Education Quote by Suzanne Farrell

Perfection is a terrible teacher, Suzanne Farrell insists, and coming from a dancer it lands with extra bite. Ballet culture fetishizes the “clean” performance: the applause, the reviews, the moment when your body finally obeys. Farrell doesn’t deny that rush - you should enjoy it, she says - but she’s puncturing the comforting myth that excellence automatically produces insight. When things go right, you’re rewarded into repeating the same choices. The feedback is bluntly positive, so you stop interrogating the mechanics.

The line also smuggles in a critique of ego. “You give yourself credit” isn’t framed as a sin, just as a psychological endpoint: credit closes the file. Learning, by contrast, requires leaving the file open, sitting in the awkward space where you can’t fully explain what happened and you don’t yet look impressive doing it. That’s why she hammers the rhythm of “trial and error, trial and error” - it mimics rehearsal, the unglamorous loop dancers live in, where progress is less epiphany than repetition with better information.

Context matters: Farrell’s career was shaped by high-stakes scrutiny and institutional gatekeeping, where a single “good” night could be treated as proof of worth, and a bad one as a verdict. Her reframing is quietly liberating. It moves the center of gravity from external validation (the performance) to internal process (the work). The subtext is resilience without romance: mistakes aren’t noble, they’re simply the price of becoming precise.