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Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Macie Bridge: In this episode, ballet dancer, choreographer, and teacher Silas Farley reflects on the physical, spiritual, and theological dimensions of dancing. Charting his journey from liturgical dance in his childhood church to a professional career at the New York City Ballet. He explores the profound relationship between faith and movement, the expression of emotion and creativity, the physical feat of performing ballet, the discipline and precision the art form requires, and finally, how ballet can help us appreciate the fullness of human life.
Silas Farley: I think that if we get down to it, the difference between a liturgical dance and a performative dance is in the intention of the dancer. Because I always felt that when I was dancing any dance, whether it was in a worship service or doing the George Balanchine production of the Nutcracker at the New York City Ballet.
The spirit of it was a liturgical dance, it was an offering. So this is kind of the seed for liturgical dance, which is a form of dance that is a kind of embodied prayer in the same way that a song goes up to God out of the body. Liturgical dance is a movement that goes up to God out of the body, and it's not about really who's watching.
It's not performative in that way. It's more of an offering to God than it is anything else. And then when you think about the art of ballet, you oftentimes will think of a proscenium stage, audiences seated, watching people who are particularly skillful and trained to perform different kind of virtuosity movements in relationship to music.
I would say that those things on the surface might seem very different. 'cause one is explicitly performative, one is not. But yet both are an offering. Both are the vessel, the dancer, the artist. Expressing something through the body that then transmits a certain kind of energy and life to the other people in the space, to the audience, and then in the liturgical dance, especially with the motivation of it going back up to God.
Macie Bridge: I am Macie Bridge with the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. We all experience this life through a body. God formed humanity from the dust of the ground and then breathed life. And ever since our experiences of the world have been filtered, encumbered, complicated, and made wonderful. By these clay vessels we traverse each day through being in a body can make up some of the hardest parts of our lived experiences, but it also gives us a physical vocabulary to take in the world and act on the world.
It grounds our relationships, our politics, our morality, our worship, and the swirling life inside of us. The soul or mind or consciousness gets. All the credit for these, but importantly, we work through our bodies to live our faith. Think of the way you position your body to pray. Maybe you fold your hands in a specific way, bow your head, cycle through motions of sitting, standing, reaching, genuflecting, kneeling, or embracing.
Perhaps there are commonalities in the ways people move and use their bodies throughout a liturgy in your tradition. Or maybe you just can't help but sway or nod or close your eyes. When the music sings back to your body on a Sunday morning, biblical accounts of faith also show the centrality of the body in worship.
I think of Miriam's dancing with tambourines at the crossing of the Red Sea or David dancing undignified with all his might before God as the arc of the covenant was brought into Jerusalem. In the Gospels, Jesus kneels to pray, puts his hands in the mud and takes people by the hand, John the Baptist, leaps from within the womb.
Thomas asks to put his fingers in Jesus' wound and Mary anoints Jesus with oil, wiping his feet with her own hair. And this doesn't even scratch the surface of the texts that tell us more directly what ways we might use our bodies. Texts we know well. Like Psalm 30, you turn my morning into dancing. So I've been asking the question, how can we better integrate our bodies into our spirituality?
How do our material and immaterial lives come together into the fullness of our being? How does spirit meet flesh? What is it to be incarnate? There are many ways to answer these questions, but today we are dancing, moving with the joyful impulse that seems to cause us to universally wonder at the abilities of our bodies.
But we're not starting with any dancing. We're going to one of the most elemental expressions of dance, in my opinion. We're going on point. We are going to the ballet.
Yes, the world of Swan Lake and the sugar plum ferry, dazzling costumes and gravity defying elegance. But the world and value of ballet is so much more than this.
I'm joined today by ballet dancer and choreographer Silas Farley. Silas currently serves as Armstrong artist in residence in ballet in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. He's a former dancer with the New York City Ballet and continues to host their podcast, hear the Dance.
Silas also serves on the board of the George Balanchine Foundation. In today's conversation, Silas brings us not only into the technique and tradition of the ballet, but into the art form's expansive potential for connecting the dancer and audience to the divine. Thanks for listening today,
Silas, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Silas Farley: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Macie Bridge: Coming into this conversation, there is a 16-year-old version of Macie who spent all of her free hours at the local dance studio, who is very excited to be talking to you. So I'm really thrilled to be getting into the world of dance and ballet with you today.
I'm sure that this is a new subject for a lot of our listeners, so I'm wondering if maybe to kick off the conversation, you might start us out with how did you come into the world of ballet to begin with? It's your whole career now. Where did that start for you?
Silas Farley: Sure, I'd be happy to answer that. I'm originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, and my family is, is really special to me.
We have, we're multiracial. My dad is white. My mom is black. I'm the youngest of seven children. I have four older brothers and two older sisters, and we grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. And the church that my family was at when I was born was a charismatic Lutheran church and it had a huge liturgical dance ministry as part of the church.
And so there would be special choreographed dances on important moments in the church calendar, whether that was Easter or Christmas or Pentecost or Christ the King. So dance was part of worship. My first exposure to dance was dance as a form of worship, even before it was any kind of performance. Wow.
And so that was my first exposure to dance. And there were dances in the round around the altar every Sunday in worship because the sanctuary was situated in a circular configuration around the altar at the center. Mm-hmm. And so there would of course, be these choreographed dances by the people involved in the liturgical dance ministry at certain points in the year.
But then every Sunday there were also just you, just like spontaneous extemporaneous, improvisatory worshipful dances that would break out in the congregation and happen in the round around the altar every Sunday. Wow. So I was born into a church that danced. And so my first paradigm was really dance as worship before anything else.
