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Farley, now 24 and a member of City Ballet, has been exploring the galleries and corridors of the Met ever since. He doesn’t ignore the traveling exhibitions, but he prizes, above all, the museum’s permanent collection.
“Making choreography here is beyond anything I could have hoped,” Farley said. But starting Friday afternoon his site-specific ballet, “Songs From the Spirit,” a MetLiveArts commission, will take over three of its galleries.
As his work for seven dancers moves from darkness (the staid and somber Assyrian Court) to tranquility (the meditative Chinese Garden Court) and finally lightness (a bright court in the American Wing), Farley takes the audience on a journey laced with history and spirituality.
“Songs From the Spirit” also poses a question: What does freedom mean? The dance, a collaboration with Radiotopia podcast Ear Hustle, a nuanced look at prison life, features spirituals and new music created by incarcerated men at San Quentin State Prison in California. The idea to collaborate with the podcast came from Limor Tomer, general manager of MetLiveArts, who commissioned the work.
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“I thought if you’re talking about spirituals and being separated from community and finding grace,” Tomer said, “then we have that right now.”
Last summer, Tomer, Farley and his wife, Cassia Farley, who is dancing in the work, visited San Quentin to meet with inmates and with the podcast’s hosts: Earlonne Woods, an inmate who has since been released; and Nigel Poor, a visual artist.
The men had prepared musical selections — modern spirituals in a variety of genres, including rap, folk, spoken word and hip-hop — to perform for the visitors, who chose pieces to use for the dance. Silas Farley, who is religious, likened the experience to being in church. “Almost every man who contributed music to the ballet experienced some kind of spiritual transformation,” he said. “They’re these very raw, very vulnerable, very revelatory songs.” (Their music will be played on recordings; soprano Kelly Griffin and tenor Robert May will also perform spirituals live.)
For some of the men involved, Farley was surprising. “Not too many people of color come in to San Quentin trying to help us,” LeMar Harrison, known as Maverick, said. “He was the first dude who actually looked like me, and he kind of reminded me of all the kinds of things I wanted to be as a kid.” (Harrison, who was recently released after serving 22 years, 2 months and 2 days, will attend the Met performances, along with two other recently released men.)
Even for a ballet dancer, Farley, nearly 6 feet 6 inches tall, is statuesque. He has legs for days, hands that dance elegantly in the air and a beaming smile. His impressive presence has to do with more than his physicality; it has a spiritual side too. As he sees it, his faith is intertwined with ballet. “I was first introduced to dance in the context of worship,” he said. “The first time I saw a ballet was when a company from Mississippi came to perform at our church. I was 6.”
The original seed of “Songs From the Spirit” was planted at Redeemer Presbyterian Church West Side in Manhattan, where Farley performed a liturgical dance during the offertory portion of a Sunday service. This work “was always worship before it was a performance,” Farley said. “It was about, ‘I’ve been entrusted with this gift, and I’m offering it.'”
On a recent morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Farley stood in the gallery of the Assyrian Court of Ashurnasirpal II and gestured at the reliefs taken from one of his palaces. “Some of these stances you see are in the choreography,” he said. “These very substantial male figures that are very delicately holding these little bowls. It’s such a contrast between the sensitivity and the strength. And that’s so much like the male ballet dancer. It’s power and poetry.”
The gallery has a heaviness to it; it’s dark and enclosed, almost like a prison cell. “That’s really the spirit that the ballet begins in,” Farley said. “We’re literally covering the history of the world in its geography, in its art — we’re traveling from the court of Ashurnasirpal all the way to 19th-century American sculpture to music that’s been written in the past few months by these guys. It is both ancient and imminent.”
The dancers, Farley said, will wear white clothing and sneakers to look “like seraphic track stars — a bit artist and a bit athlete and a bit angel.”
As they lead the way to the Asian art wing, they will perform a procession set to a percussive, soulful song, “Blinded by the Light,” by Calvin Johnson, who has since been released from San Quentin. The dancers glide forward in crisp footwork and sleek swirling turns before dashing away. At a recent rehearsal, one of the dancers, Claire Kretzschmar — a City Ballet soloist — aimed her arms as if she were about to shoot a bow and arrow. “Oh,” Farley said happily. “Do a little Diana!”
He was referring to the Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture of Diana that graces the final gallery of “Songs From the Spirit.” Once in that setting, Farley said, he is aiming to uplift. He finds it fitting that ballet is his vehicle to do so. He sees the art form as “a historically transcendent community of presence: People put their bodies in the same shapes, and they were formed by that practice.”
Farley said he saw a connection between a dancer’s training and the spiritual transformation that some men have experienced at San Quentin. “You’re yielding to a force beyond yourself,” he said, “and the idea that you’re becoming freer and freer in what could seem a very confining context.”
One man told him that he was grateful for being imprisoned because it was at San Quentin that he became free: He found religion and turned his life around.
“That counterintuitive but undeniably true reality is something that a dancer goes, ‘oh, of course,'” Farley said. “It’s through the submission to this rigorous discipline that you’re actually set free on the stage to express, to be a vehicle of whatever the idea of the choreography is and whatever the music is expressing. You’ve allowed yourself to be formed.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.