Inside Wendy Whelan's Triumphant Return to the New York City Ballet
IT’S A SUBLIME SPRING day in New York, but Wendy Whelan wouldn’t know a thing about it. She’s spent the day in the windowless studios of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, where rehearsals for George Balanchine’s Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet are under way. Today she’s dressed in dark skinny jeans and a navy cardigan, but even in this everyday outfit, you can see a body sculpted by the three decades she spent at New York City Ballet, 28 of those years as a principal dancer. In a profession where women often bow out by their mid-30s, Whelan’s tenure onstage was remarkable. Now 52, she has become the first woman in the company’s history to hold a permanent position within the artistic leadership. “I never imagined myself here,” she says. “I just thought, That’s usually a guy’s role.”
Her appointment as the associate artistic director of NYCB in February—alongside Jonathan Stafford as the new artistic director of NYCB and School of American Ballet—not only ended a tumultuous year, it also signaled that the company was in need of a dramatic shift. In January of 2018, Peter Martins, the NYCB’s star dancer turned ballet master in chief, retired, his resignation precipitated by accusations of sexual harassment. (Martins maintains his innocence, and the NYCB’s investigation did not corroborate the allegations.) Then, just days before the fall season, City Ballet fired two male dancers (the company had earlier accepted the resignation of a third) accused of sharing explicit photos of female dancers. The company would “not put art before common decency,” announced principal dancer Teresa Reichlen in a speech delivered on the evening of the fall gala, standing onstage with her fellow dancers.
The revelations of #MeTutu, as it was quickly dubbed, have the dimensions of a 21st-century scandal, but gender inequality is practically built into the DNA of ballet. In 19th-century France, upper-class men treated the Paris Opera Ballet as their personal brothel. (When the company received its Charles Garnier–designed theater in 1875, a backstage room to proposition dancers was reserved for deep-pocketed patrons.) Balanchine, the Russian-born father of American ballet—and NYCB cofounder—dissuaded his female dancers from marrying or having children, but married four ballerinas himself, each a dancer for whom he also choreographed. “The ballet is a purely female thing,” Balanchine famously said, “it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and the man is the gardener.”
“I like to say it’s a seismic shift,” says Whelan of the change her appointment signals. “It’s a very different field; different soil.” She’s warm and affable, in stark contrast to the imposing czarina one might expect at the head of a major company. And though she does not bring it up, her return to Lincoln Center has a certain poetic justice; as chronicled in the brutal 2016 documentary Restless Creature, her exodus was reluctant. In the years following, she continued to dance—“If I don’t dance, I’d rather die,” she once said—moving beyond ballet into different genres, working with choreographers like Kyle Abraham and collaborating with designers like Dries van Noten on costumes. This summer, she’ll premiere a new piece with postmodern choreographer Lucinda Childs at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts. Though she’s mindful of the physical demands of this project—“I have to get myself to class!”—she’s also careful not to blur the lines between her own work and what she’s doing for the dancers at NYCB. “I don’t want to infiltrate their studio space,” she says. This kind of emotional intelligence is playing out in almost all aspects of Whelan’s agenda. When we speak, she was in the process of planning the company’s 2020–2021 season and has embarked on what she’s calling a listening tour. “I’ve just been trying to be careful about not disrupting things that don’t need disrupting,” she says. But better communication, better feedback between the dancers and their superiors, is crucial. “In my whole 30 years in New York City Ballet, I rarely interacted with my boss except on the stage,” she says. “I never knew where I was in his eyes or other people’s eyes, so I was just guessing, along with everybody else.” One should understand the dancers’ experience more holistically: “We put ballets on really, really fast. People are learning like lightning, and sometimes we forget that those people are, maybe, having a hard time, that they’re 18 years old and they’re stressed-out.” She’s also interested in keeping a dialogue open with retired dancers like Mimi Paul, Suzanne Farrell, and Adam Luders, who know the choreography better than anyone else. “Mimi couldn’t give the information for years,” Whelan says. “She just wasn’t invited to give it.”
For her part, Whelan brings an intimate knowledge of the company’s repertoire (she originated more than 40 principal roles). “Wendy has an unparalleled level of experience,” Stafford, himself a former dancer, tells me. And her work ethic is legendary. “There isn’t anybody who worked harder than she did,” says one of the company’s star principal dancers, Tiler Peck. But she also brings a receptiveness that extends beyond the insular world of ballet. “I think it’s one of my strengths, having a real connectivity with the outside dance world,” Whelan says. Although she lives near Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side (“the dance belt,” she calls it), her husband of almost 14 years, the artist David Michalek, is not from the performing-arts world. The two met in their 20s when Michalek was hired to photograph her for Lear’s magazine. “I opened the door to some studio and just saw the most handsome man I’ve ever seen in my life,” Whelan recalls. “I was like, ‘Well, who’s the photographer?’ Because you’re obviously too young.” The two are sounding boards for each other: “He sees things in dance that I don’t normally see because I live in it. And then I see things in his art that he wouldn’t normally see.”
A few weeks after our interview, Amar Ramasar, one of the male dancers dismissed in the photo-sharing scandal, is reinstated to the company. “He’s had some time to prepare him to enter the new environment that we’re in,” Whelan explains when I get in touch to ask about his reintegration. “It’s very different than when he left.” But for her, the future is primarily about what unfolds onstage. She’s interested in giving female choreographers who’ve been working on a smaller scale a bigger venue. At the same time, she wants to explore a sense of scale: “We danced in the MoMA recently,” she tells me. “I like that idea—that rather than being so far and distant across the orchestra pit, the audience can see the more human aspect of what we are and what we do.” And then there are the dancers themselves: “We’re filling up our ranks with all different kinds of people, bodies, colors. There’s not one idea about New York City Ballet like there was a generation ago, when it was all tall, skinny, mostly white people.” Perhaps the most important shift of all will occur in the way she’s likely to match dancing partners. “Part of the beauty of Balanchine’s work was that the man leads the woman,” she says. “But in the work I’ve done for the company in the past 20 years or so, there is an equal partnership. I hold my own with the man."
Originally Appeared on Vogue
