Adrian Danchig-Waring knows that few moments in life unfold with an obvious before and after. His was crystal clear. He almost died.
Danchig-Waring, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet, had already experienced two potentially career-ending injuries when, in late 2024, he suffered a herniated disk in his spine. He was given an epidural injection, which led to a bacterial infection.
“I immediately lost the ability to walk, spiked a fever, lost 25 pounds and, for two months, couldn’t figure out what was going on,” he said in an interview at Lincoln Center. “I thought I was having an adverse inflammatory reaction. I thought it might be autoimmune. Nobody knew.”
It only became worse from there. Imaging showed that his disk had dissolved to a fluid. “I was bone on bone,” he said.
It was the most severe pain he had ever experienced. “It turns out that this particular bacterium has an 85 percent fatality rate when untreated,” he said. “I was very sort of idiomatically saying, ‘I feel like I’m fighting for my life.’ It turns out, I was.”
Danchig-Waring wasn’t sure if he would ever walk again, let alone dance. He made a deal with the universe, he said. “I was like, If I have the grace to return to dancing, I will wrap it up in a year,” he said. “I will only do the ballets that bring me meaning. And I will be so grateful.”
He was eventually given a proper diagnosis and spent nine months on antibiotics. He had surgery. And finally, in fall 2025, he made a soft return to the stage in the final movement of George Balanchine’s “Episodes.” Lifting and jumping were out of the question, but this is a part that demands stature, or what he thinks of as “Balanchine voguing.”
On Oct. 18 — a year later, as he promised himself and the universe — Danchig-Waring, 42, will dance his farewell performance at City Ballet. He won’t be going far. Since 2018, he has also been the artistic director of the company’s New York Choreographic Institute, an important incubator of new work.
But his departure from dancing is an occasion, both celebratory and bittersweet. Danchig-Waring’s refined presence as a dancer will be reflected in his final program, a rich one that includes two Balanchine classics (“The Four Temperaments” and “Agon”), a Lar Lubovitch duet and a premiere by Pam Tanowitz that also features Mira Nadon, Unity Phelan and Indiana Woodward. He didn’t want a solo. He wanted to dance with his friends.
Phelan, a frequent dancing partner with whom he is close, said she felt as if she were in mourning for her ballet husband. Danchig-Waring said cheerfully that he and Phelan are “in love in a really profound way that both our husbands know about.” (Danchig-Waring, previously in a relationship with a fellow principal, Joseph Gordon, is married to Thomas Rom, an art adviser and the board chair at Performance Space New York.)
When Phelan was young and starting out with the company, Danchig-Waring was a lifeline. “He made me feel so comfortable onstage,” she said. “At that time I was so nervous and kind of shaky and really just wanted to prove myself. We built such a huge trust so quickly. There are certain ballets that I honestly couldn’t imagine not having his eyes to look into.”
If Phelan is his “ride or die,” as he put it, Woodward is like a sister.
“We’re both these hippie California kids,” he said. “We call each other Sunshine.”
Nadon came into his life more recently as a partner. “There’s nothing about her that isn’t present and accountable,” he said. “She’s like a wellspring of authenticity, and it’s manifest in these virtuosic and heartbreakingly beautiful ways.”
He has witnessed her strength and fragility — and the way she’s able to glide between them — close up. “I remember being like, I need more of this in my diet,” he said. “So I was like, if I have the opportunity to continue to learn from her right to the end of this ballet career, I would like that.”
And to make the dance, he chose Tanowitz who, he said, makes him feel the most himself when they’re in the studio. “My humor, my historical nerdiness, my obsessiveness, my empowerment, my insecurity, like it’s all available,” he said. “It shines a light on all these facets of my being that have not been invited into ballet before.”
In the new work, not a City Ballet commission but a gift she made for him, Tanowitz wants to show his different textures. “So his balletic training, which obviously people are going to see in Balanchine, but then different shades of it, where it’s a little messy, a little chaotic,” she said. “And then seeing him be subtle and perform shades of the same step.”
DANCHIG-WARING GREW UP in San Francisco dancing in an after-school program that was part of a Russian folk dance company and studying Chinese acrobatics at the Pickle Family Circus in the early 1990s, before discovering ballet at Dance Theater Seven with David Roxander (the father of American Ballet Theater’s Jake Roxander). By 13, he was addicted.
