Bio:
Silas Farley is a member of New York City Ballet’s corps de ballet. He began his training at the age of 7 with Sal and Barbara Messina at King David Christian Conservatory in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the age of 9, he was accepted on scholarship into Charlotte Ballet Academy (formerly North Carolina Dance Theatre School of Dance), where his teachers were NYCB alumni Patricia McBride, Kathryn Moriarty, and Mark Diamond. At the age of 14, Mr. Farley attended the summer course at the School of American Ballet (SAB), the official school of NYCB, and was then invited to enroll as a full-time student. In August 2012, Mr. Farley became an apprentice with NYCB and joined the Company as a member of the corps de ballet in August 2013.
A choreographer since age 11, Mr. Farley has created ballets for SAB’s Student Choreography Workshop, SAB’s Winter Ball, SAB’s Summer Choreography Workshop, the New York Choreographic Institute, and Columbia Ballet Collaborative. In the summer of 2017, he served as the choreographer for the Practicing Silence workshop at Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, CT. Mr. Farley was commissioned by MetLiveArts to create a new site-specific ballet entitled Songs From The Spirit that premiered in March 2019 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 2012 he was one of two advanced SAB students selected by Peter Martins for a student teaching pilot program at SAB. Since 2016, he has taught at SAB, first as a Teaching Fellow and now as a guest teacher. He has guest taught at Charlotte Ballet, Ballet Austin, Ballet SND (Slovak National Ballet), Southern Methodist University, The Hartt School, and The Kennedy Center. Mr. Farley has also taught NYCB Company class. In both 2016 and 2017, he conducted masterclasses on the teaching and work of George Balanchine at The Academy of the Performing Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia. From 2018 to 2019, Mr. Farley served as Artist in Residence for Ballet Hartford.
Mr. Farley was an inaugural Jerome Robbins Dance Division Fellow at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. He has also written for Dance Magazine and lectured on ballet for New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and at the Museum of Modern Art. Since the summer of 2019, Mr. Farley has served on the Board of Directors of The George Balanchine Foundation.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).