Parenting & Family Quote by Suzanne Farrell

That opening phrase, "In fact", lands like a corrective to a myth. Suzanne Farrell isn’t reminiscing; she’s revising the record. The line is blunt, almost logistical, and that’s the point: it punctures the romantic story people like to tell about talent inevitably finding a stage. For a dancer who became synonymous with Balanchine-era glamour, she starts with absence - not hardship-as-brand, but infrastructure-as-destiny.

The intent is quietly political. Farrell frames her childhood not as a personal deficit but as a regional one: the Midwest simply lacked the institutions that make a ballet life imaginable. The subtext is that artistry isn’t just trained in studios; it’s authorized by ecosystems - companies, touring circuits, patrons, teachers who’ve worked at the next rung up. Without that, ambition has to be imported, or it withers.

Context sharpens the edges. Mid-century American ballet was still consolidating on the coasts, with New York functioning as a gravitational center. By naming the Midwest, Farrell gestures at a cultural map where certain places are assumed to be "serious" and others are expected to stay spectators. There’s also a generational undertone: today’s regional companies and pre-professional pipelines can feel inevitable, but she reminds you they were built - late, unevenly, and not by accident.

It works because it’s a single sentence that contains a whole sociology of opportunity: not "I had no chance", but "the chance hadn’t been constructed yet."