I have been dancing so long that the stylized specificity of ballet, even when painful, makes sense to me. I have been a principal dancer with New York City Ballet since 2017, a dancer with the company since 2007, and in ballet studios since 1995, when I was 6. I didn’t know how to make sense of dance at a moment when audiences seemed to see misconduct in all aspects of our art form.īallet has governed my life and shaped my body for 27 years. I understood “Agon” to require a machismo that I didn’t think I possessed and that I knew I didn’t want. It was winter 2019, and conversations happening offstage and in the press about toxicity in the ballet world, particularly toxic masculinity, had altered my experience of ballets I love. I’d just cranked her foot to her head a few times and we were about to reunite for a kind of rubber-banding push-and-pull section. In one of my first performances of George Balanchine’s “Agon,” I stood onstage, uncomfortable, while my partner, Teresa Reichlen, danced her short solo.