Wow. And then I saw formal ballet for the first time when a Christian ballet company from Mississippi called Ballet Magnifico came and performed at our church when I was six, and it was seeing formal ballet in that way that inspired me to want to be part of that specifically because I was young enough that I never actually took the classes through the liturgical dance ministry.
Mm-hmm. My older siblings did, but I was just part of whatever was happening on the Sunday morning, more just kind of improvisatory in that kind of way. But to have that seed planted for wanting to study ballet, that didn't happen until seeing ballet magnifica performed at the church and then. One thing led to the next, but that's how it began.
Macie Bridge: Wow, okay. So for you, dance has really always been tied to your faith. Always. That's so unique. Would you describe a little bit, what is the difference between liturgical dance, liturgical dancers describing and what somebody might think of if they're thinking of ballet, the Nutcracker, that version of dance that they're familiar with?
Silas Farley: Yeah, it's a great question. I would say the liturgical dance is a kind of dance that helps amplify what's happening in worship. And so if these, the listener is thinking back to the scripture. There's the example of David when he brings the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, and as an overflow of his adoration and celebration of the presence of God and the arc, he just breaks out in a dance.
Or when the children of Israel pass through the Red Sea, Miriam starts playing her tambourine. The people start singing, they start dancing. So this is kind of the seed for liturgical dance, which is a form of dance that is a kind of embodied prayer in the same way that a song goes up to God out of the body.
Liturgical dance is a movement that goes up to God out of the body. And it's not about really who's watching. It's not performative in that way. It's more of an offering to God than it is anything else. And then when you think about the art of ballet, you oftentimes will think of a proscenium stage, audiences seated, watching people who are particularly skillful and trained to perform different kind of virtuosity movements in relationship to music.
Mm-hmm. I would say that those things on the surface might seem very different. 'cause one is explicitly performative, one is not. Mm-hmm. But yet, both are an offering. Both are the vessel, the dancer, the artist. Expressing something through the body that then transmits a certain kind of energy and life to the other people in the space, to the audience, and then in the liturgical dance, especially with the motivation of it going back up to God.
But I say it like that because I always felt that when I was dancing, any dance, whether it was in a worship service or doing the George Balanchine production of the Nutcracker, the New York City Ballet spirit of it was a liturgical dance. It was an offering. So I think that if we get down to it, the difference between a liturgical dance and the performative dance is in the intention of the dancer.
Because I know people who are rock, former Rockettes, who were Christians, and they did those dozens of performances every holiday season as an act of worship. So the intention was that it was an offering back to God. So I think there's some surface level differences, but if we get down to the heart of the offerer to get down to the heart of the actual dancer in the moment that it can actually all be a liturgical dance.
Mm-hmm. The sense of what is, what is offered up as worship to God.
Macie Bridge: Yes. When I think of ballet opposed to other styles or you're kind of framing it as performative versus this non performative as just this offering, I think of ballet as so precise and defined and in, in that way I think it can almost come across as uptight maybe.
Sure. And so as a dancer, as you're performing ballet, as an offering, how does that come into play? That precision Yeah. And discipline
Silas Farley: Yeah.
Macie Bridge: Factor into your experience of this as a, as an experience of faith.
Silas Farley: Yeah. This is a great question. I think you touch on something very important about the precision of ballet training.
Because it is incredibly demanding and precise and finely tuned what the body is required to do, working from these absolutely rotated positions of the feet and the hips. And there's a, a real, uh, commitment to detail and how the body moves. Mm-hmm. For sure. But I'm gonna go back to something deeper than that and then jump back to it.
The foundational thing about the physicality of ballet is the idea of turnout. So sometimes if you look at a dancer, you know they're a dancer 'cause they point their toes outward. They have a certain kind of upright carriage of the back and the neck. There's a certain openness about the carriage of their chest and shoulders.
And this is ingrained in the body of a ballet dancer because of the training. And that idea of turnout makes the body. More expressive in a way, because if our toes are straightforward, like the way we're designed, yes, you see a certain amount of the leg. Whereas if the body stands turned out, you see the whole inside of the musculature of the leg.
It's, it's a more complete revelation of the body. Chest is open, it's not closed off. So there's a certain radiance about the physicality of ballet, and that physicality conveys something even deeper. And I describe it to my students as spiritual turnout, that you are open and receptive and generous, and that's embodied in the physicality of ballet.
It can seem, if you're not used to seeing ballet, like you're touching on very astutely, it can seem a little other because normally, you know, pedestrian people were walking around our toes are facing forward or maybe a little more casual with the carriage of upper body. But so much of what developed as ballet as we know it happened at the court of Louis the 14th, in the 16th, sixties, seventies.
And so it was actually part of the courtly etiquette. And so there is something still in the physicality of ballet that has a certain courtly grace and elegance for sure. And so that's not necessarily how you're walking around at the grocery store. Yeah. So, but I would say it's not artificial. It's actually supernatural.
Mm. In the same way that when you listen to an opera singer, you could dismiss it and go, oh, that sounds so unnatural. But it's like, no, the body actually can do that. Mm. If trained and schooled and disciplined and sacrificially developed, the body has the capacity to do that. So it's supernatural. It's like watching a high jumper.
You know, I'm not doing that every day, but the body can do it. And the same thing with Bowery. The body can outwardly rotate from the hips and have this kind of exalted carriage. So I think there's that physicality right away of turnout. And that idea is a first spiritual connection because mm-hmm. Our walk with God is that he's defining us so that we are becoming.
Open. We're open to him. We're open to receive his love. We're open to be vessels of his love. We're open to receiving and exchanging love with other people. One of the great theologians, I don't remember exactly who it was, said that sin makes the soul inus in say curved in on itself. Mm-hmm. Whereas holiness or wholeness in God opens us up.
