On Dance

...Farrell was the touchstone, Clara as Muse...

...She was ripe for everything...

...In her increasingly circumscribed repertory, the Rosenkavalier waltz stood her in good stead...

...Indeed, Farrell has said that when Balanchine was choreographing this section he told her to improvise her arms...

...As was Laura to Petrarch, Clara to Robert Schumann, so was Farrell to Balanchine—they had the same slow-burning association, the same courtly alchemy...

...In a company of Galateas—for unquestionably Balanchine was a most active, generous and liberating Pygmalion —Suzanne Farrell was the divine one, the most vivid incarnation of the choreographer's ideal that we shall ever see...

...Thus emerges one of Balanchine's lifelong themes: a woman inflamed but not undone by desire...

...In her last Mozartiana they touched surfaces that were virtually invisible to the eye...

...One does not know where to begin describing a career that was as stubbornly independent as it was bound up in the artistic vision of another...

...She needed his hawk-eyed homage...

...Her pirouettes never tightened, as Baryshnikov's did...

...No matter what rough, reductive part he danced, it was always "Baryshnikov...

...By the fourth movement—the Gold and Silver Waltz, set in Maxim's to the lilting wit of Lehâr's The Merry Widow—the narrative element in the dance has becomeexplicit in the music...

...Where Baryshnikov had phenomenal control—his great trick—Farrell was phenomenon, period...

...He was superconservative technically, yet aloofly rebellious...

...In ballet after ballet he whispered his imperative: "Make me thy lyre...

...Depicting the dénouement of a voluptuous era, one rich with gesture and drama, Waltzes became that night a pointed comment on what it means to lose Farrell from the stage at this post-Balanchine time...

...It also focused attention, by contrast, on her long, languidly arched pointes, unmatched in their sensitivity and yet unequaled in strength...

...the way she shaded her eyes or pointed a suddenly illuminating finger suggested her recurring role as Balanchine's Dark Lady...

...Neither had a clue as to what to do and the work fell apart...

...Those who have seen Farrell with any regularity are intimate with that extraordinary back, its whiteness, its broad flat grace...

...She was tall and sleek, but those smooth full thighs—by ballet standards an imperfection—provided softness and ballast...

...As if he could not bear to leave it at that, Balanchine choreographed Mozartiana the following year, a ballet as abiding and hopeful as RSD is dark (Farrell told him that dancing it, she felt as if she were in heaven...

...Watching it being performed was a painful experience, not only because of its subject, but also because of its implication that near the end of his life Balanchine still was unable to settle the boundaries between art and love...

...Hereisawoman (performed with drop-dead glamour by Maria Calagari) alone by fate yet not displeased...

...The notion that a single ballerina could yoke such heterogenous elements together, could unify the world, was Balanchine's...

...The piece is earthly and torn by doubt...

...His last two masterpieces—Robert Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze (1980) and Mozartiana (1981)—were explicitly about her...

...That other was, of course, George Balanchine, arguably the greatest choreographer of this century...

...When he choreographed RSD Balanchine was suffering neurological symptoms not unlike Schumann's...

...On the other side was Farrell, as vulnerable to the moment as he was walled off from it...

...On her part, Farrell chose a leitmotif from the earlier movements and made it her own...

...Requiring neither point work nor power turnout, Vienna Waltzes remained a ballet she could dance to the full, because its articulation is accomplished in the ballerina's mind, and expressed through the upper body...

...Kistler, Calagari and Kyra Nichols have all tried the role...

...During the '80s, as her physical range narrowed, Farrell's wisdom and wit emerged more purely...

...But change was in this dancer's system...

...Farrell, on the other hand, challenged every assumption about the nature of classical dancing...

...He left American Ballet Theatre to work with Balanchine— to be "choreographed on" by him— but ended up with no new ballets, merely Edward Villella's old roles...

...they seemed to widen vertically, like tornadoes...

...It was the unknown waiting to be discovered in every performance, not the role itself, that attracted Farrell...

...When AdamLuders, her waltz partner, appeared in her arms, she hardly noticed...

...It was she who mo ved Balanchine to create...

...Balanchine created more ballets for Farrell than for any other dancer, 23 in all...

