Nobody at NYCB is using the word fired; spokeswoman Elizabeth Healy terms it “a budget issue.” “She has not been doing a great deal for the company, and when we were evaluating the budget we were cutting various areas due to our anticipated deficit and that was one of the items that we felt we had to cut,” she says. (The company’s budget is $32 million; Farrell’s salary was reportedly about $30,000. Healy says the amount of the projected deficit will not be made public.) In a statement issued last week, Farrell acknowledged she had done little for NYCB since 1990. “It has been a source of unspeakable grief to me…that I have not been allowed to serve ballet…in the company that has been my home for nearly 25 years.” Martins is not speaking to the press and hasn’t explained why he refuses to tap a resource as priceless as Farrell. “It’s the waste of a major talent,” says John Clifford, a former NYCB principal who stages Balanchine ballets around the world. “She’s a major link in the Balanchine canon.”
Martins is having a bad year. Last summer he was arrested for allegedly beating his wife, dancer Darci Kistler; she dropped the charges. Now rumors are circulating about his volatile behavior toward company members. Recent reviews have been mixed: several critics mauled his stewardship of the Balanchine repertoire during last spring’s mammoth Balanchine festival. Under Martins, wrote Tobi Tobias in New York Magazine, Balanchine’s choreography “is gradually being diminished or deformed.” In May, The New Yorker ran a story analyzing why Martins was “shutting out” Farrell at a time when he so desperately needed her expertise. “He seems to think that the faster Balanchine’s disciples leave, the sooner he will stop being compared with Balanchine,” former NYCB dancer Francisco Moncion told the writer.
Bart Cook, an assistant ballet master as well as a distinguished dancer who worked with Balanchine for many years, believes Martins may be feeling the pressure. Cook told NEWSWEEK that he has witnessed–and experienced-episodes of shoving and ,‘verbal abuse." There is hardly a dancer in the company, he says, who isn’t afraid that Martins will suddenly turn against him or her. Cook isn’t afraid anymore, because Martins told him last spring his contract would not be renewed. “I think he’s running seared,” says Cook. “The New York City Ballet has always commanded excellence. Now the basic demand seems to be submission.” (When NEWSWEEK asked for Martins’s response to the allegations, NYCB’s Healy said the company does not respond to rumors and does not discuss personnel matters.) Martins, on vacation right now, will return to a company with a serious case of the jitters. And that doesn’t make for good balances.
