Andrew Veyette has been pushing himself this season, his last at New York City Ballet. But, in his 25 years with the company, he has always danced every ballet as if it were his last — with dynamism, virtuosity and joie de vivre.
From his earliest years, though, what has really set him apart are two things, seemingly at odds: sheer willpower and a mischievous grin, the sort that makes you think he is laughing at himself or proposing a dare, Andy to Andy.
Veyette, a principal dancer whose farewell performance is this Sunday, has always seemed to take City Ballet more seriously than he took himself. Perhaps that’s what drove him to push his body beyond its limits, to be unafraid to fail.
He knows things. When Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia were having problems with whip turns in Jerome Robbins’s “The Four Seasons,” they turned to Veyette for help. Veyette told Mejia: “‘After the second turn, give her a little bump to the right,’” Peck said. “‘She tends to fall on the second one. You just got to give her a little tap back.’”
He was right. “Roman was like whoa,” Peck said, adding that Veyette “is kind of a quiet commander.”
Veyette, 43, designed his final program to be full of technical challenges. “Even if we see me struggle, I’m kind of OK with that,” he said. “Because I want to find my limit in that show.”
The program will showcase his versatility. Along with the third movement of Robbins’s “Glass Pieces” — which he will dance with the corps de ballet — he is the lead in Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s “Chiaroscuro, a moody work that shows his more introspective side. He’ll also dance “Cool” from Robbins’s “West Side Story Suite” and the pas de deux and finale of George Balanchine’s “Stars and Stripes,” a ballet he’s been obsessed with since he was 12.
It’s ambitious. “I just want to make sure that I just leave everything I have out there,” he said. That’s what his dancing is about, he added: “I don’t think I’m the prettiest dancer or the most talented dancer, but I have tried really hard to give everything I had.”
There was a time in Veyette’s career, around 2018 and 2019, when the idea of a celebratory farewell seemed out of reach. “I really struggled onstage,” he said of that time. “And at the root of that was struggles with alcoholism and dependency and depression. I took two different short stints away from the company.”
The first visit to rehab didn’t work out. “I don’t know if I was ready to feel better yet,” he said. “Then I did an inpatient program in Florida.”
That time, it clicked. He said he realized that what addicts often have in common is a belief: that they don’t “deserve to be OK.”
And that, he added, doesn’t even take into account the chemical reality of what drugs and alcohol do to the brain. “I would leave my rehearsal day, and my feet were just walking to a bar,” he said. “This wasn’t a choice. This wasn’t like, I guess I’ll go do this, or something’s wrong, or I’m upset.”
Around that time, his oldest brother and father were both gravely ill; they died six months apart. There was also, Veyette said, “the uncomfortable reality of being married to two different women in the company in the tumultuous time that that became.” He was married to Megan Fairchild before he met Ashley Hod, his current wife, who is a soloist at City Ballet.
One of his father’s last visits to New York was for an intervention. “That had to have been really painful for him,” Veyette said. “It was them and Ashley that saved me. I was in a really, really, really dark place.”
Being open about his addiction is important, Veyette said, because “it takes so much strength and courage to actually ask for help and to admit that you have a problem and be willing to change.”
If he could give advice to young dancers, or anybody, he said, it would be to ask for support: “That’s not a weakness.”
During the pandemic, he and Hod went to live with his mother in Arizona. He got back into biking. And he and Hod realized that while they love ballet, they were happy just to be with each other.
In coming back to dance, Veyette wanted to leave the stage in a way that paid justice to his career. “It could have been a very sad story,” he said. “It very easily could have become something that I just kind of skulked away and wasn’t able to get it back together.”
He didn’t want to be “a side note in people’s conversations,” he added. “I would have felt like I left years on the table and let a lot of people down.”
Peck, his former sister-in-law (she was married to Fairchild’s brother), said, “I think he came back a better version of himself, as a person.”
Over the years, he and Fairchild have had conversations about their relationship — especially, he said, when he wasn’t doing well — and about how they want each other to be happy. “When it comes to the two women in my life and my time in the company,” he said, “I’m almost shocked that not once but twice such remarkable people cared to spend their time with me. I’m very grateful that we can all get along now and that we’ve found a comfortable place at work.”
He will begin his last performance with “Glass Pieces.” There was a pact among the male dancers with whom he first performed it: The last to leave the company would include the ballet in his farewell and “everybody else has to come out of retirement to do it,” Veyette said.
One of those dancers was Jonathan Stafford, now the company’s artistic director, who told him, “I don’t think I can do it, dude.” Veyette didn’t really expect anyone from the old days to return to the stage. But he wanted to dance “Glass Pieces” as a way to honor the corps de ballet part of his career and to perform with a new generation. “I wanted to acknowledge that I didn’t just see my soloist and principal rep as what I considered success in this company,” he said.
BORN IN DENVER, Veyette began his dance training at 9. Before entering the company-affiliated School of American Ballet in 1998, he trained at Westside Ballet in Santa Monica, Calif. He joined City Ballet in 2000, and was promoted to soloist six years later. He has been a principal since 2007.
“My path had a lot of peaks and valleys,” Veyette said. “Some very deep and some very high.”
He knows his body isn’t what it used to be. “Sometimes I go to do something, and it just doesn’t want to cooperate anymore,” he said. “But I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to get into a place physically that I can kind of do something that” — he paused — “resembles my best? You know?”
Veyette and the principal Sara Mearns are not exactly the same generation, but they were part of a group that, Mearns said, “escalated together.” They have an affectionate nickname for each other: Crazy, as in, “Hey, Crazy.”
“There are no limits for him,” Mearns said of his dancing. “There’s no bounds for him. Especially when he was at his prime, it was like no one could out-dance that man.”
After he retires, Veyette plans on staying in the ballet industry, staging works and teaching. (He teaches now at Ballet Academy East.) He said he hoped to help dancers, something Peck has witnessed with men at the company struggling with partnering. “He’s very generous with the younger guys and showing them partnering tricks,” she said. “You don’t have to be generous and share what you know. But he always does. And you can see the difference it makes immediately.”
Veyette’s career will culminate with one of his favorite ballets, “Stars and Stripes.” He taught himself the choreography after watching a videotape of it when he was 12. It was the dance he performed at his Workshop Performance at the School of American Ballet.
“I know I didn’t smile a single time, not the whole show, not once,” Veyette said in a robotic voice. He did, though, hit all of his turns.
And now he gets one last shot at it, this time opposite his wife, Hod, in a debut. “What are the chances, he said, that the last dance he gets to perform is “the thing I was obsessed with as a little kid, that made me want to be a ballet dancer in New York City Ballet and that I got to do as my Workshop Ballet?”
He just wishes he had smiled back then. “I will definitely smile this time.”
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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