Ashley Bouder has grit, and that’s good. Since the pandemic, this New York City Ballet principal has been dealing with a lot: injuries, weight issues and sporadic performance opportunities.
They have fueled one another. There was the time she tore her plantar fascia onstage during a performance of “Western Symphony.” She made a full recovery, but it took a while. There was weight that wouldn’t come off, which resulted in infrequent casting and just a smattering of shows.
With few scheduled shows, there weren’t many chances to rehearse. Then came another injury, this time in “Vienna Waltzes”: She tore her posterior tibial tendon.
“My dancing feet weren’t there,” she said in an interview at Lincoln Center. “That’s kind of been the up and down. It’s like trying to come back, but not getting enough to do and then hurting myself again.”
But she wasn’t ready to give up. “I just kept waiting to dance again,” she said. “I’m like, all I want to do is dance. Like, get me out there, let me dance, let me dance.”
This season, Bouder, 41, got to do that, before closing out her 25-year City Ballet career. On Thursday, her farewell performance, she’ll dance in George Balanchine’s “Firebird.” She first danced the role at 17, when she was thrown into at the last minute.
“Everybody always asks you when you get to the end, ‘What do you think you’re going to retire with?’” she said. “I was always like, ‘I don’t know.’ But I think I’ve know my whole life that would be the ballet.”
In the years since that “Firebird” when, she said, “I didn’t know anything,” Bouder became one of the company’s most visible ballerinas — she also earned a double degree in political science and organizational leadership from Fordham University; married and had a child (her daughter, Violet, 8, is a student at School of American Ballet); and embraced being a feminist, speaking out about injustices in the ballet world.
Onstage, Bouder was vivid from the start, dating back to her first major role at City Ballet as the demi-soloist in “La Source.” Kathleen Tracey, a repertory director whom Bouder works closely with, said, “She came bounding out onstage with so much excitement and thrill and a huge jump and a beautiful, exhilarating kind of presentation. I was blown away.”
She was fearless. Soon after joining the company in 2000, Bouder, who trained at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet before attending the School of American Ballet, quickly became a dazzling interpreter of Balanchine ballets. Her virtuosic dancing matched her theatrical effervescence. Her sparkle was never put on — she was never the type to hide how happy dancing makes her feel.
But over the last couple of years, she said, she had been questioning her every move. “Finally I’m feeling like I can do it again,” Bouder said. “Like not be nervous that they’re going to judge me because my leg’s not high enough. Or if I didn’t hit that fifth. Or if I’m going to get tired because I don’t know what kind of shape I’m in.”
In other words, all of those anxiety-producing feelings that, she said, make your shoulders rise and your dancing smaller. “So I’m finally, like, just” — she exhaled deeply — “let it go.”
There were moments during our interview when Bouder’s voice shook and her eyes welled with tears. But she was just as prone to laughter as spoke about the ups and downs of her career. “Firebird” was a high. Tracey is proud of her for choosing that ballet as her send-off.
“It means a lot to her and it means a lot to the ballet to have her leave her imprint on it,” Tracey said. “She will be remembered in that role.”
When Bouder danced it at 17, she had only two hours of rehearsal. “I remember that Kay Mazzo was there,” she said, referring to a former principal and chairman of faculty at the school. “I didn’t know when to enter because the music is very murky in the beginning, and it’s Stravinsky, and I hadn’t even seen that part of the ballet.”
She had danced in the ballet before, playing a monster. But “I had never watched the beginning of it,” she said. “So Kay stood behind me and she goes, ‘OK, bend over’” — the Firebird enters leaning forward like a soaring bird — “and she pushed me so I could run out.”
Bouder triumphed in many more roles after that storied debut, including Balanchine’s “Ballo Della Regina,” “Stars and Stripes” and “Tarantella.” But she faced challenges in those early years too. While the onstage and studio part of dancing was great, “the social aspect was terrible,” she said, and described one show “that was absolutely horrifying.”
She danced in three ballets on that program. For the final one, she needed to switch from pink tights and pointe shoes to white. When she returned to her spot to put on her white shoes, they were gone.
“The ribbons were all cut off,” she said, “and the shoes were destroyed in different trash cans around the dressing room.”
She ended up performing in a colleague’s shoes that were a half a size too big. (She packed them with extra toe pads.) “We were all kids at that point,” Bouder said. “I got bullied a lot. There were certain colleagues that if I was walking down the hallway, they would say things like, ‘I hope you fall tonight.’”
Now City Ballet has a Human Resources department, something Bouder wishes had been around when she was coming up. “I grew a really thick skin to the point where people were like, ‘Well, she’s prickly.’ And I’m like, yes, but if you had been treated the way I have, you pull the wall up. You are not getting in here. And it took me a long time to reverse that.”
Recent experiences have been wounding, too. In 2022, she posted on Instagram that a board member had told her that “they don’t mind the extra weight on me.”
Before that Bouder said she had been taken out of a performance, “because the costume showcased my ‘problem area.’”
She fell into a deep depression. “It’s like I didn’t want to work,” she said. “I couldn’t lose the weight because I didn’t want to work. It wasn’t eating too much or doing something like that, but it’s just like I couldn’t get the energy.”
She added, “one of the things that I’m excited to let go of is the constant scrutiny of every part of my body.”
Tracey, a former soloist with City Ballet, has watched Bouder evolve as a person and a dancer. “She was able to always navigate through the pressure,” Tracey said. “I think that is a testament to her mental toughness and that ability to take hard situations and make them her own — to be able to work through the difficulties of any particular ballet or situation in the workplace.”
For her next act, Bouder is now in the middle of applying for nonprofit status with a new organization, Ashley Bouder Arts, which will include educational elements like workshops in different dance forms; continue her performance group, Ashley Bouder Project, with a choreographic lab; and start a summer dance festival that would tour the Northeast.
“I would love to keep dancing,” she said. “It’s funny because a lot of people say, I’m ready to hang up my pointe shoes, get rid of the pointe shoes. I love my pointe shoes.”
As for “squishing into a leotard,” as she put it? Not so much.
“I think that just the past couple of years have really destroyed me forever really wanting to do that again,” she said. “I want to still dance, but I don’t want to be in a leotard and tights in front of 2,000 people anymore.”
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