The Body as Sacred Offering: Ballet and Embodied Faith / New York City Ballet Dancer Silas Farley

Silas Farley, former New York City Ballet dancer and current Dean of the Colburn School's Trudl Zipper Dance Institute, explores the profound connections between classical ballet, Christian worship, and embodied spirituality. From his early exposure to liturgical dance in a charismatic Lutheran church to his career as a professional dancer and choreographer, Farley illuminates how the physicality of ballet can express deep spiritual truths and serve as an act of worship.

Episode Highlights from Silas Farley

“The physicality of ballet is cruciform. The dancer stands in a turned-out position... the body becomes the intersection of the vertical and the horizontal plane.”

“Sin makes the soul curve in on itself, whereas holiness or wholeness in God opens us up.”

“We are Christian humanists. We don't need to be intimidated by beauty.”

“There's knowledge and insight in all the different parts of our bodies, not just in our brain.”

“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.”

Resources for Ballet Engagement

• Local community ballet companies/schools
• “B is for Ballet” (ABT children’s book)
• “My Daddy Can Fly” (ABT)
• Celestial Bodies, by Laura Jacobs
• Apollo’s Angels, by Jennifer Homans
• Silas Farley’s Podcast: Hear the Dance (NYC Ballet)
• The Nutcracker (NYC Ballet/Balanchine)
• Jewels (1967, Balanchine)
• Agon (Balanchine/Stravinsky)

About Silas Farley

Silas Farley is a professional ballet dancer and choreographer. Dean of the Trudl Zipper Dance Institute at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, Silas is a former New York City Ballet dancer, choreographer, and educator. He also currently serves as Armstrong Artist in Residence in Ballet in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University.

His work includes choreography for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Houston Ballet, and the New York City Ballet. He hosts the Hear the Dance podcast and creates works that integrate classical ballet with spiritual themes.

Silas also serves on the board of The George Balanchine Foundation.

Show Notes

Silas Farley’s Early Dance Background & Formation

• Silas Farley: Originally from Charlotte, North Carolina; youngest of 7 children (4 brothers, 2 sisters); multiracial family (white father, Black mother)
• First exposure through charismatic Lutheran church’s liturgical dance ministry
• Saw formal ballet at age 6 when Christian ballet company Ballet Magnifica performed
• Dance initially experienced as form of worship before performance

Liturgical vs Classical Ballet

• Liturgical dance:
  • Amplifies worship
  • Functions as embodied prayer
  • Not primarily performative
  • Historical examples: David with Ark of Covenant, Miriam after Red Sea crossing
• Classical ballet:
  • Performed on proscenium stage
  • Requires specific training
  • Focuses on virtuosic movements
  • Explicitly performative
• Both forms serve as offerings/vessels for transmitting energy to audience

Technical Elements of Ballet: Turnout, Spiritual Turnout, and Opening Up

• Foundational concept of “turnout”—rotation of feet/hips outward
• “That idea of turnout makes the body more expressive in a way. Because if our toes are straightforward, like the way we're designed, you only 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 a more complete revelation of the body.”
• Creates more complete revelation of body’s musculature
• Physicality conveys “spiritual turnout” - openness/receptiveness
• “Spiritual turnout: that you are open   and receptive and generous. And that's embodied in the physicality of ballet.”
• “So much of what developed as ballet as we know, it happened at the court of Louis the XIV in the  1660-1670s.”
• “It's not artificial, it's actually supernatural.”

Physical & Spiritual Connections in Ballet

• “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.”
• Freedom within the constraints movements and positions
• Swan Lake: “They're so free. They're almost like birds. But that's come through a lifestyle of discipline.”
• “You get a hyper awareness of your own body.”
• Develops hyper-awareness of body
• Links to incarnational theology—Christ as God-man
• Freedom through discipline and submission
• Movement vocabulary builds from simple elements (plié, tendu)
• Plie: Mama and Dada
• “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 plié and the tendu.”
• Creates infinite lines suggesting eternity
• Combines circular power with eternal lines
• Theological Dimensions of Ballet
• Silas’s choreographed interpretation of C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, as a ballet

Ballet and the Art of Choreography

• “The music and choreography were like brothers.”
• “Songs from the Spirit”
• “The music becomes my map.”
• Choreographing in silence

The Role of the Audience and Their Experience

• Ideas to dialogue with
• A set of ideas to gather together and embody
• Arvo Part, The Genealogy of Jesus in Luke 3
• Uniting my heart with Jesus
• I’m never didactic about it.
• An embodied musical experience
• “If I  say ‘family, friendship, romance, divine love,’ you all instantly have associations, beauty, pain, trauma, consolation that are associated with those four loves.”
• “ I'm not writing a sermon about any of these ideas. I'm choreographing a ballet. I'm assembling these classical steps with this music to create a visceral, embodied musical experience.”
• The audience: “They come to it with their experiences, their own eyes and ears and their own bodies. And that's enough.”
• Arvo Part: “Music is white light, and the prism is the soul of the listener.”
• “The musical ideas are refracted through the hearer.”
• “The audience is always in my heart and mind.”
• “I always think of the artwork as an act of hospitality.  … I’m just setting the table.”

What’s Unique about Ballet as a Physical Artform

• Beautiful interconnectedness
• Asking the body to reach to its limits
• “The Infinite Line” in Ballet
• Radiating out into multiple eternal lines at the same time
• Constant reaching in many directions at once
• Cruciform positioning: intersection of vertical and horizontal planes
• “The body becomes radiant”
• Use of “épaulement”—spiraling of body around spine’s axis
• Reveals pulse points (neck, wrists) creating vulnerable energy exchange with audience
• Opening up the life force of the dancer
• No separation between dancer and instrument (“I am the work of art”)
• Cruciform physicality

Contemporary Cultural Context

• Modern culture increasingly disembodied due to screens/digital media
• “We live in an increasingly disembodied culture, we are absorbed with screens two dimensional, uh, highly edited and curated,  mediated self presentation   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.”
• Education often treats people as “brains on sticks”
• “The Christian life is a lifestyle of in embodied discipleship to the God man, Jesus  Christ. And he's not a brain on a stick. 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. 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.”
• Church needs more embodied practices
• Ballet offers counterpoint to disembodied tendencies
• Importance of physical discipline in spiritual formation
• Romans 12:1 and making our bodies as living sacrifices

How to Experience Ballet

“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, and let that be an entry point  to not be intimidated by the, the music,  or the wordlessness 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, 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.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Silas Farley and Macie Bridge
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, Kacie Barrett & Emily Brookfield
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give