Sara Mearns, the New York City Ballet principal, started to pay attention to her mental health in a serious way around the fall of 2021, when the company returned to the stage after the pandemic shuttered theaters the year before. She felt strong. During lockdown she had worked constantly, barely taking a break.
“I didn’t accept that this was happening, that I was losing out on a year and a half of my career performing-wise,” she said in one of a series of interviews, starting in 2022.
Mearns said she felt like she had to return to the stage at a top level — dancing as she had been when the world shut down. But on City Ballet’s opening night that fall, during George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C,” she missed a turn in the finale.
“How could I miss that turn?” she recalled thinking. It started a downward spiral. She felt everything she did onstage was wrong. “I was crying after every show,” she said.
To compensate, she over rehearsed, which left her body in shambles. “I was just hobbling and barely making it onstage.” She realized some of this was her own doing: “I could have said, ‘I can’t do these shows.’” But she kept going.
The retirement of the longtime principal Maria Kowroski that season affected Mearns in a way she couldn’t have predicted.
“‘Oh my God, am I in her shoes now?’” Mearns said of the leadership responsibilities of being a senior ballerina. “I don’t know if I can handle this.”
After Kowroski’s farewell performance, Mearns said she crawled under her dressing room table and sobbed. The next morning she found herself weeping on a park bench. She knew this was not OK. She texted Marika Molnar, City Ballet’s health and wellness coordinator, and told her that she needed help.
That was the start of Mearns’s “therapy journey,” she said, “and finally talking about my issues and my traumas from childhood and from relationships and career and injuries. How it all is so intertwined.”
The Mirror and Mental Health
A dancer is sometimes called an instrument. But an instrument, even one completely in tune, doesn’t have a mind.
A dancer is a body — and a mind. Mearns, in speaking openly about her mental health, has led the way to normalizing discussions of the topic for ballet dancers. That frankness feeds into a change in ballet culture that took on greater urgency during the pandemic. Dancers began to question their careers and who they were apart from being dancers. Some saw their bodies change. Some decided to have children. And many started paying closer attention to their mental well-being.
Many workplaces, schools and college campuses are trying to provide more mental health services. But ballet faces special challenges.
Serious students often leave their families as teenagers to train, making adult decisions before their prefrontal cortices are fully developed. For dancers lucky enough to get into a company, pressure comes from all sides. They need to deal with a constant stream of corrections. They must learn to take of their bodies and to deal with injuries. And there is the stress of stepping in last minute if another dancer is ill or injured, which could be the kind of break that leads to a meaningful career.
The pressure never lets up. All dancers have to deal with the mirror, a punishing aid in which bodies are on full display and ripe for comparison. Weight, too much or too little, can be an issue. Some dancers grapple with eating disorders or substance abuse. Injuries can lead dancers to wonder what they are without dance.
Ballet companies can’t solve all of dancers’ problems. But now, after decades of neglecting dancers’ emotional health, companies and schools are taking steps to prioritize the whole dancer, body and mind.
And dancers are showing that seeking therapy isn’t a sign of weakness, but a proactive approach to becoming a better artist — the kind who doesn’t dance through injuries but addresses them, mentally as well as physically.
“It’s a real game of balance through your whole life,” said Wendy Whelan, the associate director of City Ballet and a former principal. “Finding that balance between your body and your mind. Your chemistry inside.”
A similar taboo about mental health is being broken in sports, as major athletes like Simone Biles, Kevin Love and Naomi Osaka talk publicly about their struggles, pushing back at the idea that it’s a failing in an arena that prizes mental toughness and grit.
Still, sports psychologists are an ordinary part of an athlete’s life. There’s no equivalent for dancers.
“It’s one of the biggest things that’s lacking in ballet, because all sports get that kind of coaching,” said Susan Jaffe, the artistic director of American Ballet Theater. In dance “you have to go out there and do really, really hard things. And how do you do that if you’ve got a lot of fear or you don’t have confidence?”
The Whole Body
Molnar, who started with City Ballet in 1980 as a physical therapist at the request of Balanchine, the company’s founding choreographer, has been thinking about mental health for decades. But when she started, it was thought of as a different specialty. “It was psychology or psychiatry,” she said. “It wasn’t part of the same field.”
At City Ballet, there wasn’t an emphasis on mental health until the company brought in SportStrata, which specializes in performance coaching and sports psychology, before the pandemic.
“They presented ideas of how to take care of health in all ways, not just being strong and conditioned and ballet ready,” Molnar said. “But their whole body outside the ballet as well.”
City Ballet, in partnership with SportStrata, now makes performance coaching and sports psychology available to dancers in group sessions or one on one.
