Daily Inspiration Quote by Suzanne Farrell

Onstage, Farrell argues, is not just a place you perform; its a technology for becoming. Coming from a dancer - someone whose instrument is the body everyone thinks they already understand - the line pushes back against the idea that performance is simply heightened reality. She frames the stage as a controlled rupture: you step into a space where identity is temporarily unfastened from your day-to-day self, and the rules of consequence soften. That is the seduction and the discipline of it.

The wording is tellingly plain: "anything" is an audacious promise, then immediately qualified by "removed from reality", as if she knows the romantic myth can curdle into escapism. Farrell is pointing at a paradox dancers live with. Ballet is brutally material - soreness, repetition, gravity, aging - yet its cultural function is to look like transcendence. The stage is where the audience gets the illusion; the dancer gets the permission. Permission to inhabit roles, emotions, even archetypes that would feel theatrical or unsafe in ordinary life.

Context matters: Farrells career unfolded in an era when ballet demanded near-total devotion, often under charismatic (and controlling) male power. In that landscape, "removed from reality" reads as both refuge and strategy. Art becomes a kind of counter-sovereignty: the place where a dancer can author herself, even if the offstage world insists on hierarchy, decorum, and limits. The quote works because it captures that split-second alchemy - the body in full constraint, the self in brief expansion.