So I think that there's a spiritual turnout that we're called to as we walk with God, and that's embodied in the physicality of bowel. And then going back to your question about looking at the precision of it, it can seem that the dancer doesn't have a lot of autonomy because it is so prescribed. But if you talk to a dancer who's actually submitted themselves to that lifestyle of technique, and then they're getting on stage and they're able to perform, they're actually free.
Stage in so far as that person has submitted themself to the design, timing, pacing of the choreography, the spacing with the other dancers, the relationship to the music being played in so far as they submit to those constraints. They're actually free on the stage. Their freedom is not that the curtain gets to go up and they get to do whatever they want.
Their freedom is that as they follow the prescribed pathways of movement, their body is actually kind of sublimated to articulate something even deeper than words. And so there is a kind of freedom that comes through discipline in the art of ballet. And so watch the Swan Lake Swans doing their dance.
So you watch the, you know, any of their great moments in the classical ballet repertoire, the, especially when dancers start jumping or start dancing on point. Yes. There is a kind of other worldly gravity defying, almost super human presence and power that they have. And they look larger than life and like they're flying and that they're so free.
They're almost like birds. Mm-hmm. But that's. Through a lifestyle of discipline, and I think that's the Christian life. It's the same. It's like we're actually set free through submitting our lives to a set of disciplines that are carved out for us by God, that are modeled supremely in Jesus and that are empowered by the Holy Spirit and to the degree that we enter into those disciplines where actually a set free,
Macie Bridge: oh my gosh, it's so ripe with this spiritual metaphor.
Wow.
Silas Farley: Beautiful.
Macie Bridge: It's, it's so beautiful.
How do you feel coming to know your, push your body to these extremes? Coming to, to, um, as you're saying superhuman, kind of test those limits? How has. Ballet as a practice into that for you shaped your understanding of what it is to be in a body, to be created Hyper
Silas Farley: awareness. Yeah. You get a hyper awareness of your own body, and I think about it, there's something really special about a dancer.
I was talking about this with a theater person the other day too. So I think the actor and this singer to a degree, the singer, the actor, the dancer, have it in common. But there is no separation between me and my instrument. I don't have paint brushes, I don't have reads. I don't have an easel, I don't have a camera.
I am the work of art, and this is incredibly powerful. It makes the dancer incredibly vulnerable and it also makes the dancer, I think, conscious of themselves in a really, a really extraordinary way. Because every sin you of your body, every gesture that you make becomes a major kind of design expressive opportunity.
Mm-hmm. How you place your hair, how you shape your feet. And especially with all the stuff like I said about the turnout, like how you actually wrap the muscles in the backs of your rights together to outwardly rotate your hips and how you lift your torso off of your hips to create a really expansive alignment.
So you just get a really nitty gritty knowledge of your own body and it's capacity. Mm-hmm. And it's frailty. 'cause you are working with muscles that maybe a person doing a different kind of lifestyle may never actually realize they even have. Yeah. But you're so finely tuning every part of yourself that you do get an incredible awareness of that.
How does that relate to, I mean, I think about insofar as that relates to creation, it makes you marble at the created. Masterpiece that is the human body because you cut such a deep awareness of it. And then, and then of course I think about it with my faith. It's like I believe that Jesus is the God man.
And so then the, the mystery of the incarnation is like very viscerally present to me as a dancer. So there's that whole other set of ideas. That's
Macie Bridge: beautiful. So you now have dedicated a lot of your career to choreographing as well as dancing. And I actually first found your work because I was reading about your choreographing CS Lewis's for loves for the Houston Ballet.
I would love to hear a bit about your process with taking, and I think, have you done other works along these lines as well?
Silas Farley: Lots. Lots of ballets on sacred themes and Okay. Yeah. So spiritual implications of movement for sure.
Macie Bridge: Yeah. So we don't have to stick to just for loves, but I would love to hear about your process taking a written, uh, or, or an ideological Sure.
Um, bit of theology and translating that into bodies Yeah. And into this art form.
Silas Farley: Yeah. I'm gonna, I I'm gonna, I'm gonna come at the answer from a couple different directions. Please do, please do. The first thing I would say is I love the language of classical ballet. So, as a dancer grows up in ballet, the dancer learns a whole vocabulary of movement.
First thing you learn is to stand with your feet outwardly rotated in first position, and to bend and stretch your knees. This is called the ple, and it's a physical equivalent of mama. And then you learn a step called du, where from that first position, you stretch the leg out and point the foot. And this is the physical equivalent of dadda.
And out of those two movements, the circular power collecting movement of the plie and the stretching eternal line of the du, all the other movements flower out of that. And it's like creation itself. The two simplest design elements are the circle and the line. Everything is reducible to one of the other, are a combination of the two.
And so as a dancer grows up in ballet, the dancer then develops this enormous vocabulary of movement that are all reducible back to the microcosm of the plie and the du. So my whole joy as a choreographer is to take that language. All of it is codified in French because ballet was first codified at the cord of Lu, the 14th.
I always say ballet didn't fall out of the sky. At the cord Olu the 14th, they were building on musical and dance and etiquette traditions and philosophy and theology from lots of different cultures. And they were in a centrifuge that developed at the court of Luther 14th. But they got to name the steps.
So there's a play, there's a tan, there's a r, deja gli, a pat, bre, tan, de a pirouette, all of those terms. But so the dancer builds up this huge vocabulary of movement. And some choreographers, and I say this with great respect to them, they choreograph in a way where they make an in an invented language.
