NEW YORK, NY.- Harrison Ball, a principal at New York City Ballet, has tears in his toes. His sesamoid bone is crushed and, he said, dying. There is bone shard sticking into a tendon in his foot. His arthritis is so bad that his doctor told him it was comparable to that of an elderly person. He can’t do his job if he can’t pirouette.
So Sunday, he’s leaving his job. He’s barely 30.
Such an early farewell is not the norm. But for Ball, who was promoted to the rank of principal dancer just last year, the injuries were too much.
“It’s gotten to the point where I just can’t do my job without being in an enormous amount of pain,” he said.
Even with that pain, Ball has been performing in new, intriguing ways. As the Poet in “La Sonnambula” and Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” both George Balanchine ballets, his seriousness, his investment as a dramatic dancer brought a new urgency to the characters.
“I could just see his future right in front of me lining up,” said Wendy Whelan, City Ballet’s associate artistic director.
Whelan is trying to look at the bigger picture in terms of Ball and others who have parted ways with the company since the pandemic started. There have been more than a few and from all ranks, including Jonathan Fahoury, Claire Kretzschmar and Lauren Lovette.
“Everybody knows leaving is scary,” she said. “Artists, young people are a little more courageous a little sooner.”
Whelan and Jonathan Stafford, the company’s artistic director, had been excited to promote Ball.
“He’s such a technician and this classicist and also contemporary and free — he’s an investigator, you know?” Whelan said. “You always love when you have a dancer like that at your fingertips to guide and help. He could morph.”
Ball is looking more toward acting in his future. He just got a part on the ballet-world series “Étoile,” coming to Amazon, by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Bunheads.” He’s also focused on choreography: His “Purcell Suite,” a work for New Jersey Ballet, will be performed at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in June. His personal life has come together, too. He is engaged to fashion designer Zac Posen, whom he met at City Ballet and became close with during the pandemic.
Ball, disarming and funny, has a spontaneous streak. Much of his life has been erratic and wild, fueled, in part, by drug and alcohol addiction. (He was partial to cocaine, he said; he’s been sober for more than five years.) Even Ball’s childhood was unorthodox. He started ballet training at 4 with the now-defunct Charleston Ballet Theatre in South Carolina and performed as a child.
“I was this little kid, and I was touring with all these adults,” he said. “During the day, the dancers would take me with them during the lunch break. They would all go to a bar.”
When he was about 15 and a student at the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet, he lost his dorm privileges as a result of disciplinary action; with his family’s support, he lived on his own in an apartment, he said, with his mother checking in on him periodically from South Carolina, where she and her husband were raising two other sons. Soon, he was fully on his own.
“It was a really weird situation,” Vera Ball, his mother, said, “but, yeah, that’s what we had to do.”
She added, “I just wanted him to be able to be him, and this was where it was.”
He was enrolled at the Professional Children’s School, which specializes in educating young artists, athletes and others, but stopped going. As a ballet student and as a member of City Ballet, which he joined in 2012, he was something of a party animal. He had a steady paycheck but was always short on cash.
When he was 24, he broke both of his feet in a rehearsal. He wasn’t even dancing when it happened.
“I was talking, and I took a step on my right foot, and it went” — Ball clicked his tongue to make a popping sound — “and then I took a step on my left foot” — he clicked again — “and I just fell.”
Instead of crying, he laughed. Surely this was a sign.
“I had a really rampant alcohol problem at that time,” he said. “I was using a lot of drugs. I was homeless for a while. I was living in a car.”
He slept and showered at the theater, he said. The address on his driver’s license still reads 20 Lincoln Center Plaza.
“It was a really wild moment for me,” he said. “And the hardest part of it was keeping up the facade, right? Because nobody really knew.”
The only person at the company he had told about his addiction was Peter Martins, then the artistic leader.
“I was just so afraid,” Ball said. “I told him, and he offered financial support and just said, ‘Go heal.’ I couldn’t believe it. He said to me that the ballet will save me. And in a way he was right because it was always something that tethered me. It held me accountable.
“If I didn’t have the ballet to show up to every day,” he added, “I don’t know if I would have lived.”
Ball, who went to a rehab facility in Thailand — “it was cheaper than rehab in America” — said he was eager to talk about this part of his life because he knows that many struggle with addiction.
“And it’s not just the dance world,” he said. “I mean, let’s be real.”
When Martins stepped down after accusations of physical and mental abuse, Ball went into panic mode. Martins, who was later cleared by an independent investigation, was the only person who knew why Ball was in Thailand. The assumption was that he was healing from an injury.
“This guy came up to me and said, ‘Oh, I just saw that your boss was #MeToo’d,’” Ball said. “I was like, What? I didn’t even know that #MeToo had happened. In rehab, you’re literally cut off.”
Ball told the company about his situation and was put on disability.
“They said, ‘Just take your time,’” he recalled.
He was out for a year and a half.
In recent seasons, he has taken on repertory that is more subtle, less virtuosic — a calculated decision, he said, so that he could be onstage but not hurt himself. And he realized something.
“I see everything that they were telling me,” Ball said. “To be myself, to dance the way I wanted to dance and just to kind of throw it all away.”
It took him years, he said, to be himself onstage. His farewell program offers a final chance, in a debut, Jerome Robbins’ “Afternoon of a Faun,” in which two dancers find themselves alone in a ballet studio with the audience essentially as their mirror.
“That ballet feels so intimate,” he said. “I think that it’s the definition of what it is to be a dancer.”
“Faun” begins and ends with Ball alone stretched out on the floor. Earlier this week, Ball and Unity Phelan rehearsed it with repertory director Jean-Pierre Frohlich. After a run-through, Phelan walked over to Ball.
“This is going to be very emotional,” she said, her voice cracking. “I’m walking away from you.”
Ball said, “Are you crying?”
Frohlich had notes.
“It’s good,” he said. “There was intimacy, which is what we want. The most important thing is do not perform. It does it. Trust it.”
After Sunday’s performance, Ball will have to trust himself, his future. He is working on a memoir.
“I lived a lot of lives in the past 12, 13 years that I’ve been in this company,” he said. “And I got the great privilege of dancing on some of the best stages in the world, dancing the best ballets in the world, dancing for the best dancers in the world, with the best dancers in the world. And I got to put this theater on my driver’s license. Isn’t that funny?”
He paused and added, “I have to change it now, though.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
