This is an excerpt from an interview with dancer and choreographer Silas Farley on The Living Church Podcast. Farley is Armstrong Artist in Residence in Ballet in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. He’s been a teacher and choreographer at the New York City Ballet, the Guggenheim, the Washington Ballet, and the Met, and attends All Saints Anglican Church in Dallas. The conversation is edited for clarity and flow.
I would love to hear about your vocation to dance, and how this weaves into your faith life.
My father was a professional percussionist and a high-level fencer. My mom was in Christian broadcasting. And so I grew up with a synthesis of athleticism and artistry, music and communication arts.
I also grew up in a Lutheran church that had a liturgical dance program woven into the life of the congregation. There would be special choreographed dances on particular feast days, but then the actual sanctuary space was configured in the round around the altar, and there were improvised, expressive, communal dances around the altar basically every Sunday. So I grew up in an environment where dance was worship. My first encounter with dance was dance as an embodied prayer of thanksgiving, of praise back to God.
Okay, hold on. I can almost not believe two of the things that you’ve just told me. You went to a Lutheran church that had a successful liturgical dance program that was non-awkward. And this church also had charismatic dance praise time?
Yes. And it began because a lot of the early congregants at that church had had really radical conversion experiences, and there was this openness to the power of the Holy Spirit, to just do whatever he wanted to do. And they had a heart and a desire to worship.
There was one Sunday where the boy who was the acolyte just started dancing, and then it was like it just rippled out into the bodies of the other people in the congregation. It gives me chills talking about it, because it was like a Pentecost-type moment. The Holy Spirit was manifesting himself through this little boy’s dance. And the congregation has kept dancing for 50 years.
And then this church’s liturgical dance ministry invited Ballet Magnificat, which is a Christian ballet company out of Jackson, Mississippi, for a performance. That was my first time seeing formal ballet.
What about formal ballet grabbed you?
It was something about the male dancers, their combination of power and poetry. I was captivated by that. I can only say it was the Lord, putting me in the way of a certain kind of beauty that captivated my imagination.
When we moved to a Presbyterian church, a woman in the church told us about a small Christian dance school close by, King David Christian Conservatory. My mom was like, “I don’t know how I would be able to pay for that.” The woman said, “Go anyway.” So my mom took me there, and long story short, I started my training.
Again, it was a place where there was this very clear synthesis of faith and art. We would do devotions together before we started class. That’s where I first learned ballet, tap, and jazz. It was a really nurturing environment.
And then what happened?
I knew that I wanted to devote my whole life to dance. Soon I started reading and studying the history and development of dance, and I became interested in George Balanchine, this incredibly brilliant teacher and choreographer.
He trained at the Imperial School in St. Petersburg, and he was part of the first generation of dancers under the Communist regime. He came to the West by way of the Ballet Russes, where artists like Picasso and Ravel and Stravinsky and Chanel were all collaborating. And he came of age as a choreographer there. Then he founded the School of American Ballet, and then later New York City Ballet.
All of this is just fascinating to me, the vitality of his approach to movement, the way he was incorporating different parts of American culture, the jazziness, the syncopation, the speed, the streamlined architecture, all of those things given a physical form.
And then, through a crazy combination of events, I ended up at the North Carolina Dance Theatre (Charlotte Ballet), where I had a teacher named Patricia McBride, who had been a principal dancer in the New York City Ballet with Balanchine. At the age of 13, I was accepted on a full scholarship to the School of American Ballet, which is the official academy of New York City Ballet. Just a miracle.
Upon my high school graduation, I was invited to join New York City Ballet. I told people it was like wanting to be an astronaut and then actually getting to go to the moon. And I was on the moon for eight years.
Was there a spiritual continuity for you in New York, or were there moments of struggle or tension between dance and faith?
I would say it was mostly very seamless, because my church communities embraced me and my vocation. When I first moved to New York, I was a 14-year-old boarding school student. I had a connection at Redeemer Presbyterian, so I went there.
And I heard Tim Keller preach, basically every Sunday, this summons to redemptively participate in every sphere of the city, every sphere of culture, and to be the hands and feet and the body of Christ in politics, education, the arts.
And little did I know that a bunch of other young teenage Christian ballet students had also been accepted to SAB at the same time, one of whom later became my wife. Our group started a Bible study, and we had this little gaggle of Christians pursuing our professional aspirations as ballet dancers, but also encouraging each other as budding believers.
As your spiritual and professional development have dovetailed, what theological connections have you made?
Dance is predicated upon a lifestyle of embodied discipline and learning. How do we shape our feet? How do we develop our bodies to have the strength, agility, flexibility, and sensitivity to music and to other bodies to be able to navigate complex choreographic patterns?
We advance in our growth in Christ through spiritual disciplines. I grow in grace, I grow in the knowledge of who God is, I grow in my confidence, in my communion and intimacy with Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Father through spiritual disciplines. And so that intentional participation in the community of the church, immersion in the Scripture, and the lifestyle of prayerful communion with God were analogous to the artistic disciplines of going to ballet class and going to our weight training classes.
Discipline yields freedom. And we live that in the art of ballet. The dancer is free to the degree that the dancer has submitted to the discipline, the technique, the training, so that when the curtain rises and the orchestra starts to play, you’re set free on prescribed pathways in which you have unbelievable and real freedom.
And it was Lincoln Kirstein, the brilliant arts patron who brought Balanchine to America, who said (and this kind of blew my mind) that dance is the ultimate manifestation of something that’s both predetermined and gives total agency. You’re choosing in each moment to adhere to the prescribed pathway, but in so doing, you can actually fly.
This reminds me of the beautiful dance in Scripture and in the lives of God’s people between law and grace. And grace is a word that anybody in their right mind would associate with ballet.
For sure.
But when I watch a movie about a ballet dancer, or about any artist serious about their craft, often it’s someone who, in a theological sense, feels really far from grace. They are haunted by perfectionism, by a grand vision that they feel that they can never quite capture. So, I’m curious how you have found grace as a physical concept and as a theological concept relating.
I love Nicky Gumbel’s quip that GRACE is God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense. It’s like the person who comes to the stage door and tells the ballerina, “I would give my whole life to dance like that.” And the ballerina says, “I did.” There is a clear corollary, because grace comes through a deep level of sacrifice.
And then I think about how, in the New York City Ballet, we were appropriating the grace of God into that pressure cooker. I think it was grounding us in the fact that, okay, because I am the recipient of God’s Riches at Christ’s Expense, then my identity is based in something deeper than my last performance.
My identity is shaped in something, is formed and grounded in something, deeper than whether my body is injured or not at this moment in the season. Or whether I’m the way I want to look. It was a lot of reminding ourselves of the grace that we had received from God through the work of Christ. And allowing his Holy Spirit to constantly remind us of our identities as beloved sons and daughters of God.
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Amber D. Noel, M.Div., directs the public-facing programs of The Living Church, including the podcast, events, and the Partner program. Outside of work, she is a writer and enjoys life in Atlanta.
