“That’s too pretty,” Suzanne Farrell told Mira Nadon, a principal at New York City Ballet, as her arms rose and hovered in the air like cresting gulls.
It was pretty. But pretty isn’t where the power comes from in George Balanchine’s “Pithoprakta,” a modernist ballet from 1968 that Farrell, the 81-year-old former City Ballet star, is reviving this season at the company. “Pithoprakta,” eerie and tense, means “action by probabilities.” The score, by Iannis Xenakis, sounds like trinkling molecules are zipping across the universe.
“Get under, get higher and higher and higher,” Farrell said to Nadon, bending forward and dipping her arm before it rose and skimmed with conviction across an invisible horizon.
The undercurrent of this strange ballet is a flinty, unsettling strength. A work for 14 dancers, including a lead couple — originally Farrell and Arthur Mitchell — “Pithoprakta” has a tone both feral and feverish, mysterious and otherworldly. But Balanchine, armed with a curious mind, never produced only one kind of ballet. The year after he made the glittering beauty “Jewels” (1967), he created “Pithoprakta,” a shadowy beast.
“It was like nothing we had ever done before,” Farrell said.
Farrell, one of City Ballet’s most influential dancers, originated many important roles in Balanchine works. In recent years, she has returned to the company to coach dancers. In 2024, she staged “Errante,” formerly “Tzigane,” with Nadon in her part. But “Pithoprakta” is different. This time, Farrell is bringing a nearly forgotten Balanchine ballet, infused with some of her own imagination, back to life.
There are recognizable Balanchine signatures, like a turning backbend, but what sets “Pithoprakta” apart is its sense of gravity. At times members of the corps de ballet even roll and lie on the floor. The lead couple close in on each other yet seldom touch; there is air between their palms as they trace space with their hands in parallel. At one point the man, lying on his stomach, reaches for his partner’s ankles as she towers over him, stabbing the floor with sharp steps on pointe. And here dancing to music takes on a different quality within Xenakis’s galaxy of sounds, a composition made up of 46 parts for strings, trombones, xylophone and wood block.
Balanchine first encountered Xenakis in Montreal in 1967, when the composer created a spectacle of light and sound for Expo 67. The installation included “cables running all different ways,” Farrell said. “Xenakis was a great mathematician and architect, and every so often, there would be a lightbulb that would go off.”
There was something else in the air, too, Farrell said. “The whole world was talking about going to the moon — everybody’s life was revolving about what life is going to be like outside of what we have and so perhaps that was interesting to him,” she said of Balanchine.
But the draw might have had more to do with the Xenakis himself. Balanchine “was fascinated with how you could move to that kind of music,” Farrell said.
“Pithoprakta” holds mysteries beyond its mood and look. A film was made before the 1968 City Ballet premiere, but it was shot on a day when Mitchell was absent. “I said to Mr. B, ‘What should I do when we’re supposed to be doing the pas de deux?’” Farrell recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, just do it by yourself.’”
Balanchine, Farrell said, further emphasized the couple’s distance from each other after the filming. “Pithoprakta” hasn’t been performed at City Ballet since 1969. But Farrell relied on that film when she staged it for her now defunct company, Suzanne Farrell Ballet, in 2007, as part of the Balanchine Preservation Initiative at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. When she spoke to the Balanchine Trust about reviving it back then, there was a decision to be made.
“I said, ‘The only reference anyone has is this old black-and-white film, and when Arthur’s not there, do you want me to do it with or without the man?’” Farrell said. “They said, ‘with the man.’”
This led Farrell to create movement for the male principal since, she said, “I don’t know at all what Arthur did. There were a couple places — a step where he was behind me — that are maintained, but I can’t remember much of anything else.”
She also used photographs for guidance. “You kind of latch on to any anchor that you have,” she said. “I think some of the fascinating aspects is that so little is known, but a lot is known.”
And it’s a gift. “I feel that for these dancers, it’s almost like Mr. B is coming back and doing a ballet for them,” she continued. “As if he was here saying, all right, now you’re ready for this. And it’s something nobody else has.”
The dancers in the corps de ballet, angular and disjointed, jump in place with flailing arms, roll across the floor or pat it with their hands. Often they move in packs. The male lead, twisting and contorting, becomes increasingly frenetic as if he were running out of time. For the woman, her hair whipping around her, sharp pointe work contrasts with dangling arms making her seem both bound by gravity and wildly loose.
Nadon, who will dance Farrell’s part in the opening-night cast on Oct. 8, had never heard of the ballet, which has, ”an alien-y, extraterrestrial feel,” she said.
She said Farrell told the dancers that they were like molecules bouncing around the stage. “She’s also been very clear that it’s not the type of ballet that we’re trying to add a lot of emotion to,” Nadon said. “She’s like, ‘Don’t do this step in a jazzy way. It shouldn’t be sexy. It shouldn’t be jazzy. It should just be the step.’”
Unity Phelan, who dances Farrell’s role in another cast, said that for her the movement is liberating. “Suzanne describes it as it’s kind of like a spacewalk, and you’re running out of oxygen,” she said. “I’m trying to take as much air as possible from the people around me. It’s like taking their energy and holding it into myself.”
A sense of anxiety runs throughout “Pithoprakta,” which reminds Phelan of the state of the world. “I think it’s a visual representation of the idea of trying to hold on, but also be free and also create relationships,” she said. “It’s like it’s a human experience all in 10 minutes of a ballet.”
In the final moment, the woman travels backward on pointe, her feet stabbing the floor in small side to side steps as her arms reach and shake. Her partner swirls around but soon she is alone. She wilts to the floor before landing in a kneeling position as her arms rise overhead and her wrists cross and fold over her eyes with wiggling fingers.
“I feel like I’m reaching for something,” Nadon said. “She didn’t say this,” Nadon added of Farrell, “but I kind of feel like you are out in space and you run out of air. You’re collapsing. And then maybe you become the alien.”
Farrell said that she didn’t know what was in Balanchine’s mind with the ending. “I can’t speak for him,” she said. “I would never do that. No one can. They try, but they can’t. But you can kind of imagine what was in his mind by the steps. He would always say, ‘If you want to know about my ballets, it’s all in the choreography.’”
In the studio, Farrell is explicit about the approach needed for the choreography’s urgency and weight. This is not a meek ballet. She pushed them to move with more groundedness, to get “into the ground,” as she put it.
“It’s even difficult to explain to them what the steps are,” she added, “because it’s not your typical glissade-jeté steps, it’s not our vocabulary often. And certainly the musicality is not our vocabulary often. I know they do a lot of contemporary ballets, but I don’t even call this contemporary. I don’t know what to call it. I think every ballet of Mr. B’s is in a category of itself.”
Farrell may not be able to move like she used to, but the thrust of the choreography — its weight and its energy — is palpable in her body. “It’s so ingrained in her bones and her blood,” Phelan said. “You can see it happening.”
Farrell said that she felt like she could do it even though she knows she can’t. “But the same energy is there,” she said. “I’ve got the power, I’ve got the thrust, I got the weight, I have the light. It’s so visceral. People move differently and they don’t necessarily move like I do. So I try to find the same thrust that they need without locking them into something. But I just say, in a good way, ‘Throw it away. Don’t keep it. Give it away. Explode.’”
It’s all in the choreography: “Pithoprakta” has a sense of danger. “Why not?” Farrell said with a smile. “It should have an element of danger. Going to space has danger.”
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