I can't read a note. I have lots of discipline, but I can't sit still at any instrument.
— Suzanne Farrell
Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are, I don't quite know how I'm going to do them, because I haven't lived that moment yet. I always feel very insecure and I get very excited.
The body can do amazing things in a situation when it is really called for.
Once I started dancing, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was as a child.
On the other hand, I think it is wonderful for everyone to take ballet classes, at any age. It gives you a discipline, it gives you a place to go. It gives you some control in your life.
I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do.
Of course, in the art class, I was the model.
I think especially in a world where you have so little say about what goes on in your life, or in the politics of the world around you, it is wonderful to go into that studio, and tell yourself what to do.
I had two sisters, and we would love to get dressed up and pretend that we were chic, sophisticated ladies. And I think that was a great sort of preparation, in a way.
That the work involved, the willingness to take chances, the commitment, the opportunity to get on stage and make people happy, was more important than becoming famous, or even what I was dancing.
So dancing was not something I had a great desire to do.
I'm thought of as a cool, unemotional dancer, but inside I'm not.
The steps must be second nature to me, so that the music seems to be drawing the steps out of me and I don't look as if I'm struggling to fit the steps to the music.
I didn't have any doubts about my choice of career, but I had constant doubts about my ability, yes.
There is pain and sacrifice in everyone's world. That's why, when I was dancing, I had no pain.
When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.
I learned to love dance for its own sake.
I liked tap, because I liked hearing the results of my movements.
I liked to read but, being a dancer, I didn't have a lot of time to read.
I could work out a lot of my emotions by going to class and dancing.
I used to love to play dress-up, where you get your mother's or your grandmother's dresses and high heels.
But what was my motivation was music, and the fact that I love to move around. I'm always moving around.
I was very much of a tomboy.
I like dramatic ballets, particularly if they're ballets in which I have a chance to go from one extreme of style or characterization to another.
It's ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven't lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else.
You don't learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don't really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time.
When you get on stage, you can be anything. You are removed from reality in a way, the real world.
And I just thought, this is what I want to be. And I knew that dancing would be my chosen profession.
I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.
I loved tests because it was another form of competing, a healthy competition.
I had a wonderful childhood, coming from Cincinnati, and I think that it was great going into the life that I was going to have, where you have to start young as a dancer.
The particular ballet was not so important as the fact that I was physically healthy, and capable of getting out there and dancing as often as possible.
In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child.
As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate.
