When Roman Mejia found out he would be dancing “Apollo,” the oldest work in New York City Ballet’s repertory, he knew where to turn for god guidance.
A dancer who does his homework — he is, he says, “such a bunhead” — Mejia had a plan, or a man, in mind: Jacques d’Amboise, a family friend and an athletic, unruly Apollo from the 1950s and ’60s whose performances he studied on video, would lead the way.
“His approach was just so raw,” Mejia said after a run-through of the ballet in advance of his debut. “Essentially at the beginning of the ballet, he is just learning how to become a god. And these muses are here to teach him how to progress and how to get there. So you really see from the beginning that he’s almost weak on his feet, trying to figure out things — some things work, some things don’t. He gets frustrated.”
The fervor of youth? Mejia, 25, has always had that down. But over the last couple of seasons, he has begun to tap into a more understated refinement, which was indelibly clear in his first “Apollo,” on Tuesday night at Lincoln Center.
Mejia went from an unfinished boy to a refined god with the help of his three muses (Unity Phelan, Dominika Afanasenkov and Ashley Hod). He was raw, yes, but also guileless. This was a sincere, musical Apollo — full of heat and strength, but also youthful and unaffected, impulsive and curious. Mejia’s control was in the way that he linked the steps with emotions, giving both a logic, a fluidity. Mejia may have muscles — he is, as they say, ripped — but he doesn’t muscle his way through steps.
Mejia is an airborne dancer whose exuberance shines in joyful Balanchine ballets like “Stars and Stripes,” “Rubies” and “Western Symphony.” But his repertoire, especially in recent seasons, has expanded to roles that require him to be more subtle, more sophisticated. His bravura side is still firmly in place, yet it is buoyed now by a growing sophistication.
Mejia, who grew up in Fort Worth, saw “Apollo” for the first time when he was 3. It might seem unusual that such a young child would fall for such an dramatic yet unadorned Balanchine ballet with music by Stravinsky, but there he was, a toddler, performing the choreography at home. “My dad has stories of me going around the house just like this,” Mejia said, illustrating a striking moment from the ballet in which Apollo wraps an arm behind his back, the other raised, and opens and closes his hands like blinkers.
Both of his parents were dancers — Maria Terezia Balogh and Paul Mejia, a former member of City Ballet who had staged “Apollo” in Texas. “At that age,” his father said, “he would go to the ballet whenever we had a performance, and what was always amazing, whether it was ‘Apollo’ or whatever he saw, the next day he could duplicate it.”
“It was just uncanny,” he added.
Roman was especially proud, Paul Mejia said, “of the fact that he could do the hand behind the back and in front flashing. He thought that was a neat thing.”
While on a visit to the zoo, the young Roman approached another little boy with his new skill. “He said, ‘Look, look — look at this!’” Paul said. “And he did Apollo, and the little boy started to scream and cry. He thought he was a nut or something.”
Mejia started training at 3. “I was just so inspired by the whole idea of moving to music and taking up space,” he said.
When Mejia was 9 or 10, he lost interest in ballet and took a couple of years off, playing the piano and studying taekwondo. (He excelled at that, too.) A couple years later, while in middle school at the Fort Worth Academy of Fine Arts, he learned that a nearby studio needed boys for “The Nutcracker.”
“I wasn’t too crazy about dance, but I was doing it at school so I thought why not?” Mejia said. “And that’s when I really fell back in love with it again. I think it’s just the aspect of performing. I really love performing.”
He began training at an academy in Coppell, Texas, more than an hour away. “I’d go with him, and he’d do his class,” Paul said. “I didn’t watch it, nothing. I wanted to stay away from the whole thing. We saw that he was not only serious, but he had a gift.”
His parents decided to open a studio themselves. At 13, Roman started training at the Mejia Ballet Academy where he focused on technique and on learning variations, classical and from the Balanchine repertory.
At 14, he came to New York for one of two summer sessions at the School of American Ballet, the academy that feeds into City Ballet. Before he started, he learned about his father’s history at the company — and that Paul had married Suzanne Farrell, the dancer Balanchine was most enamored with. The marriage led to drama: Paul and Farrell left the company and danced in Europe. But while Farrell eventually made her way back to City Ballet, Paul did not.
“My sister always said, ‘Oh, you know, our father was married to Suzanne Farrell,’” Mejia said. “And I was like: ‘No he wasn’t. That’s crazy.’ And she’s like, ‘Oh yeah, it was all over the internet.’” (A family friend confirmed it at the dinner table one night. “My sister was, like, ‘I told you so,’” he said.)
Once Mejia was serious about studying at the School of American Ballet, his father “sat down with me and kind of gave me the rundown of everything,” he said.
There is more family history at the school: Both of his parents studied there along with his paternal grandmother, Romana Kryzanowska, a protégé of Joseph Pilates. Mejia is named after her father, the Detroit artist Roman Kryzanowska.
D’Amboise was the reason Mejia ended up at City Ballet. At one point Mejia found himself with an offer to join Boston Ballet or to continue at the school. D’Amboise voted for New York. In 2017, Mejia joined the corps de ballet and was promoted to soloist in 2021. Two years later he became a principal dancer. In the fall of 2023, he performed his first lead in a full-length ballet as a principal: Franz, the male lead in “Coppélia.”
Franz is a comic role with virtuosic elements — Mejia trademarks — but what was most revealing about his performance was the warmth and assurance with which he held the stage, especially in the classical third act.
Last winter, performing opposite Tiler Peck — his fiancée — he made his debut as Siegfried in “Swan Lake” and, again, showed a more nuanced side of his dancing, more grounded and understated. He showed that he could be a prince.
For Siegfried, Mejia worked with Gonzalo Garcia, a former principal who is now a repertory director at City Ballet, and Isabelle Guérin, a former Paris Opera Ballet étoile. She showed him, he said, that “I don’t have to always punch things to make them effective.”
Garcia, who works frequently with Mejia, was proud of his Siegfried. “I think becoming that kind of dancer, a noble dancer, can take sometimes a few tries,” he said. “But from the moment we started until he did his first shows, I was blown away. He understood it.”
It has become increasingly apparent that, however thrilling, Mejia has more to offer than virtuosity. This season, he makes his debut in Jerome Robbins’s elegant, folk-infused “A Suite of Dances,” created for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1994; later he’ll take on Balanchine’s “Divertimento from ‘Le Baiser de la Fée.’”
“It’s fiendishly hard,” he said of “Baiser.” “I didn’t realize. And it’s not bravura at all. That solo is long.”
But Mejia, Garcia said, “never whines” and “never seems upset, which is kind of amazing.”
Mejia got only one crack at “Apollo” this time around. That was fine. When he describes himself as feeling “over the moon” — a recurrent Mejia line — he means it. “I’m ready to be pushed in this new way of not just nuanced work, but telling a story,” he said. “Apollo is bravura, but a lot of it is so subtle and it’s not so in your face. I’m starting to figure out where to play with things now.”
When the curtain went up on “Apollo,” his nerves kicked in, but the music calmed him down. “I felt so comfortable and at home,” he said. “It was quite something to perform, and I just feel really lucky that I was able to experience that at this point. Obviously, I feel like here’s still more to do and more to grow in it. But in the moment it just felt so right.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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