Dancing Tales

By Martha Duffy

HOLDING ON TO THE AIR

by Suzanne Farrell

Summit; 322 pages; $19.95

THE SHAPE OF LOVE

by Gelsey Kirkland

Doubleday; 237 pages; $19.95

Since his death seven years ago, George Balanchine has taken on a strange, ectoplasmic life in the pages of other people's books, most of them written by his former dancers at New York City Ballet. One, Gelsey Kirkland's angry, vengeful Dancing on My Grave (1986), made the best-seller lists. This year brings a slight but more genial coda from Kirkland and the memoir the dance world has been waiting for, from Mr. B.'s last muse, Suzanne Farrell.

Farrell's Holding On to the Air -- the title comes from one of Balanchine's many wily stage instructions -- is a modest, somewhat limited book. One could wish that she had chosen a more adroit collaborator than Toni Bentley, a former City Ballet corps member. Even so, Farrell's spirit is generous, and she gets the big things right.

She sketches in charming details of her early hoydenish exploits, followed by baby-ballerina days in Cincinnati. At 15, she was spotted by City Ballet star Diana Adams, who suggested that if she ever came to New York City, she might telephone. That was enough for Farrell's mother, who packed up her family and moved right away into a tiny, one-room flat. "Mother," sums up the daughter, "pursued rather impractical interests in a practical way." Providentially, Farrell was accepted at the company's school.

At the heart of the book is a fascinating account of Balanchine's increasing obsession with his leggy protege. Young Suzanne was a chaste and sheltered Catholic girl whose onstage recklessness and daring were not reflected in her life. To her, Mr. B., 40 years her senior, was a god -- and a married man. But she responded to his every impulse.

In time they also spent off hours in each other's company, "eating, walking, lighting candles in churches." But even after he separated from his wife, they did not sleep together. When he took her home at night, she felt that he wanted to lock her in. At 22 she had a brief romance with a man her own age but could not face her mentor's wrath. Her next young suitor was savvier. Paul Mejia, a member of the company, slowly made friends with Farrell before asking for her hand -- and he got it.

Farrell went from dancing virtually every night to ostracism. When she brought matters to a head, she was barred from the theater. She and Mejia danced for four years with Maurice Bejart's company in Brussels before she went back to make peace with Balanchine.

One has the eerie feeling of dipping into a version of Proust's Swann's Way written from the point of view of the object of Swann's fixation. Farrell in no way resembles the fictional Odette, but she tries to distance herself from suffocating attention, tries to limit passion to the stage and embrace practicality off it. Balanchine's attentions were consuming. He designed little furs for her and bought her shoes because "I just love to hear you clip-clopping along." After she broke the spell, she danced old roles and new ones, finally watching Mr. B.'s slow decline and death.

Kirkland would never find herself in Farrell's exquisite dilemma. In Dancing on My Grave, she dismissed Balanchine as a neurotic martinet who emphasized music and rhythm over her own Method-acting approach to a role. Kirkland was a poetic artist whose romantic heroines in story ballets were indelible. Alas, her writing on the subject is not. The Shape of Love, written with her husband Greg Lawrence, is largely about a handful of performances she gave with the Royal Ballet in 1986, and there is too much trite gush about what motivated Giselle and what Juliet was thinking when she gulped the potion. Whatever the wellsprings of dance may be, they do not lie in words.