Their own more idiosyncratic movement vocabulary. And it's beautiful and it's very interesting. I mostly don't work in that idiom. I love to work with the language of bowel and to use that given language and recombine that those different vocabulary words into new combinations. So I think the essence of everything I love to do in choreography is to give that classroom ballet vocabulary and expressive and beautiful choreographic application.
And then, so I think for me, first and foremost, it's kind of that idea of everything I feel I do in the art of dances and act of worship. But at its most basic and more like purely artistic level, it's about making work that gives new life to that centuries old language of Bowery. So that if someone who was a ballet fan from the Paris Opera in 1830s sat down to watch my ballet before loves it would be recognizable to them as ballet.
You know, it might have some new, it might, it's informed by different movement language, but it, there's still those essential elements. So I think underneath it all, there's that devotion to the classical vocabulary and then it's really project by project. And I've gotten to, I've been blessed to do ballets that have been based on that particular piece of music.
I've been blessed to do pieces that are choreographed in response to a particular place. Like I did a site specific ballet for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Wars, that kind of thing. And then again, I've done pieces based on literary texts. I did a ballet adaptation of the book Deaf Republic by the poet IAC Kaminsky.
We did that at Grace Farms Foundation in New, in New Canin. But for Loves was super special because I felt like I got to bring all of my different loves together. C. S Lewis has been a huge spiritual, imaginative influence in my whole life. Growing up with Narnia books and then in high school really digging into his more theological books.
I went to a church called Redeemer Presbyterian in New York from when I was 14, when I moved to ballet school. Boarding school up until I was 26. And our pastor at that time was a man named Tim Keller and he was always quoting CS Lewis. So I feel like CS Lewis just kind of got into my pores from all of these different influences and from my own reading.
And I read four Loves when I was in high school and it really impacted me. And so I. I got this opportunity to make a new piece for the Houston Ballet, and I knew I wanted to make something that would be a new choreography that uses the classical vocabulary, but I also knew I wanted to do something where we would commission new music.
And I have a dear friend, Kyle Warner, who I met through my church in New York through Redeemer, and he's an amazing composer and we're like spiritual brothers also, so we're so artistically, spiritually, creatively aligned, and Houston Ballet is so generous. They commissioned a new score from him. And so I wanted to find something that could be a point of departure for new movement and for new music.
And I instantly thought of for loves because whether some, no matter where a person's coming from in terms of their personal background, their spiritual conviction, whatever we've all been touched by, we are all shaped by, we all feel some kind of way about those four loves store gay, our family relationships.
Celia, friendship, Aeros, romantic loves, and then agape divine love, self-giving love, some kind of transcendent love beyond the realms of this world. And we've all been kind of caught up in those loves in some way. So I thought that was a big enough set of ideas that it could inspire new music, and it mapped well onto a form of mid symphony.
So the first movement Celia Kyle wrote was a, I'm sorry, the first movement Stargate, a family relationship. He wrote in Sonata form second movement. Uh, Celia, he wrote as a scared, so the bubbliness of friendship, the third movement, a big sweeping adagio arrows. And I looked at that as a marriage relationship.
And then the last movement, agape, kind of tying it all together as we looked at the transcendent love of God that actually holds all the other loves together. And so that was fun because I thought I got to bring my, my whole spiritual journey and my whole artistic journey and my devotion to the classical vocabulary and loving to make works that are inspired by music and theology and literature and getting to put it all in one.
Mm-hmm. So that was, uh, one of the most special projects I've ever done.
Macie Bridge: Yeah. Wow. Okay. I have two, two different questions coming outta that. Yeah. Uh, describe a little bit more this process with the music. So, so does, do you find the music often comes first and then, yeah. The, these, uh, uh, units of classical ballet start to come to you after that or did this sounds like a collaborative process.
So how did that come to be?
Silas Farley: And I would say it's a little bit different with each piece with four loves. Houston Ballet asked me to make the piece. I knew I also wanted to work with Kyle De new music, and so I brought the idea of Four Loves to Kyle. He loved it. We had lots of back and forth conversations.
We looked at different ballets from the past and scores from the past, his inspiration. But then there came a point when he went off and he wrote the music and I didn't make any steps yet. I waited to hear and he started to send me the files of the music we would discuss. And I only ever asked for more of something.
I never wanted him to cut a note 'cause his music is so glorious. And, and then after that was really starting to get set. The music that I went into the studio developed a little bit of movement in advance, and then she had all the score finished by the time I went into the rehearsal period with the dancers to formally choreograph piece.
So we said that in that particular project, the music and the choreography were like brothers. The music was the older brother, but they were growing up together. So we, he was my forerunner, and then I got to physically manifest the sounds that he'd written. I would say in some project it's different.
Like the Met Museum asked me to make a site specific piece. So then I thought about the space and I thought about what kind of music could tie together a journey through the whole museum. And then I had just done an operatory dance in worship at Redeemer to the old spiritual called Guide My Seat Lord.
And I thought, okay, what if I took spirituals, guide my seat, Lord, there's AAL in Gilead, he's got the whole world in his hands. Deep River called heaven, those kind of pieces. And I made a dance that was a journey through the whole museum that was tied together by these spirituals. And I could give, we could do a whole another set of conversation about that piece, which I called songs from the Spirit with that little line coming out of Paul's letter where he says that we are to encourage each other with songs, hymns, and songs from the spirit.
And so that piece, it was the space that then made me think about what music would fit the space. Then there have been other times where I was asked to make a piece at the New York City Ballet commemorating a big anniversary where the New York City Ballet was looking back 50 years to 1972 when there had been a big set of ballets all performed to celebrate the composer Igor Stravinski and a new composer, David K Israel.
