Lucking Out - James Wolcott [109]
Suzanne Farrell, one of the great dancers of the age, has rejoined the New York City Ballet. She returned without publicity or ceremony of any sort, entering the stage on Peter Martins’ arm in the adagio movement of the Balanchine-Bizet “Symphony in C.” The theatre was full but not packed. The lower rings were thronged with standees who did not have to push their way in. Sanity was in the air. As the long bourrée to the oboe solo began, the audience withheld its applause, as if wanting to be sure that this was indeed Suzanne Farrell. Then a thunderclap lasting perhaps fifteen seconds rolled around the theatre, ending as decisively as it had begun, and there fell the deeper and prolonged silence of total absorption. For the next eight minutes, nobody except the dancers moved a muscle. At the end of the adagio, Farrell took four calls, and at the end of the ballet an unprecedented solo bow to cheers and bravas …
In that first moment of delighted recognition and then in the intense quiet that followed, the audience, I think, saw what I saw—that although this tall, incomparably regal creature could be nobody but Farrell, it was not the same Farrell.
I too was part of that audience that tremulous night and I sure didn’t see what Croce saw and wouldn’t have been able to articulate it if I had, even with a set of drawing pencils. What she saw was this:
[Farrell] has lost a great deal of weight all over, and with it a certain plump quality in the texture of her movement. The plush is gone, and it was one of her glories. The impact of the long, full legs was different, too. If anything, they’re more beautiful than ever, but no longer so impressively solid in extension, so exaggerated in their sweep, or so effortlessly controlled in their slow push outward from the lower back. The largesse of the thighs is still there, but in legato their pulse seemed to emerge and diminish sooner than it used to, and diminish still further below the knee in the newly slim, tapering calf. Yet the slenderness in the lower leg gives the ankle and the long arch of the foot a delicacy they didn’t have before. And it shaves to a virtual pinpoint the already minute base from which the swelling grandeur of her form takes its impetus.
Has any anatomy study ever swung that high? “Farrell and Farrellism” the essay was called, and its publication in The New Yorker had a sonic impact, exciting even among those who never went to the ballet and didn’t know Farrell had left, much less returned, but knew something major was afoot. I know it made me sit up a little straighter when I went to the ballet from then on, working on my X-ray vision. After typing the quotation above into the text you’re now reading, I flipped to the front of the original paperback of Afterimages, the collection that contains “Farrell and Farrellism,” and saw, written in ink:
For Jim Wolcott,
In keenest admiration.
Arlene Croce 1980
I had forgotten that she had inscribed it for me. How could I have forgotten? Memory is a treacherous mistress, keeping so many past kindnesses from us.
What was it about ballet that won my allegiance? It was hardly the only thing hopping in tights. New York City—the entire country—was experiencing a dance boom in the seventies, a leotard liberation army breakout that was recognized while it was happening, as opposed to those golden eras known only in retrospect by their afterglow. The pioneer explorers who had made the Judson Memorial Church the Cabaret Voltaire of modern dance had matured, evolved, and dispersed: Kenneth King, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown. Institutional largesse and arts funding kept companies solvent that had been formerly dangling by a shoestring. “Sexual liberation and gay liberation added momentum to the dance boom,” the critic and cultural historian Holly Brubach told City Journal in 2011, “and you sometimes got the feeling that they were turning out because they were curious