Holley goes lightly

INNER STRENGTH Farmer, with Daniel Squire, performs Split Sides.

Photo: Tony Doughtery

Holley Farmer began dancing late—at 16—in Fresno, California. That may be part of the reason she never looks bored onstage; the jubilance of performance has never left her body. Now she finds herself in an awkward and unenviable position: As one of three dancers whose contract will not be renewed at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (the reason is claimed to be artistic rather than financial), she is in the midst of her final shows. Next week, Farmer appears with the group at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; at the end of the month the company performs in Madrid; and, finally in May, she wraps up her Cunninghham career at Dia: Beacon. With her crop of red hair and magnificent control, Farmer has been one of the Cunningham company’s brightest beams of light since she joined in 1997. The impending departure—of not only Farmer, but Daniel Squire and Koji Mizuta as well—has come as a shock. With the same thoughtful elegance that defines her dancing, Farmer, while on tour in Paris, spoke about her work.

Time Out New York: How did you discover dance?
Hollley Farmer: It was very related to my family. My mother was in the USO as a young girl. She was living in Los Angeles and working for a bank during the week, and then on the weekends she would do two evenings of performing and entertaining the troops.

No way.
Yeah. [Laughs] It’s the classic story of her getting to the point, professionally, where she had a great opportunity and then basically met this hot guy in L.A. and wanted to get married instead. [Laughs] So during all of my growing up, she was very encouraging of dance for her daughters. I have three older sisters who got their rounds of dance training. However, my oldest sister was on the brink of doing really well—she was only about 13 by then, and my mom was sick of dragging her to dance. She finally said, “If you want to take class again, you need to ask me to.” And my older sister never asked again. That was the end of it.

That was sort of the policy afterward: If you wanted to take dance, you had to ask and be motivated to do it yourself. So I spent my childhood playing with leftover costumes and dancing around the living room. And really enjoying the play-making part of it: that you could put on a costume and have a whole scenario for an afternoon with your sisters and just go crazy. But I didn’t ask for dance lessons until I got my learning permit. I was 15. Basically, I started taking classes when I was 16 and could drive myself.

My parents were very hard workers; they had a fish-and-chips restaurant and worked 12 hours a day; there just wasn’t enough time in the day. And I was interested in a lot of other things too. I was always very physically precocious, very curious. I had done some gymnastics. It got to a point of being very serious, and I realized I was not happy being an exhausted, competitive person. I quit gymnastics at the point where I would have had to move out of town to be specially trained and all of that stuff. It didn’t make sense to me.

When did you stop?
I was 12. And then I had a great time just climbing trees for four years. I did Highland dancing when I got to high school; basically within three months, my calves had doubled in size. [Laughs] You spend the whole time jumping on demi-pointe! They said, “Take ballet because it will help your Highland dancing,” so I took a ballet class and ended up having the best teacher in Fresno, California, and she immediately started steering me in the right direction and allowing me to take as many classes as I wanted. That’s probably why I’m a dancer.

How do you mean?
I felt like any limitation in terms of money, which was the first, and then time, which was the second, was gone. One summer, she gave me the keys to the studio and I got to go in and work on things that were bothering me—to figure out for myself why I liked to do what I liked to do or why certain things were impossible still. Just being an older dancer in that sense—being self-motivated and realizing it was a privilege—got me going.