They said in LA was gonna write a set of variations on a piece of music that the New York City ballet's founder, George Balanchine, had written as a birthday gift to Stravinsky. So it was gonna be new music, but I was assigned that I was going to work with this composer to physically realize through movement, his music that he was already gonna be writing kind of thing.
Mm-hmm. So say it just kind of depends on the project and then other times someone says, do whatever you want, and then I get to just pick the music. Yes. So it's, but music, I feel like the music becomes my map. I feel, I feel like I have secure ground underneath me. Once I know what the music is gonna be, it tells me where to go.
But then I've also had to beaming that same project at Grace Farms where I adapted Iliac, Kaminsky's, death Republic. I choreographed a lot of it in silence and that was very freeing in its own kind of way. So I've done a couple different projects where there are at least whole sections that happen in silence.
So, but music is through iron, through most everything I've choreographed.
Macie Bridge: At what point, I'm wondering then, do you, or do you at all, take into consideration what the audience is taking away from what they're watching? I'm, especially when you're working with something like that was my first reaction to reading about your four Loves is I'm assuming you're wanting the audience.
To take away something very specific. And so then how does that, or maybe not specific, but you have this theology that you're working with, so then how does that come into play as, especially I'm thinking, as you're sharing about how internal and personal the ballet can be to a dancer. Where does the audience come into all of that?
It's
Silas Farley: a beautiful question. In all of the projects I've done, especially the ones that have been on more explicitly theological or like sacred music themes, this and that, I've presented, I've presented it into, to the dancers in the studio with a little more depth than I would ever present to the audience.
And I once did a ballet that was set to Arvo Parrot and his music, which he took the genealogy of Jesus from Luke chapter three. And he said it as an acapella choral piece called, which was the Sundowns. I choreographed that and I've actually reset that part of that ballet in a couple different settings with students, with professionals, with an all men's cast, with men and women, that kind of thing.
And every time before working on that piece, I always sit the cast down and I tell them why I picked that music. It made me think about the different levels of my own inheritance and genealogy artistically, spiritually, and biologically. So I talked to him about my dad, Mark Farley, and I talked to him about my artistic inheritance through the choreographer, George Balanchine and his many disciples who are my teachers.
And I talk about my spiritual heritage as a Christian and learn, and how I, how I was brought into that community of faith as a child. But then with, from very young, I think I was three when I really can remember having a very conscious. Kind of uniting of my heart with Jesus. That's very deep in me as a person.
And so I said, I'm bringing all of those layers of myself to this project. And I would then have each of them share something about their artistic, personal, and spiritual inheritance or genealogy. Of course, all the nfu, all different places, different family backgrounds, different faith traditions, no faith, tradition, artistic heritages of all different kinds.
And so I always tried to present the ideas from a place that is honest from me. This is what I brought us on this road as the maker of this piece, but I want to invite you all to participate in it with all of the different parts of yourself that these ideas dialogue with. And so when I sat the dancers down about the four Loves, I told 'em, I said, you're welcome to read the book, but you don't have to read the book.
I said, because if I say family, friendship, romance, divine, loves you all instantly have associations, beauty, pain, trauma, consolation that are associated with those four loves. So I've offered up this as a set of ideas that we can gather together to embody, but I'm not didactic about it. I don't ever write long program notes, anything like that.
It's in the work. And I like to say it's like if I, I'm not writing a sermon about any of these ideas. I'm choreographing a ballad. I'm assembling these classical steps with this music to create a visceral, embodied musical experience. It's not didactic. You don't need to open the program and read a bunch of text.
I didn't write a treatise about it. I choreographed it Dance. And so that's where I come from with all that. So I really don't tell the audience what the pieces mean in that regard. I've done talkbacks with the audience and in so far as I've asked what my inspiration was for the piece, I'm very honest.
Like I'll say I studied the four loves. I was riffing on an idea from the Catholic bishop Robert Barron who said, who was riffing on older theologians talking about the love of the Trinity. His father is the lover, the son is the beloved. The spirit is the dynamic of the love between live. I would say that like in a talk back to the audience, but I wouldn't put that in the program.
To like tell the audience this is how you have to interpret it. Because that, I don't think that does justice to the intelligence and imaginative participation of the audience. They come to it with their experiences, their own eyes and ears and their own bodies. And that's enough. And this makes me think back to my hear one of my artistic heroes who I mentioned before, ARVO parent, who's a deep orthodox Christian and much of his music is the, uh, musical realization of different spiritual texts, scripture, that kind of thing.
And he says that music is white light. The prism is the soul of the listener. And so it's like the musical ideas are refracted through the hearer. And I think the same for dance and in in another kind of way. Because you may see sitting in the audience, you possess the same instrument as the people on stage.
So even if you don't know what the piece is about, you didn't read the program note, maybe there's something didactic, maybe there's something not didactic. It doesn't matter because your own body resonates with what's happening to the bodies on stage. And a hero of mine named John Meyer, a brilliant dancer and choreographer based in Germany for the past 50 plus years, he says that when an audience member sits and watches a ballet, it's like a cello is playing for an audience of cellos.
Like you can't not resonate with it. You look at what the dancers are doing and you might think, ah. I wish I could do that. What would it feel like for someone to hold me like that? Or you might look and think something as simple as like, ouch. That looked like it, looks like it hurts, you know, but you have a, you have a physical relationship to what's happening.
So that's kind of multiple layers of the answer. But the audience is always in my heart and mind, and I know that they are bound up with what we're doing from the moment of go, because they have a body. And so they're sitting there with the same instrument as the people on stage. So I know there's an energetic, visceral, physical exchange happening between the stage of the audience no matter what.
