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In regarding the ever-rising arc of Ashley Bouder's career, I'm always reminded of a famous description of Abraham Lincoln, whose "ambition was a little engine that knew no rest." While it's a commonplace that it takes tremendous dedication and determination to succeed as a dancer, it's not surprising that to accomplish the things Bouder has done in her short career takes an staggering amount of both, in a career in which she's improved, almost magically, from season to season. You think she couldn't possibly improve on a performance, and then she does.

In two interviews over the course of a year, I became struck by her descriptions of never allowing herself to be content with a performance, always striving to find things to be fixed.

This in itself would hardly be of interest, except that Bouder has become the most exciting dancer to City Ballet in many years. A virtuoso of tremendous talents, she burst onto the scene in 2001, not long after joining City Ballet as an apprentice with a performance of the allegro, jumpy demi-soloist role in Balanchine's La Source which, quite famously, brought down the house. A critic friend of mine still remarks on this as one of the most exciting things she's ever seen.

And why not? It blindingly foreshadowed the qualities which have made Bouder an audience favorite in New York, and almost an enfant terrible of the dance world: an astonishing allegro technique, effortless and dazzlingly high leaps, a rock-solid self-confidence which expresses itself in an air of almost smug self-confidence and, more importantly, in an awesome, driving attack, both technically and musically. She's fond of using phrases like "punching it" and "going for it" in describing her dancing, and it's easy to see why. If she'd been in musicals, her number would be "I Can do That!" from A Chorus Line.

If this were the extent of Bouder's talents, it would be enough to pigeonhole her as a fearless bravura dancer, but that hardly begins to encompass her ability, and over the years she's shown she has much more going on than simply a high-powered technician. But, first, there is that strength. I haven't seen a jump like hers since the days of Eddie Villella. with no apparent fuss or preparation, she just goes ... up. Her legs swing upward and her body follows, as if she were pulling herself airborne with her thighs instead of pushing off the floor like mere mortals. And she's become a demon turner, sprinkling her famous solo in Stars and Strips with blink-and-you'll miss them double and triple pique pirouettes. Get past the breathtaking technique of her allegro work, and you'll see an even more breathtaking musicality.
 

Ashley Bouder and Gonzalo Garcia in Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux
© Paul Kolnik

True to the City Ballet tradition of dancing on top of the beat, and fueled by her power and technique, Bouder's very musical aggressiveness lets her play with the beat when dancing at speeds in which any other dancer I've seen would be content simply to keep up. It's rubato on a tightrope stretched over a volcano, but in even the quickest of allegros, she can take the time to pause, ever so slightly, in a delicate echappe on pointe or balance in passe, taking risks more-mortal dancers couldn't, secure in knowing she can catch and exceed any tempo, only to play with it some more. It's not uncommon to see dancers approaching adagios like slowed-down allegros; Bouder dances allegros like speeded up adagios, and that's just one of her astonishments. After the retirement of Kyra Nichols, Bouder became the most interesting, and unconventionally, musical dancer in City Ballet (if not the world).

Right now, at age twenty-four, she's gone from the promise of a young, up-and-coming star to one of City Ballet's star attractions. At a recent, rather leisurely, program of City Ballet's, I sat not far enough from two talkative, well-coiffed twenty-somethings who chattered away through most of the evening, until Bouder's cheeky arrival for the pas de deux in Stars and Stripes. "Finally!" one said to the other, and, finally, they shut up and watched. Even among those in New York who don't watch ballet, Bouder's become the ballerina to watch.

You'd hardly know that from talking with her, though, as in person she's far from the supremely confident Wonder Woman she appears onstage: more a young, bubbly Diana Prince. At first it's hard to see the artist behind this unpretentious young woman, who peppers her language with "I was like" and "y'know" and seems to delight in telling anecdotes of her onstage disasters and offstage worries. She speaks of thinking constantly about mistakes and seems almost painfully aware of critics' complaints that she can sometimes be too aggressive, too punchy. Oddly, she's far more guarded in talking of her triumphs and strengths, demurring at opportunities to blow her own horn, and steering the conversation towards her support system of fellow dancers, ballet-masters and teachers.

Of course, she doesn't need to boast in interviews; her dancing speaks for itself. Although after years before the public, she's probably rightfully wary of sounding like a diva, her self-deprecating humor speaks less of false modesty than of her relentless pursuit, not necessarily of perfection, but of betterment. You can't improve on perfection, and so triumphs aren't as interesting as flaws. Flaws can be analyzed and improved upon, but what can you do with a triumph except repeat it? She's clearly more interested in finding new challenges, either external, by finding new roles, partners, etc., or internal, by simply dancing better.

For Bouder, dancing better started at age six, when growing up in Carlisle Pennsylvania, she and her mother accidently ran into Marcia Dale Weary, head of the respected school, the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet (or CPYB, as it's always called). "I found out my mom had danced, and I wanted to be like my mom," she says, and so started her dance career. "My mother had stopped because she didn't want to do it anymore. She was actually pretty good."

