SECOND ACT.(ballet dancer Suzanne Farrell)

On a November night in 1989, Suzanne Farrell gave her final performance with New York City Ballet, the company that she had joined twenty-eight years earlier. One last time, her hair hung with jewels, she danced the long, strange enchanted-ballroom solo that George Balanchine had created for her in "Vienna Waltzes," and once again, on the great stage of the New York State Theatre, she gathered every inch of the space into the passionate logic of her dancing. When she exited, forty dancers--the entire ensemble--entered, and they seemed small compared with her. She rejoined them for the finale, and then it was over: the ballet, and the career. Farrell bowed to the company, and they to her. Peter Martins, N.Y.C.B.'s director, came on and presented her with a bouquet. Next came Lincoln Kirstein, who had founded the company with Balanchine, in 1948. Kirstein handed Farrell more flowers, and burst into tears. She took his arm and laid her head on his shoulder. Then the two of them walked offstage together, leaving the fans hollering.

Farrell was the most influential American ballerina of the late twentieth century. Others before her had done what could be called modernist ballet dancing--lean and wild, as opposed to the plump and decorous nineteenth-century model--but Farrell, under Balanchine's tutelage, carried that project further than anyone else. What she performed was still classical ballet--she got out there with her hair in a bun and did glissade, assemble--but in her the classical style seemed to have sunk to the bones of the dancing. The flesh was something else, an awakened force. When she bent down into an arabesque penchee, you thought she would never stop. (She was the first dancer I ever saw touch her forehead to her knee in penchee.) When she executed a triple pirouette, and tilted as she did it, and then--without ever righting herself--plunged directly into the next jackknife or nosedive, you thought the walls were falling in. As Arlene Croce wrote, Farrell "made audiences sweat."

One could scarcely believe that a power so huge had come to an end. But it had, as ballet dancing does for most people, however gifted, in their forties. (Farrell was forty-four, and had already had the first of two hip-replacement operations.) And there was some comfort in the thought that she might now have time to coach New York City Ballet's younger dancers. But the company chose not to use her, and so she took her skills elsewhere. Long before Balanchine died, his work had become a staple of the American ballet repertory. After his death, many more troupes, European as well as American, began calling the Balanchine Trust, the organization that licenses his ballets and sends repetiteurs, or rehearsal directors, to stage them. As one of the repetiteurs, Farrell went to Moscow, Stuttgart, Copenhagen, Paris, Seattle, Miami, Cincinnati. In 2000, she accepted a professorship at Florida State University, in Tallahassee, and began teaching there for part of every year. At times, it seemed that the only place she wasn't working was New York.

Actually, she was still in New York, because that's where she lived, with her dog, Tex, in a rambling apartment a few blocks from the New York State Theatre. Between assignments, she could occasionally be spotted in the grocery store, or walking Tex on Broadway. But these were like Elvis sightings. In terms of the New York ballet scene, which she had been instrumental in creating, she was gone. Furthermore, wherever she went, she was never there for long. She had no troupe to call home, no base from which to launch a sustained act of teaching. She had said repeatedly that she had no thought of running a ballet company of her own, nor did she seem to have the right personality for such a job. She was known to be introverted, narrow, focussed--not your standard company director's profile. Once, a journalist asked her what she did between gigs. She answered that she was very good at doing nothing. She played solitaire, she said, and read Robert Ludlum novels.

In 1992, James Wolfensohn, who is now the president of the World Bank, sat in his office thinking about the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington. Wolfensohn, an Australian who had become the chairman of the center's board of trustees two years earlier, had spent the nineteen-seventies and eighties working as an investment banker in New York, and there he frequently went to the ballet. His favorite company was New York City Ballet, and his favorite dancer was Suzanne Farrell. Although Farrell was still technically on staff at N.Y.C.B., "I knew she wasn't being effectively used," Wolfensohn told me. So he called her to see if she would have lunch with him. He took her to the Four Seasons--"I felt as though I were having lunch with an angel," he recalls--and he asked her if she might make some contribution at the Kennedy Center. They started small. Early in 1993, Farrell taught a group of local teen-agers at the center for four weekends. "But then a buzz started," Derek Gordon, the center's vice-president for education, says. Within a few years, Farrell was running a three-week summer session, for which students auditioned across the country.

At the end of the 1994 summer session, Farrell staged a recital for her students, and put together a ballet for them. Wolfensohn liked it: "So I asked her, 'Why don't you see if you could do a little program with professional dancers?' " Farrell had said she had no intention of running a ballet company, and Wolfensohn insists that he had no thought of getting her to do so. Nevertheless, in 1995 Farrell staged two programs of Balanchine's work at the Kennedy Center, to effusive reviews. In 1999, she again mounted a two-program season, this time adding pieces by other choreographers--Jerome Robbins, Maurice Bejart--and she took her show on tour: five weeks, nine cities. By 2000, the group had a name, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet. By 2002, it had twenty-four dancers and a booking agent. No one can quite say how it happened, but Farrell seems to be directing a ballet company.

This year and last, I spent time watching Farrell do the two main things that she now does for a living: teach ballet to advanced students and coach professionals in Balanchine's ballets. The first day I visited her class at the Kennedy Center, she entered quietly through the studio's back door. She is fifty-seven now, but she hasn't changed much. She doesn't seem as tall as before, but that's because she's no longer standing on her toes. (On point, she was six feet one. On flat feet, she is five feet six and a half.) In certain respects, she looks like a regular, hardworking ballet teacher. Her long brown hair is clipped back in a ponytail. She wears a baggy sweater, plus a little skirt. Still, you know you're looking at a ballerina. Indeed, offstage, the features that made her body perfect for the stage are more striking. The famous feet, with the curved arches--can you walk down a street on those things? The big eyes, the long neck seem lonely for their proper context: the lights, the tiara. The beautiful face that once housed a mystery now opens its mouth to tell other people how to make a mystery. This takes getting used to.