The Suzanne Farrell Ballet

About the Artist

In just over a decade, The Suzanne Farrell Ballet has evolved from an educational program of the Kennedy Center to a highly lauded ballet company. The Suzanne Farrell Ballet has performed annually at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and has toured both nationally and internationally.  To date, the Company has over forty ballets in its repertoire, including works by Ms. Farrell’s mentors George Balanchine, Maurice Béjart, and Jerome Robbins. 

In June 2005, the Company collaborated with The National Ballet of Canada to restage Balanchine’s Don Quixote.  The evening-length ballet was originally created in 1965 by George Balanchine specifically for Ms. Farrell and is unique to The Suzanne Farrell Ballet.  The Company traveled to the Edinburgh International Arts Festival in 2006 to present this landmark revival. 

Committed to carrying forth the legacy of George Balanchine through performances of his classic ballets, The Suzanne Farrell Ballet announced the formal creation of the Balanchine Preservation Initiative in February 2007.  This initiative serves to introduce rarely seen or “lost” Balanchine works to audiences around the world. To date, the Company’s repertoire includes nine Balanchine Preservation Initiative Ballets including Ragtime (Balanchine/Stravinsky), Divertimento Brillante (Balanchine/Glinka), and Pithoprakta (Balanchine/Xenakis).

The Company launched an Artistic Partnership outreach program in 2007.  Since, The Suzanne Farrell Ballet has collaborated with Cincinnati Ballet and Ballet Austin.  The mission of this initiative is to salute, support, and galvanize ballet companies throughout the United States.

Suzanne Farrell, Artistic Director

Suzanne Farrell is one of George Balanchine’s most celebrated muses and remains a legendary figure in the ballet world.  In addition to serving as Artistic Director of her own company, she is also a repetiteur for The George Balanchine Trust, the independent organization founded after the choreographer’s death by the heirs to his ballets to oversee their worldwide licensing and production.  Since 1988 she has staged Balanchine’s works for such companies as the Berlin Opera Ballet, the Vienna State Opera Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Kirov Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, as well as American companies, including those in Boston, Miami, Seattle, Cincinnati, Fort Worth, and New York.  She was born in Cincinnati, and she received her early training at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.

Ms. Farrell joined Balanchine’s New York City Ballet in the fall of 1961 after a year as a Ford Foundation scholarship student at the School of American Ballet.  Her unique combination of musical, physical, and dramatic gifts quickly ignited Balanchine’s imagination.  By the mid 1960s, she was not only Balanchine’s most prominent ballerina, she was a symbol of the era, and remains so to this day.  She restated and re-scaled such Balanchine masterpieces as Apollo, Concerto Barocco, and Symphony in C.  Balanchine went on to invent new ones for her-Diamonds, for example, and Chaconne and Mozartiana, in which the limits of ballerina technique were expanded to a degree not seen before or since. By the time she retired from the stage in 1989, Ms. Farrell had achieved a career that is without precedent or parallel in the history of ballet.

During her 28 years on the stage, she danced a repertory of more than one hundred ballets, nearly a third of which were composed expressly for her by Balanchine and other choreographers, including Jerome Robbins and Maurice Béjart.  Her numerous performances with Balanchine’s company (more than two thousand), her world tours, and her appearances in television and movies have made her one of the most recognizable and highly esteemed artists of her generation.  She is also the recipient of numerous artistic and academic accolades.  Since the fall of 2000, Ms. Farrell has been a full-time professor in the dance department at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.

In addition to her work for the Balanchine Trust, she is active in a variety of cultural and philanthropic organizations such as the New York State Council on the Arts, the Arthritis Foundation, the Professional Children’s School, and the Princess Grace Foundation. Summit Books published her autobiography, Holding On to the Air in 1990 and Suzanne Farrell – Elusive Muse (directed by Anne Belle and Deborah Dickson) was an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Film in 1997.