And then of course there are different ideas I've brought forth to the dancers and the creative process, but I'm not prescribing that to the audience as the lens through which they need to interpret the piece. Because they're the prism. The art is gonna be refracted through them. And I think back to my piece, songs from the Spirit.
I thought about that a lot because there were some people I knew were coming 'cause they wanted to see a classical dance that was a dialogue with the Mets collection. Beautiful. I knew there were other people who were coming 'cause they were excited to see something that was very explicitly Christ exalted.
Like it was a very worshipful dance happening in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That's beautiful. There were other people coming I knew because they were excited to see work by a young black choreographer who was working in the genre of classical ballet. That's beautiful. We, through the creation of the piece, we're working with these old spirituals sung live by opera singers, but then through the creative process, we got connected with a group of musicians out of San Quentin State Prison in San Francisco, and they wrote the other half of the music.
They wrote their own songs from the spirit. So there were people who were coming because they were thinking about the implications about beauty and justice and what this meant for the men from San Quentin whose work was gonna be presented in this really honoring way as emblematic of the spiritual transformation that each of them had since going to San Quentin.
That's beautiful. So I always think of the artwork kind of tying all this together. Macie, I always think of the artwork as an act of hospitality. So I'm not telling you what dish on the menu you have to like, I'm not belaboring, I'm not giving you some long story about how I sourced all of the ingredients.
I'm just sitting the table and I trust that all the people coming to the performance, they're hungry in different ways. Some are longing for beauty. Some are longing for a prophetic image of a better world. Some are longing to see something reflected back to them from their own life. And I'm just trusting that as I offer the artwork as an Octa hospitality and as I offer the artwork, as an act adoration of worship back to God, that in his own beautiful winsome totally personalized way, he'll meet each of the audience members in the way they need to be met.
But that's happening through the work itself. Okay? It's not happening through me telling people how they should interpret it by intention. Imperfect as it may be. That's my,
Macie Bridge: that active engagement that you're presenting it, it's reminding me of, maybe I'll call it a phenomena that I remember from my own time in the dance studio of when, I remember when there would be moments where some of us would be sitting watching other dancers practice or rehearse.
And when you really got locked in on, you're so concentrated on what this other dancer is doing and you're sort of imagining, you're able to imagine yourself in their body feeling, feeling those movements, feeling those stretches and the extremities of it. I remember you could kind of see a specific look in the other dancer's eyes where they're so focused and they're kind of swaying with it and moving with it and, and there's a real.
Beautiful interconnectedness there. I remember observing it in my teachers and sometimes catching myself in that own that zone. And I think you're right. It's a, it's an incredible body speaking to bodies. And I wonder, there are, I think as maybe a species, we love coming up with these things that we can do to, to sort of test, test our limits.
And maybe it could be said that a number of sports embody that in different ways. What do you think sets ballet apart in this inter interconnecting of bodies in opposed to other sports or ways that we try to test ourselves this way?
Silas Farley: I think some of what sets ballet apart goes back to the turnout, the physicality of ballet, the way the body is opened up.
I think that sets it apart from some of the other physical disciplines. I also think that because ballet is almost always somehow an embodiment to use it, that also sets it apart in some powerful ways. It's different from a basketball game. There's a beautiful jump shot, there's a beautiful layup, but it's not also physically manifesting the nuances of a score box.
Music isn't becoming visible through the slam dunk necessarily, and that's not a slight basketball at all. It's just that there's a different level of musical attentiveness that's also happening, dance in the art of ballet. And I think that you're touching on something really special about the art of Ballas specifically because it does ask the body to reach to its limits.
That idea of DU that we've talked about earlier, where the dancer learns to just stretch the foot out and point to the toes. That's the creation of an infinite line to create the leg into an infinite line, and that's the idea of eternity. An infinite line. That idea comes from the choreographer. I love Alonzo Cube.
He talks about that, that the infinite line is an idea of eternity. And so when the dancer reaches the arm out into the arabesque and the hand is outstretched in front of the body at the same moment that the other leg is outstretched behind the body, and the other arm is reaching out, and the head is energetically reaching to the ceiling, and the leg is energetically reaching to the floor, then in fact all the limbs are radiating, radiating out into multiple eternal lines at the same time.
And I think that does set apart the art of bowel because there's that constant reaching in many directions at once. And this goes back to something that's so precious to you about the physicality of ballet, is that the physicality of ballet is crucifer, that the dancer stands in a turned out position.
Much of the work at the bar, you're holding the bar. One arm is out to the side, the other arm is holding the bar, the head is being pulled to the ceiling, the legs are being pulled down through the floor, and the body becomes the intersection of the vertical and the horizontal brain, you see it a little bit in a gymnast doing the Iron Cross too, but the body becomes cruciform.
It becomes the intersection of heaven and earth, an infinite line reaching upwards and downwards and an infinite line reaching outwards in both directions. And I think that there's something about that expansive physicality that also sets part balance, that reaching, that constant, reaching out in infinite lines of energy from the center out of the body so that the body becomes radiant.
Any different raise. Emanating out of the different parts of the body. So I think that really sets ballet apart. And one of the things I think is very deep is that there's an idea in B called olmo. So if you combine the circle and the line, you get a spiral. The idea of the AAL malt is the spiraling of the body around the axis of the spine to create a more multi-dimensional revelation of the body and space.
And that is something that the listener or the arc lover might recognize from like contra post in sculpture, the body from different angles. So as opposed to being flat or planar, it's angled and curvaceous, and there's shadows and there's light, and there's that kind of thing. But what ends up happening in that exploration of the spiraling of the back, shoulders and neck is that the place where you take your pulse on your neck becomes revealed and vulnerable to the audience.
