At that point, they joined Meditation, which Mr. B had given me the rights to in 1965.) Both were an integral part of my life with the company and beyond. I was very honored.

Suzanne Farrell on CHACONNE

The version of Chaconne that we added to my company’s repertoire in 2002 was the choreography that Balanchine originally created for the dance sequences in the Hamburg Opera’s 1963 production of Orpheus and Eurydice. (This was around the same time that he made his first ballet on me, Meditation.) I first learned and performed Chaconne in 1976, the year Mr. B added it as an independent ballet to New York City Ballet’s repertoire. In this version, he choreographed a new pas de deux for Peter Martins and I at the beginning of the ballet, set to the opera’s sad, yearning, otherworldly music titled, “Dance of the Blessed Spirits.” (Peter and I danced together in many Balanchine ballets throughout our careers, but this along with our shared steps in Tzigane, were the only new pieces of choreography that Mr. B created for us as a pair!) In this section, Mr. B also added a dance for 9 girls dressed in flesh-colored chiffon, with their hair loose. It was his idea of Elysium.

Mr. B may have been inspired by the music in Orpheus and Eurydice, by the 18th-century German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, but there is no connection to the opera’s characters or plot. Chaconne is pure dance—those who are familiar with the opera, however, will enjoy seeing another art form set to the music. By definition, a chaconne is a form of music in ¾ time signature. The exact music he formatted for the ballet does not exist in the opera, or in any recording. He was such the musician that he tied together various pieces from the opera’s score to create something uniquely his own.

Mr. B intended for the first and second halves of Chaconne to be very different from each other. The opening of the ballet evokes the timeless, ethereal mood of Elysium, or the afterlife; while in the second pas de deux, the tone is more courtly, formal, and stylized. When Chaconne premiered, people were uncertain regarding its two distinct halves, with no story or immediately observable similarities to link them. But the absence of a narrative thread doesn’t mean there’s an absence of drama. I never questioned anything Mr. B did when he was putting together a ballet, because it was always answered by the end of the choreography. I think Chaconne shows Mr. B juxtaposing people’s private lives with their public personas, exploring how they might behave in each of those worlds.

Mr. B created these often-dubbed “plotless” ballets like Chaconne for a reason. People would ask him, “What am I supposed to look at when I come to the ballet? What should I pay attention to?” I believe Mr. B created works where people could appreciate movement for its own sake. It’s not necessary to see a story if you don’t want to—just come and enjoy the dance. Of course, Mr. B also created story ballets like Don Quixote, giving audiences even more choices.

As far as the designs for Chaconne, the costumes were primarily blue and white. The stage version does not include scenery, though Mr. B did agree to some rather ornate backdrops—complete with clouds and abstract-looking topiary sculptures —for the Chaconne filmed in 1978, which is now on DVD. The version of Chaconne that The Suzanne Farrell Ballet first performed in 2002 and 2007 follows Mr. B’s adaptation for television. It begins with the additional pas de deux, followed by nine young women in translucent gowns and long, flowing hair. The couple meets again for a more formal pas de deux, followed by virtuoso solos for the man and the woman. The ensemble enters for the finale danced to a chaconne, in which the couple also celebrates.

The Suzanne Farrell Ballet presented its premiere of Chaconne in 2002; the following year, we featured the first pas de deux in a program called The Balanchine Couple, which I scripted and narrated. In 2017, we will perform the complete 1976 version that Mr. B staged for New York City Ballet, which includes three sections of divertissements: a pas de trois, a pas de deux for demi-soloists, and a pas de cinq.

They have enriched and shaped the cultural life of America. The 2017 Kennedy Center Honorees are Carmen de Lavallade, Gloria Estefan, LL Cool J, Norman Lear, and Lionel Richie!

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