New leadership
Stafford, Whelan take helm at dance troupe after period of turmoil
New York City Ballet has picked artistic leaders.
New York City Ballet, which has been going through one of the most tumultuous periods in its history, announced Thursday that it had picked new artistic leaders for the first time in more than three decades, turning to a pair of respected former dancers to help right the ship.
Jonathan Stafford, 38, who has been running the company for more than a year on an interim basis, will become the new artistic director of City Ballet as well as its affiliated academy, the School of American Ballet. Wendy Whelan, 51, a star ballerina who danced with the company for 30 years, will become City Ballet’s associate artistic director. The two said they intended to work as partners.
The ballet has a summer residency each year at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs.
They are taking over a company that has been shaken over the past year and a half. Peter Martins, its longtime ballet master in chief, abruptly retired early last year amid allegations of physical and emotional abuse, which he
denied. Then, with the company being led by an interim team overseen by Stafford, three of its 14 male principal dancers were forced out after being accused of sharing text messages of sexually explicit photos of women.
Stafford and Whelan said healing the rifts within the company and improving its backstage culture would be a big part of their work.
“We both will really be working on the cultural elements of the company,” Stafford said during a joint interview with Whelan. “We agree on dancer development, dancer enrichment, making sure we are providing a safe space for them to really thrive as artists and as people, not just in the theater but in their personal lives as well.”
Whelan, who has enjoyed a fruitful second act in contemporary dance, said she intended to exercise her control over programming and commissioning new works to push for “more women choreographing, more diversity on stage, bigger ideas, more open ideas, more daring ideas.”
Choreographer George Balanchine, whose works helped define 20th-century dance, founded the company, often considered the nation’s most important ballet company, in 1948 with Lincoln Kirstein. Martins, a Danish-born dancer and choreographer, succeeded him in 1983, running the company for several years with choreographer
Jerome Robbins, and then on his own — until his abrupt departure forced the company to grapple with the question of succession sooner than it had anticipated. (A company investigation of Martins, after several former dancers had accused him of physical and verbal abuse, called the allegations uncorroborated.)
The appointment of Stafford and Whelan signals a generational change at City Ballet. They will be its first leaders not to have worked with Balanchine — he died the day Whelan was performing one of his works for the
first time as a student in 1983.
But they are also the first two leaders to have come of age in the two institutions that Balanchine helped create: They both trained at the School of American Ballet and both made their dance careers at City Ballet, learning from dancers who learned from Balanchine.
Unlike their predecessors, neither is a choreographer. Justin Peck, City Ballet’s resident choreographer, will take the new title of artistic adviser. That will allow Peck, 31, who has enjoyed success on Broadway and is now
working with Steven Spielberg on a new film adaptation of “West Side Story,” to continue making work for the company and to bring new choreographers into City Ballet’s fold, as he has with Kyle Abraham and Pam Tanowitz. Peck will stop dancing with the company, where he is now a soloist, after the spring season.
Stafford will be responsible for supervising the company’s artistic operations and working on its day-to-day management with the company’s executive director, Katherine Brown, who oversees its administrative and financial operations.
Whelan — who not only danced much of the core Balanchine and Robbins repertory but also originated roles in ballets created by William Forsythe, Twyla Tharp, Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne Mcgregor and others — will have more sway over programming. She will be responsible for conceiving and planning seasons; commissioning new work; and working closely with dancers in the rehearsal studio, both teaching class and coaching works in the company’s repertory.
Whelan said that while she has had only limited experience staging and coaching ballets, “I have a lot to say about the ballets that I know, and I have a lot of experience and knowledge and insight to bring.”