And that is incredibly exposing for the dancer. But it's also a visceral energy exchange with the audience because you've literally opened up your life force, like your pulse points to the audience. And the way the ballet port of bras always invited you to articulate your wrists and present your wrists, that the, that's the other place where you take your pulse.
It's like the two pulse points are being constantly revealed to the audience. And that's a very deep, very vulnerable, very powerful energetic exchange that happens between the dancers on the stage or in the class, but also between the dancers of the audience. So I would say turnout the cruciform physicality, the idea of infinite lines of energy reaching out of the body.
And then the idea of the AAL Mall with the constant revelation of the pulse points are all things that really set apart ballet from other physical disciplines.
Macie Bridge: Wow. Do you think that the, let's see, how do I wanna put this? The church today, or our culture at large is in need of more embodiment in this way.
Silas Farley: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because we live in an increasingly disembodied culture. We are absorbed with screens. Mm-hmm. Two dimensional, highly edited and curated mediated self presentation. Mm-hmm. As opposed to like visceral nitty gritty blood, sweat, tears, good, bad, and ugly of life itself. So we get insulated from the step that makes life what it is.
We also can fall into different paradigms of education that only teach the mind. And the idea, and I didn't make it up, but it's like teaching a person, like they are brain on a stick. Yeah, but that's not reality. That we're not brains on sticks. We're full-bodied people with, you know, a whole person to cultivate and educate and there's knowledge and insight in all the different parts of our bodies, not just in our brain.
And so there's something to be gained through an, an investigation of embodiment in that way. And then I think, especially in the church, because some of that same kind of the mind above all else, the brain above all else, sometimes disciples, people in states as if their brain's on sticks. But that's not the Christian life.
The Christian life is a lifestyle of embodied discipleship to the God man, Jesus Christ. And he's not a brain on his feet, he's the God man. He has a jawbone and he went through puberty and he has wounds like the beautiful hymn. It says, rich wounds, yet visible and beauty glorified. Like he, the mystery of the incarnation is that when the creator of all things wanted to make himself known to his creation, he didn't come as a vapor or as a mountain or as a bird, but he came as a man.
And so he sublimates and affirms the glory of his creation, the materiality of his creation and the body as the crown of his creation by coming as a man. And so when we have a paradigm of Christian formation and discipleship that does it take into account that what we do with our bodies is everything in that process, then we've, we've kind of thinned out what it means to walk with God.
Mm-hmm. And then we've gotta go back to Romans 12, one, we have to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and to God. Mm-hmm. Because he has offered his body to us. On the cross. He's offered his resurrection body to us as the prophetic first fruits of what we become, as we rise in him and he gives us his body in the Eucharist.
He says, this is my body, which is given for you. This more blood, which is put up. And you can't get more materiality focused than that.
Macie Bridge: Yeah.
Silas Farley: And so we have to worship him with our whole bodies and we have to relate to each other as whole people. Not as zoom squares. Yes. Or as brains only. Mm-hmm. But it's go for a walk with somebody kneel when you pray, lift your arms up and worship.
That's the spiritual turnout. I would love to say that when you lift your arms up in worship, which is what we're commanded to do in scripture and lift up your hands in the sanctuary mm-hmm. That idea is that you're experiencing some of the spiritual turnout that a ballet dancer feels in their whole body.
You at least get to do it from the waist up when you lift your hands up, the opening up of your body to be generous and receptive. And so we need a lot of them. A lot of them for sure.
Macie Bridge: The, as we're recording this in Lent, and you're making me think of as we come up on Holy Week, and, uh, for me, faith was not so present in my, my early, early church going years as it was for you. It makes me think of the washing of the feet and this practice that can be so outside of our comfort zones for a lot of people, I think.
But it's such a. Essential understanding of Jesus's ministry as well. So thank you for connecting those dots.
Silas Farley: Absolutely.
Macie Bridge: I'm thinking for the listener who has never encountered the ballet, where do you suggest they start?
Silas Farley: Oh, that's such a fun question. So many beautiful things to solve. I mean, I always try to think of, to the degree someone can connect with their own, because we live in a country that actually has an incredible amount of ballot.
Like most even small towns have a little dance school or a little youth ballet company that maybe at least puts on the Nutcracker. And I would say be curious and just look at your own town, see if there's something going on with ballet. Doesn't matter if it's like in the Olympian manifestation of the New York City Ballet or the San Francisco Ballet or something like that.
If you live in one of those towns that you have an advantage. 'cause you have an Olympian manifestation of the art of ballet in your backyard. Yes. But if you don't, that's fine. But just to go look and see what might be happening in your own, I would recommend, I'm trying to think a couple, I'm trying to think of a couple different entry points if you're talking about for kids.
Mm-hmm. The company called American Ballet Theater, A BT, which sort of the big two companies based in New York for ballet, New York City Ballet, and A-B-T-A-B-T has some wonderful children's books. There's one called B is for ballet, and it goes through all the letters of the alphabet. It just tells you a little bit about the different ballet steps and a little bit about the different story balances, the Nutcracker, Giselle, the Sleeping Beauty.
I think with Story ballets are such a wonderful entryway into ballet because you know the story already. If it's like Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake maybe, or the Nutcracker, there's some familiarity that helps you kind of enter in. So I would recommend Abts Children's books. There's one called Bees for Ballet.
There's one called My Daddy Can Fly. So those are really sweet books for kids, and I think they're good for adults too. If you don't know anything about Bworks, they're just some nice entry points. There's a great book, I would say for probably like teenagers and up, it's a little bit longer. It's called Celestial Bodies, how to, it's either, I think it's called How to Look At Ballet or How to Enjoy Ballet is the subtitle.
