The Body as Sacred Offering: Ballet and Embodied Faith / New York City Ballet Dancer Silas Farley
For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & CultureShow Notes
Silas Farley, former New York City Ballet dancer and current Armstrong Artist in Residence in Ballet in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, 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.
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. Visit tyndale.foundation to learn more.
Episode Highlights
“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 Understanding and Experiencing Ballet
- 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*](https://podcast.nycballet.com/category/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 recepti
More from For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture
What happens when an ancient discipline built to remake the self in the context of a way of life and normative map gets sold back to us as lifehacking for stress relief and optimization?
It took Odysseus ten years to sail home from Troy to Ithaca; we can fly the same distance in about an hour. But faster travel hasn't brought us any closer to home. We can know more, do more, and connect more than ever, and yet our ability to belong to our own reality seems to be shrinking. Philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and directs Harvard's Public Culture Project, takes up that paradox in his new book, To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World. The title comes from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and Corbin reads Eliot's lines as something like a mission statement for humanity: the point of the journey is not to escape reality or optimize our way around it, but to truly belong to it.
Everything is “maxxed” right now, and the news cycle in particular seems to be historymaxxing, insisting that things have never been worse than they are now. And the threats are real, from AI and global warming to election integrity—foreign affairs gone wrong, and violence abroad, in our homes, and in our schools. But the news maxxes us on fear, and so do politicians and corporations, because they want us to do something. If theologian Lee C. Camp is right, history was already maxed at the incarnation, and it came through a subversive way of life: humble, compassionate, at times angry, but radical and scandalous all the same. Camp, author of *Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians* and founder and host of the nationally syndicated podcast and radio show No Small Endeavor, argues that the idolatry of the nation state, and even the effort to legislate Christian morality and values into a political movement, is a subversion of Christianity.
Human growth can seem to just happen—genes, care, and nurture set each of us on a trajectory across the lifespan. But how do people actually grow toward wholeness, and is virtue even the point?
Technology, Aaron Cline Hanbury suggests, is never a purely neutral tool. But the history of ethical thinking about technology shows that as long as there's been technology, there's been anxiety about it. Or perhaps more accurately, anxiety about what we might do with it. And increasingly, what it might do to us.