An aspiring ballerina starts out bright and shiny, a vessel of faith and devotion. But little by little, as disappointments mount and personal tragedies overwhelm, faith and fortitude can crumble. That glow can fade.
It’s hard for any dancer. What happens when that dancer is Black?
Aesha Ash, who grew up in Rochester, N.Y., attended the esteemed School of American Ballet, the academy of New York City Ballet, and had a leading role in its annual Workshop Performances. Then she took the natural next step: She joined City Ballet, in 1996.
Back then, the ballet world was less concerned with diversity than it is now. “I wasn’t just dancing for myself, and I wasn’t just dancing to rise through the ranks and be seen by a director to promote me,” Ms. Ash, 42, said in a recent interview. “It was so much bigger than that. I was trying to battle stereotypes and biases on that stage every single night. And I succeeded in some and I failed in others.”
Now she finds herself in a position to continue that mission — not only for herself but for generations to come. Starting in September, pandemic or not, she will become the first Black female member of the permanent faculty in the School of American Ballet’s 86-year history.
The school, formed by George Balanchine, the founding choreographer of City Ballet, and Lincoln Kirstein, was envisioned — as Kirstein wrote in a letter — to include a student body of eight white children and eight Black children. That didn’t happen.
Jonathan Stafford, the artistic director of City Ballet and the school, said that the institution had relied too long on a system that Balanchine put in place: having students from the school and City Ballet return as teachers. But there were few Black alumni, and, until recently, they weren’t being invited to teach.
That’s what Mr. Stafford wants to change. “We can’t just rely on that system that put a lot of barriers in place to anyone of color joining the faculty,” he said. “We’re not going to be fully an equitable institution if we don’t have people of color in leadership roles.”
Ms. Ash takes her role as a mentor seriously. “I hope that as a teacher I can help shape and form dancers,” she said, “and just remind them that if you don’t get the company of your choice, if you don’t get into this career, that it’s not the end all be all. There are really so many other beautiful ways to participate.”
All the same, being the first has its pressures. “I am scared to death,” she said with a laugh. “It is a lot to carry, and it wasn’t this quick and easy yes. I have a family, I have a life.”
The school began talking to Ms. Ash about the position in spring 2019, but she didn’t accept until January; for one thing, it meant moving, with her husband and two children, to New York from San Jose, Calif. But Mr. Stafford and Kay Mazzo, the school’s chairman of faculty, were eager to have her come.
“Immediately everybody could tell she was a very strong teacher, but more than that, she was this incredible presence in the room that the students — we got great feedback — felt empowered by,” Mr. Stafford said. “They saw the care and empathy she brought to the rooms, which hasn’t always existed in ballet studios since the beginning of time.”
The timing of the announcement is something that Ms. Ash said causes her “great fear,” as it might seem like a response to recent events in the Black Lives Matter movement.
But she recognizes that it’s the job that matters. “I’m perfectly fine with being that sacrificial lamb,” she said. “I’m willing to be that first because the importance of this moment is so much bigger than any bruising of any ego.” More important, she added, “is who I will be touching once I step foot in that classroom.”
In many ways, Ms. Ash has come full circle. Her story is one of a dancer who lost her spark, and found it again. “When I left City Ballet, I left the whole reason I was fighting so hard to be something in the ballet world behind,” she said. “And so the drive in me had died.”
While in the company, Ms. Ash was a glamorous presence who danced with strength and a luxurious musicality. But she had started ballet after first studying jazz, tap and lyrical dance — she had Broadway ambitions and won competitions — and she said it felt like she was always playing catch up with her technique. “I felt like I started way late,” she said. “And then being a minority, where you already feel like you have to work twice as hard.”
Slights and comments — whether veiled or not — about her race added up over the years. While her fellow apprentices at City Ballet were given stage makeup, she was given only some lipstick. When “Swan Lake” was set on the company, the person who staged it, Ms. Ash said, “gathered everyone together and gave the last final notes and the pep talk and said, ‘Now I don’t want to see any tan bodies on that stage.’”
And there were comments on ballet blogs, including one that compared her to Lil’ Kim and another that suggested her Black body was distracting. “That is not talking about missing a turn or being overweight or that your hair is out of place,” she said. “That’s talking to who you are. That chips away at your identity and your self-worth as a young adolescent coming into yourself, away from your home and away from your culture.”
