Quotes

People tend to look at ballet dancers like we're these little jewels, little cardboard cutouts. And yet we have blood and guts and we go through hell.

[Why people didn't think she'd make it's a ballerina]: I had legs up to my ears and big feet.

The way I like to coach is I love to love my dancers into working hard. You know? And I want to help them to love to work hard, so that they see the fruits of their labor. But it is sort of cultural that women are more nurturing and take better care, maybe, of the internal side of the dancer.

But I have to say that I'm on this coalition called the Artistic Director's Coalition. And there are a lot of male artistic directors in there right now. And everybody is really taking a very deep dive into the health, the mental health of their dancers, because that's really prevalent these days, is mental health. And also discussions on inclusion. And everybody is really mindful and wanting to make sure that their companies are inclusive and a safe place to be.

Well, I do think the culture is so different now than it was when I was a dancer. I think women are innately just more nurturing, perhaps. I say that, but I also think, for example, Kevin McKenzie is very nurturing, as a male. And I think women in general are culturally more used to taking care of everybody. And it's a little bit different than how a male...and that's not to say that women aren't demanding.

I happened to get very, very lucky because I went to the Maryland School of Ballet, now Maryland Youth Ballet. I had very good training. So I moved up to New York when I was sixteen and joined the second company of ABT, called Ballet Repertory Company. We heard that Mikhail Baryshnikov was going to take over as artistic director. Misha came to watch a class, and afterward one of the rehearsal directors came up to me and said, Misha thinks you're very talented. It was shocking to hear.

Because I think—as an artist, we're really here to bring the audiences into a wider view of dance. We're the artists. And artists are teachers. And we're the ones exposing our audiences to new things. And sometimes it's very risky when we, for example, hire a new choreographer that maybe doesn't work out. But of course you have to continue to take risks and do things in order to get the gold. The point is to create. And every once in a while, you make a good one. You know?