When Whelan danced in the company, from 1984 to 2014, things were different. “We had to find our own mentors,” she said. “We had to deal with our own mental health privately or with a friend. But nobody wanted to talk about it because that was a weakness, and that was not looked well upon.”
It meant you were fragile, it meant you could be broken, that you might be judged. Whelan found a therapist on her own, when she was in her 20s, and said she couldn’t have handled her career without one. “I luckily found the right person at the right time, but that was my own thing,” she said. “I did it on Mondays, and it armed me and it gave me tools to get through the career.”
Now at City Ballet, dancers are offered life coach sessions with Carla Körbes, Juilliard’s ballet chair and a former company member. Körbes said that even if mental health programs in ballet are not yet fully formed, the conversation has been started.
“We just need to land in a place where there’s no fear around it,” she said. “No, we’re not making everybody soft and petting them. What I actually do is shift their minds from blaming everybody else to ‘this is what I have control of.’”
Starting Early
Many companies have broadened their wellness programs to include mental health, including San Francisco Ballet, where it is overseen by Antonio Castilla, the company’s associate artistic director. A former company member who experienced problems with mental health, Castilla meets with dancers at least twice a year.
“I want to know where the dancers are,” he said. “Even if they’re not in maybe such a good place, I’d rather know than not know.”
Proactive steps are also being taken at the student level, when addressing mental health can help prevent problems later, said Aubrey Lynch II, dean of students and the wellness director of American Ballet Theater. “My work is making sure the pipeline starts so that when they are in a company, they are aware.”
The School of American Ballet — the training ground for City Ballet — has opened a new artistic health and wellness student center. Designed by Verona Carpenter Architects, it opened in September for intermediate and advanced students, and cost $4.2 million.
One aim of the center is normalizing the need for support. Students can book sessions with mental health counselors and nutritionists using a confidential online system.
Jennifer Carpenter, the principal architect, wants students to feel safe and secure there, she said, for it to be “a place where you’re not under scrutiny.”
Students told her that along with constantly being observed by their teachers, they felt other eyes on them, too. “They’re also role models for the younger students,” Carpenter said. “So this could be the place where they can sort of be themselves.”
Moving Forward
Mental health issues affect all dancers, not just those in ballet and its comparatively well-funded institutions. “Dancers are notorious for not reaching out for help,” said Bebe Neuwirth, the dancer and actress, who founded the Dancers’ Resource at the Entertainment Community Fund (formerly the Actors Fund). “We are notorious for gritting our teeth and getting through it.”
That’s because “we are at the bottom of the food chain in the arts,” she added. “We are paid less than anyone else. And we are the most replaceable.”
Neuwirth formed the Dancers’ Resource after having a hip replacement. “I was in my mid-40s,” she said, “and I was still dancing — and then I was limping, and I was not able to go to ballet class, and it was very, very difficult emotionally.”
She saw others dealing with similar problems. “Most dancers don’t have the financial means to get their own independent private help,” she said. “Most dancers can’t afford to hire a therapist and work through this pain.”
Dancers’ Resource helps with financial assistance for all types of dancers, in all stages of their careers. Mario Ismael Espinoza, a former member of Ballet Hispanico, is a social worker there.
Former dancers, Espinoza said, understand “being in a space like dance that can be so harmful psychologically, but creates so many strengths,” adding that “they’re intertwined. The same things that are harmful also build resilience and work ethic and strength.”
‘How am I here again?’
Mearns knows that therapy works. Over the years, she has shared her struggles on social media, including announcing that she had been suffering from hearing loss for years. In 2022, her dog died suddenly, which she posted about on Instagram. “It flipped something in me,” she said.
“I was like, I’m here again,” she said. “How am I here again?”
She texted her therapist, who told her that she was never alone and that “‘you can literally walk to the emergency room.’”
Mearns says some days are better than others, but through extensive therapy, she feels free. “I’ve never really felt this,” she said. “I’ve always just been pleasing people and sort of surrendering myself to the situations and not having my own voice and not putting my foot down.”
Now, because of therapy — which, she stressed, “is very, very hard work” — she sees the world with different eyes. She is in the beginning stages of developing a platform for dancers and companies to address mental health.
Recently, Mearns hit her head in an elevator, which led to a serious concussion. She was confined to her apartment, where everything was off limits except sleeping, showering and eating. Mearns was able to return to the stage before the fall season ended, but the accident taught her a lot.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been this healthy in my entire career as a person,” she said. “It was a big wake-up call in terms of health for my entire body, and that affects your mental state.”
Over the past year, Mearns has felt more present onstage than at any point in her career. “This is another level that I didn’t think was possible,” she said. “It’s because of the work that I’ve done to value who I am offstage and to take care of myself that I have been able to do that.”
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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