Daily Inspiration Quote by Suzanne Farrell

Tap turns the body into its own percussion section, and Suzanne Farrell’s line gets at that thrill with disarming plainness. “I liked hearing the results of my movements” isn’t about vanity or applause; it’s about feedback. Tap doesn’t just look like effort, it proves it. Every shuffle and brush lands as an audible receipt, a tiny confirmation that the body isn’t drifting through space but making contact with it.

Coming from Farrell, the remark carries extra charge. She’s a ballerina synonymous with Balanchine’s cool, elongated lyricism - an art that often reads as frictionless, even when it’s brutally strenuous. Ballet’s ideal is to hide labor; tap’s pleasure is to broadcast it. Her wording subtly flips the hierarchy that usually places ballet on a pedestal and tap in the “entertainment” corner. What she admires is the honesty of sound: movement doesn’t need an interpreter, a critic, or even a mirror. It announces itself.

The intent feels almost childlike, but the subtext is sophisticated: dancers are trained to chase an invisible standard, and here’s a form where the standard is immediate and physical. Tap offers a kind of agency. You don’t wait to be told you were “musical” - you generate the music. In a culture that often treats dancers as silent instruments of someone else’s score, Farrell is pointing to the radical satisfaction of hearing yourself exist.