Ashley Bouder
© Paul Kolnik

Bouder came to New York, and the School of American Ballet, in 1999, and joined the company as an apprentice the next year, so when she made that unforgettable debut in La Source, she was already quite well-formed as a dancer. "I did La Source at home when I was eleven. A lot of the stuff that I first did in the company, like Raymonda, La Source, even Dewdrop, I had been doing at home since I was eleven, twelve, thirteen."

When asked if she'd started showing her technical prowess at an early age, to be dancing such roles so young, she said she was just one dancer among a very gifted CPYB cohort. "At our school, doing that stuff at the age of eleven isn't really unusual. I went on pointe when I was eight, but there are people like Abi Stafford who did it at seven. She's two yeas older than me and she did all the stuff I did two years before me. At our school, we didn't know that wasn't normal. We didn't know you weren't supposed to be able to do thirty-two fouettes at the age of ten." Bouder mentions growing up an learning with a group of young, talented kids, among them Abi and Jonathan Stafford (another NYCB principal) and Adam Hendrikson (now a soloist). "Adam was my partner when I was eight and he was eleven. We didn't know we weren't supposed to be able to do a shoulder sit. I remember asking Marcia's okay to do it on pointe, because I'd just got my pointe shoes. We were so little that we just did everything. We took eighteen classes a week and we didn't know that was excessive. I would pretty much try anything when I was little."

After joining the company in 2000, she danced small corps roles (I still remember seeing her and Megan Fairchild as the side-girls in the Nutcracker's Chinese Dance), until that La Source. "I was really lucky that it was a night performance, and all my friends could come. I think all of SAB was there." She'd learned the role years before from Violette Verdy; did that make her confident? "No, I was so nervous. I was like, 'ah, I've done this a million times,' and then I got to the show and I was like, 'Oh no! I hope I can do that pirouette from fifth."

Spring of 2001 saw another celebrated debut, when she had to learn the lead in Balanchine's Firebird only a few hours before the curtain. She'd only seen the ballet a few times. "I think I had watched Margaret do it, and I kept watching the solo from the floor, in the last berceuse, because I was a monster. I was laying on the floor and watching it sideways." After a quick rehearsal with ballet master Sean Lavery, Bouder had a tense lead-up to the performance, first dancing in the corps of the company's one-act version of Swan Lake. "I had to go sit in a makeup chair for the Firebird makeup — it's crazy — and the middle ballet was Brandenburg and it's like an hour long, so I sat there for the entire intermission, Brandenburg, and fifteen minutes of the last intermission, and finally I was like, 'I have to go!' I put on my shoes and ran downstairs. It was freezing cold. I wasn't even warm when I went on."

Following that debut, Bouder became a figure to watch in the corps de ballet and was soon well-established in demi and soloist roles, such as Dew Drop in The Nutcracker or the Third Movement of Symphony in C. She was promoted to soloist in February, 2004, and principal in January, 2005. Along the way, she developed a reputation as a fearsome technician, and the dancer who gets the hard roles: "I get Ballo, and I get Donizetti, and I get Divert, that really fast solo, I get Stars, the hard pad de deux, and it's like 'Bouder can do that.'"

She also developed a reputation for falling, especially in debuts, so much so that in reviewing her debut and spectacular crash in Donizetti Variations for The New York Times, Jennifer Dunning intimated that Bouder's fans had begun to expect her spills. In my first interview with her, she said, "When I fall, I'm always like, 'Oh! Again!' I don't know why I fall. I don't think it would be a Bouder debut without a slip or fall. Even in my debut in Swan Lake I slipped during a bourree." In her Donizetti debut, she ran onstage with her partner Andrew Veyette and somehow, instead of posing prettily with him upstage center, she continued in a sliding pratfall. "I left two skid marks on the floor, right across center. I did a double-bounce slide. I really don't know how you would do that again." What does she think when she falls? "Get up!"

In 2002, she fell in a "Live from Lincoln Center" broadcast. "My most embarrassing fall was on national television. All my friends and family were watching, and my mom was there with my grandmother, and my grandma asked 'Who was that?' and my mom said, 'That was your granddaughter.' I must have gotten over a hundred phone calls that night, from all these voicemails. I kept going delete, delete, delete, and so many text messages saying 'I saw that, I saw that!' They were all like, 'But your jump before was really high!'"