In 2003, after her father died, Ms. Ash, still a member of the corps de ballet, decided it was time to leave the company. (Her sister had died of pancreatic cancer while she was at the school.) The company did not encourage her to stay, and she said she had little fight left in her. “I was at the point where I was very tired,” she said. “That was one loss too many for me at that point, and I started just questioning everything. What is it all for?”
A friend was going to help her get a job as a waitress. But Ramon Flowers, a dancer who visited her backstage one night, intervened. When she told him about becoming a waitress, Ms. Ash said, “He just looked at me and he was like, ‘No you are not, darling.’”
He connected her with Maurice Béjart, and in a whirlwind she flew to Switzerland to audition for his company. “I didn’t have time to process any of it,” she said. “It was like, next thing I know I’m still dancing.”
After dancing with Béjart for a couple years, she joined Alonzo King’s company, Lines, in San Francisco, and then Christopher Wheeldon’s now defunct group, Morphoses. “I gained so much by not being focused on trying to be seen and rise through the ranks,” Ms. Ash said. “I gained so much by sitting back and observing and watching other dancers and seeing how they work.
But as a dancer, she felt she was just going through the motions. When she finally stopped, in 2009, she poured her energy into full-time motherhood. “Not a lot of dancers do that,” she said. “They dance through their pregnancies, they find ways to do Pilates, and I was like, nope. I’m done. I was really hurt by the dance world.”
But Ms. Ash wasn’t really done with ballet. She saw how it could serve a greater purpose: dismantling stereotypes that exist for women of color. In 2011, she created the Swan Dreams Project, which uses ballet and photography as a way to combat the objectification of Black women and stereotypes. She began on the streets of Rochester being photographed — in full ballerina regalia — with young children.
When the School of American Ballet contacted her in 2015 to be a founding member of its diversity committee, Ms. Ash was teaching here and there, but her life was largely outside of the ballet world. For that reason, she held little back when sharing her experiences.
In 2016, she became a guest teacher at the school’s Workshop for Young Dancers in California and went on to teach in New York; from 2018 to 2020, she was the school’s visiting faculty chair.
In February, Mr. Stafford and Ms. Mazzo visited morning classes to announce to students that Ms. Ash would be joining the permanent faculty in the fall. In a recent Zoom conversation, three Black students, Eunhye Darbouze, Taela Graff and Oliva Bell — all 16 — recalled their reaction to the news.
“We were all jumping up and down screaming,” Ms. Bell said.
For Ms. Darbouze, having Black teachers come to the studio makes “our eyes widen and our smiles brighten,” she said. “But when he said ‘permanent faculty,’ we looked at each other and it was a feeling unmatched. I think we were all experiencing the same sort of high.”
While Ms. Darbouze said she’s learned from every teacher she’s had, the appointment of Ms. Ash speaks to representation. “There are going to be mental blocks when you’re dancing, but there’s this other thing,” she said. “We’re Black girls. We have this additive layer of a racial difference. And if you don’t see yourself in spaces, you’ll never get to know that you can make it into those spaces.”
During her time away from City Ballet, Ms. Ash explored other types of dance and physicality, even immersing herself in anatomy studies to better understand where movement comes from. (She has two certifications in Pilates.)
“She has this incredible understanding of how the body works,” Mr. Stafford said. “She talked about how dancers use their core muscles to help them execute steps at a higher level with more energy, more attack — those are such the trademarks of the Balanchine aesthetics.”
It’s all part of what Ms. Ash referred to as her movement playground. “If I ever were to go back to dance, I would be so much better than I ever was because of all this information,” she said. “It’s so much deeper than the turn, the pirouette, the leg, the jump. And then having taken my world experience of having traveled, experiencing other cultures and customs and bringing that into artistry and movement and what that then gives the world.”
This, she said, is what she tries to pass on to students. (As of now, the school’s plan is to open on Sept. 14, with both Zoom classes and in-person training.) “I want them to gain this as early as possible and not wait till it’s too late, like me.”
But those trials have given her a heightened sensitivity for students who become demoralized. “I can see self-doubt creep in a mile away,” she said. “I have this hyper-awareness of that student who’s shy in the corner and just needs someone to pull them out. That excites me. I can be there for that little Aesha in that classroom.”