He moved into the dormitory at the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet 10 days before Sept. 11, 2001. “I remember feeling like, I’m a New Yorker now,” he said. “And I remember the eerie quiet of the city.”
Two years later, he joined the company and shortly after, in 2004, broke his foot. “I was in a boot for six months,” he said. “I backpacked through central Mexico and took painting classes.”
But he returned and flourished. In 2009, he was named a soloist and in early 2013, he became a principal. Wendy Whelan, City Ballet’s associate artistic director, first got to know Danchig-Waring when she was a dancer in the company. “He was such a beautiful puppy of a dancer,” she said. “He was fun, he was smart, just eager to learn and grow and, you know, great sense of self-deprecation. Just a really humble and lovely artist.”
For all the embodied calm — it is electrifying — he projects from the stage, Danchig-Waring is charged in a different way in person, speaking quickly in long, complete sentences that show a questing, racing mind. His passion really kicks in when he talks about the Choreographic Institute. “I think there’s something about this place being a laboratory,” he said.
He began working with the institute after another injury, one that he knew would keep him offstage for a year. He went to the company’s director at the time, Peter Martins, with a proposal: Either he could get involved with the Balanchine Trust or he could start working at the institute.
“Peter was like, ‘Well, you’re in so much new work, you should come to the institute,’” Danchig-Waring said, adding that Martins told him he would learn much by watching so much dance. “So I started watching application videos and consulting with Peter and making recommendations.”
For Danchig-Waring, it was the right fit. “It’s so different than being a dancer because no part of it is, ‘Does this feel good?’” he said.
The institute gives choreographers studio space and access to dancers from City Ballet and its affiliated School of American Ballet to create new works. Danchig-Waring is in the process of expanding its programs to support artists long term, “so that when those artists or their artworks are ready for greater visibility,” he said, “we can platform them.”
That could mean encouraging a commission by City Ballet or finding producing partners outside the company. The institute is also initiating public partnerships, including one with the Metropolitan Museum of Art that starts in March. In June, Tanowitz will be in residence to research a dance inspired by Bronislava Nijinska’s lost “Hamlet” ballet, which will feature City Ballet dancers along with her own. Including outside dancers is a first for the institute.
Danchig-Waring likes to think of the institute becoming something like “Bell Labs meets the Ballets Russes, where you bring all these innovative thinkers into dialogue.”
He hopes that the institute can be a place to encourage a wider world of ideas in ballet. “Balanchine’s masterworks are evergreen because they are rooted in philosophy, music theory, dramaturgy, mathematics, et cetera,” he said. “The man was obsessed with Spinoza!”
TO DANCHIG-WARING, ballet has the possibility to communicate more than what is shown on a stage. Life experience is embedded in a dancing body. When he returned to ballet last year, his dancing had changed, which makes sense: So had his life. Around that time, he found himself serving as the health-care proxy for his aunt and managing her home hospice care.
“I would not have been able to do so and or have embraced it so fully if I hadn’t been through my own existential crisis, this brush with death,” he said. “I could show up and be so present with changing her diapers, rolling her over, clipping her toenails and sitting and reading her Edna St. Vincent Millay for hours. She loved that morbid poetry.”
Having such proximity to dying was cathartic, “Dying as a live experience,” he said.
At some point, he spoke with an energy healer. She told him she knew that he was coming back from a big injury and that dancing was never going to be as satisfying for him as it once was. “I was like, that’s inappropriate,” Danchig-Waring said. “Like, how dare you?”
What happened was a surprise: His dancing turned out to be satisfying in new ways. It became spiritual, with more of an inner impulse. “All the perfectionism, all of these imposed hierarchies and assumptions of rightness that I inherited and carried as an armor and as a burden for so long, just sloughed off,” he said. “And I was like, this is a gift.”
Danchig-Waring cited a mantra by Thich Nhat Hanh about how your body is not just yours, but that it “also belongs to society and to all the other living beings.”
This, Danchig-Waring said, is how he experiences Balanchine. And it’s true of his newer experiences with Tanowitz. “It’s so open,” he said. “And when I say open, I mean porous, like her ideas pass through me on a cellular level. But we’re not a repository. We’re like a temporary passage, and it’s never static. It’s all motion.”
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