It's by a woman named Laura Jacobs. But I would recommend Celestial Bodies because it has some illustrations. But she goes through some of these ideas about the physicality of ballet. She's a person who knows dance and literature really well. So she connects the history of literature and poetry to the evolution of the Art of Ballet.
I think that's a great book. And then if you wanna go really deep, there's a book by Jennifer, a Home Moods, and she is the newly minted Van Cleon Arpels chair of the History of Dance at NYU. Wow. And she wrote a book called Apollo's Angels, A History of Ballet, and it is a tome, but it is very readable. And it's fascinating because her background is as a professional dancer, but she's also a scholar of European history.
And so she gives you just an extraordinary deep dive into the history and evolution of the Art of Ballet. And then I host a podcast for the New York City Ballet called Hear the Dance, HUAR, which is based on a quote from the New York City Ballet Founder George Balance sheet who said, you have to see the music and hear the dance said idea visually manifesting the music through the movement.
And I do deep dives about different ballets in the New York City Ballet repertory, and I would encourage people to listen to that because it's very conversational and I talk to people from the history of the company about particular ballets. And then I would encourage people to listen to an episode and then just go on YouTube and find a video of the ballet that we're talking about, because it gives you a lot of background that you can then work with as you then watch a ballet, especially if you're someone new to ballet, because you get a very human conversation between people who are involved with that piece.
But then you get to watch it with the insights in the back of your mind. So that I think is a helpful tool. So kind of recapping all of those. Look at what ballet is going on in your own community. If it's for kids, look at B is for ballet. Look at My Daddy Can Fly. If you're like teenager through adult, look at the book Celestial Bodies.
And if you're someone who just loves a deep dive on history and the interconnectedness of art and ideas, look up Jennifer Holman's and her book called Apollo's Angels. And then the podcast is called Hear the Dance. And then, I mean, if people are listening, they're actually gonna go look up ballets. I would say definitely the New York City Ballet Production of the Nutcracker by George balance sheet.
That's a great thing to start at to look at what ballet is. Then I would say one step further jumping over into the land of more abstract ballet is to look up the ballet called Jewels. Hmm, which was choreographed in 1967 by New York City Ballet Founder George Ball Sheet. I love to recommend that ballet for people as another entry point.
It doesn't have a story, but each of the three acts is based on a different jewel. Mm-hmm. And balance sheet. And his brilliance actually bases each of the three sections on a different culture's perspective on ballet. So the first act is called Emeralds. Beautiful green costumes, long romantic length, tutu's down to the ankle.
Very evocative of the French ballet of the 19th century ballets like Giselle. The second act is called rubies, and the first section emeralds is to use of Gabriel sole, so very like neoromantic glorious music. The second act is called rubies and it's set to stravinsky's capriccio for piano orchestra.
They have a little short kind of flapper costumes. They're almost like flappers, and it's based on the energy of dance in ballet in New York City. So it's very, it's jazzy, it's syncopated. It has a certain sensuality and playfulness about it that's very relevant and people feel connected to. And then the third act is called Diamonds.
The dancers where the, what we think of as almost like a saucer tutu that's parallel to the floor, a circle around the waist. And it's based on balancing own memories from his childhood growing up at the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg before the revolution and did the ballets of Pet Pa. So he's hearkening back to Sleeping Beauty and ballets like that.
And that's to music of Tchaikovsky. So in one evening, and you can watch it on YouTube, there are videos of the whole ballet on YouTube, but that's one where you get kinda like a flyover, a ballet history, and just some really glorious dancing all under one ballad. So Nutcracker in Jules for sure. And then if you wanna go deep into the modern abstract, I'm quoting a lot of pieces of balance sheet because I feel like he's a great touchstone.
'cause he's like a Shakespeare for Ballet is to watch his ballot called Agon. This is to music of Stravinsky. Agon, A GON. It's, it comes from the word for contest in Greek. It's like the word inside of our words, protagonist, antagonist, that kind of thing. And this is a ballet in just simple black leotards and tights.
Like it's stripped down. It's if the Museum of Modern Art was a ballet, because it's like very sleek and it's no storyline and it's just the visual embodiment of the music in a very athletic way. So that's kind of like just, and each thing I've said is kind of like going deeper and deeper.
Macie Bridge: Fantastic.
Silas Farley: I guess I would say one other thing about people that aren't familiar with ballet mm-hmm.
Is that there's nothing you need to know before going to experience ballet. You have a body, you have eyes, you have ears. That's all you need. Just let it wash over you. Let it work on you in its own kind of visceral way. Let that be an entry point to not be intimidated by the music or the wordless ness or the tutu's or the point shoes or whatever.
There's so many different stylistic manifestations of ballet, but just go experience it and if you can, I would really encourage people almost as much or more than watching it go see if like your local YMCA or something has an adult ballet class, or if you're a kid, like maybe ask your parents to sign you up to go try a class and just feel what that turned out physicality feels like in your own body.
It's so beautiful. It's very empowering, especially if it's taught in a way that's very empowering. I think this movie can have a whole nother conversation about how ballet is taught, but I think there's something in the physicality of ballet itself that really opens up the body to be generous and receptive.
So I would just encourage people to engage with the art, either as a viewer, I. Or as a participant or both.
Macie Bridge: Amazing.
Silas, thank you for so eloquently sharing with us the depth and spirituality and devotion it's possible in the ballet. We're really grateful.
Silas Farley: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Evan Rosa: For The Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Silas Farley and Macie Bridge.
Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett and Zoë Halaban. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith dot Yale dot edu or life worth living dot Yale dot edu. There you can find all sorts of educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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