“Too much energy, too much, too much, too much,” Suzanne Farrell said as she watched Isabella LaFreniere rehearse George Balanchine’s “Chaconne.”
Farrell’s direction, calling for more delicacy, softened the edges of LaFreniere’s crisp attack. Over the course of an hour, Farrell transformed the pas de deux they were working on — not the haunting one that opens the ballet, but the “pas de deux proper,” as she described its bravura counterpart — in big and small ways.
There were important Farrell lessons along the way: To stay was to be stuck. To have too presentational an approach was a “favorite hate.” And to jump with stiffly held arms, as Peter Walker, the male lead in “Chaconne,” did during a variation, was fighting the body’s natural way of moving.
The arms “don’t have to be huge, but they can’t be nothing,” she told Walker. “Nothing is nothing.”
And the opposite of nothing is Farrell, the ballerina whose influence, arguably, looms largest over New York City Ballet. She originated many lead roles in the company for Balanchine — the choreographer called her “the other half of my apple” — starting with “Meditation” in 1963, and triumphed in countless others. She feels fortunate that she entered the company when she did.
“I had the benefit of doing all those beautiful ballets that he did before I was born and then the things that we did together,” she said of the man she calls Mr. B. “So I kind of lived his whole life in my lifetime with him.”
Farrell with Jacques d’Amboise in “Meditation,” the first role she originated for George Balanchine.Credit…Martha Swope/Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library