...The qualities she was endowed with—scale, ease, impetuosity, changeableness, faith—gave to Balanchine and his art possibilities that had not been present before...

...The lab was empty, the experiment abandoned...

...the arabesque leg bent ever so slightly to release the eye upward while knee and calf gleam likeenamel...

...Reintroduced into the repertory last year, Monumentum/Movements was cast with two of the company's strongest members, Merrill Ashley and Darci Kistler...

...In Farrell's hands this motion, so decorous and staid in the preceding sections, was elaborated and intensified...

...She summed up her career, too...

...But none plays so delightedly with the music, none can make those endless strands of steps glimmer like a row of summer leaves and then, in an instant, send thunder over thesunlit dale...

...He was rarely better than when he choreographed for her...

...she was both eternal question and catalyst...

...And she, the west wind, did...

...Farrell left the stage because arthritis in her hips made it impossible to stay...

...The former is a rumination on love and the artist that employs four couples, each representing a facet of Clara and Robert Schumann's complex relationship...

...Then Farrell swept into the last movement, to the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier, her white ball gown dusted with silver and 10 yards longer than everyone else's...

...With Farrell in the two roles, the piece became a cosmic musing...

...In that final performance she offered us an iconography of her past: Her arms arrowed over a bowed head recalled her majestic solo in Diamonds...

...she was never more herself than when dancing for him...

...At her peak in the '70 and early '80s, Farrell's one consistent peer was Mikhail Baryshnikov...

...She could weave huge gossamer webs with big airy holes out of the most academic combinations, andmake you see that this, too, was classicism...

...It finishes—and it could finish no other way—with Schumann backing into the wings, into madness...

...It reminded me of the Wendy Hiller / Leslie Howard Pygmalion, where the reach for her skirt clinches Eliza's triumph at the ball —a prince waits as she prepares to take a step...

...Maybe the difference between them explains Baryshnikov's disappointing tenure at NYCB...

...Of the most superb male technician in ballet history, Balanchine could only say that he "points his feet well...

...She was in thrall to her imagined life...

...She chose the moment and set the tone: Without fanfare or hype she left the stage...

...And we know her arabesques as we know the seasons: their amplitude and detail...

...They could not have been more different...

...Perhaps no other dancer will ever repeat her feat...

...So it was fitting that Vienna Waltzes, a work about finding the right partner amid a forest of them, was the dance that carried her away...

...As she moved across the empty floor, curtsying to the imaginary man of her fantasy, she embodied the lone heroines of Balanchine's ballroom ballets—the ones who meet knowledge (Cotillon) or corruption (La Sonnambula) or death (La Valse) on that epiphanal plane, the dance floor...

...the hands crossed at the wrist bespoke the serene religiosity of Mozartiana...

...classically constrained, yet searching the repertory for roles that might release him from his own plush harmony...

...One had the sense that he was trapped inside the perfection of his technique...

...Farrell made it possible for him to dream and plot out loud...

...Choreographed in 1977 to the music of Johann Strauss, Franz Lehar and Richard Strauss, the five-movement ballet is borne along on three-quarter time...

...There was no more perfect showcase for Farrell's abundant gifts than Monumentum/Movements, actually two Stravinsky ballets that are linked as one in the repertory...

...He plucked a pudgy Farrell out of the corps and made her his Muse...

...So far, the only messenger...

...The theme is reverence—Tchaikovsky's for Mozart, Balanchine's for God—and Farrell was the messenger...

...In fact, she needed the weight—it gave a poetic roundness to the technical daring, to the musical integrity she brought to every role...

...Each has had moments of success...

...The almost silent whish of her skirt, the glancing lift and swing of it, became an illustration of the expressive possibilities of formality...

...Although risk was Balanchine's essential precept, the daring that was Farrell's cannot be taught...

...We feel a woodsy blaze in the opening sequences, where simple waltzes are woven in among the trees and romance flickers, here rustic, there fairy-like...

...The experimentation, intuition and unpredictablility she brought to the stage were hers and hers alone...

...Monumentum concerns faith, Movements science...

...The gathering up of the ball gown skirt is perhaps the most feminine social gesture of all...

...He needed Farrell's celestial acquiescence...

...the head dropped back to reveal the snowy ascent of the neck...