One final anecdote about a fall is particularly relevant to her London repertory, as it's of how she managed to "take down" Ask La Cour while she was dancing the Russian Girl in Serenade while on tour in Chicago. It was his debut, and "I ran out in the Elegy, at the end, to do that backbend lift, where he lifts the girl where I'm laying on his back in a split, and right before I ran out I thought, 'This is going to be good, really good!' and I stepped to jump and I just kept going." (She speculated she might've slipped on wax that had been tracked on the stage.) "I was in full backbend, too, with my leg up, and Ask was trying to catch me, and he's so tall that he ran out of room with his arms and I'm still going down and it was either fall with me and save me, or he could just let me fall on my head. He's a great partner so he didn't let me go and he ended up falling on top of me and then rolling in my skirt, and then he got up and picked me up, and we were fine after that. I could not believe I took a man who was like a foot taller than me down. And Peter just looked at me like 'You're all right?' I said 'yeah'. 'You didn't hit your head?' 'Thanks to Ask, no, I didn't hit my head, but I did take him down.' And he goes, 'I know,' and Peter's trying really hard not to laugh at me. I must've looked so funny."

Ironically, after that first interview in late 2006, Bouder went on to some major debuts, yet her falls stopped overnight. When I spoke to her this winter, I asked her why. I expected her to say something about increased strength or concentration, so her answer was a surprise. "I think I've perfected my pointe-shoe technique, of preparing them for performances, much better than I used to. I used to fall sometimes because I would go for it, and then I would catch an edge on my shoe and slip. I've kind of eliminated those hard edges by banging them against a wall and softening them up. Now when I really go for it I have a little bit of a softer pointe shoe on the floor that will grab more, so I won't go sliding. I put a lot of glue in my pointe shoes which makes them very, very hard. That's why I can jump on pointe so much, and my pointe shoes last until the end of the ballet instead of dying in the middle. But the flip side is that it's bad because the sides of your shoes, where your little toe and big toe are, it makes those edges very sharp." Pounding those edges to soften them makes all the difference. "I put glue on them first and then I bang them so that they soften up, because dancing on them isn't going to make those edges softer. I just figured out that I couldn't have that sharp edge there and I thought to myself, 'How do I get rid of this?' Now, people who fall, I tell them just bang the sides of your pointe shoes."

The past year, she's worked her way into City Ballet's ballerina repertory, getting away from her earlier position as the dancer who does only the hard roles, dancing not only leads in Rubies, but Emeralds, too. Did she see Emeralds coming? "No. That has no jumps and turns, but I remember Sally Leland the season before saying, 'Let me ask Peter if you can learn Emeralds. You're so romantic, and I'd love it if he gave you the part.' I was like, 'Really?' Nobody had ever put me in anything like that, and then the next season I was cast. I like that. No jumps, no turns, nothing that I do normally. Nothing that I had done before. Now I've been getting parts I can actually breathe in."

Of all her new roles, she ranks, not surprisingly, as most important that most famous of Balanchine's "Tchaikovsky-gut-busters," Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, (originally Ballet Imperial) It's daunting just to hear her describe it: "It's only a forty-minute ballet, but it has almost as much dancing as the full-length Sleeping Beauty has for Aurora. In the beginning it's a solo, then that very long pas de deux with two solos in it, and then you end the first movement with all that jumping with the corps. And there's a huge adagio in the middle which feels like the Vision Scene, and then you have about five entrances in the third movement, so it's a lot of dancing packed into forty minutes."

In describing how she copes with this demanding role, she volunteered that inside she's not always as blazingly confident as she might appear: "I always do the first solo full out at the intermission right before the ballet starts because I get so scared of it. I get very nervous. The kinds of turns you have to do in there are really scary, and you don't get to do them all the time, so they're really hard." (She's referring to the pirouettes on demi-pointe finishing in a tendu.) "There's barely any music. It's just the piano and there's everybody on stage, but nobody's moving. Everyone's just standing and looking at you."

Was the biggest challenge, then, stamina, or learning all those long passages? "More the stamina and that first solo. I've been watching the ballet so much, and it's Balanchine, so it all makes perfect sense with the music, and once someone shows you the steps it's like 'Oh. Yeah.' and you get it. Remembering the steps and learning them like that wasn't very hard. It's just being able to keep the energy level up and the technique up throughout the entire ballet, and just having the guts to get through the first solo."

When I interviewed her, she'd just finished the second of her two PC No. 2s of the winter season, after her first two last spring. These last two were as technically impressive, but far more subtle and nuanced in attack and phrasing. I'd seen similar dramatic rethinking in her second season dancing ballets like Emeralds and Raymonda Variations, so I asked how she'd arrived at the version of PC No. 2 she unveiled at the end of winter season.

"It's been several months since the last time I performed it, since July until I did these two performances these past couple of weeks, and a lot of times you think about it. I knew I was going to do it again, so it allowed me time to think about the things I thought weren't right about it, the things technically I didn't do very well. I spend a lot of time lying in bed at night thinking about, you know, 'oh why did I do that, or why did I have to do it that way, and, well, next time I'm not going to do that.' It occupies my thoughts a lot. It's hard, especially when people say to me things like, 'Oh, you punched it way too much and you know, you need to be softer.'

"It really affects me, because I hate when people say that, and I know that I do it. I want to be softer, and I want to have more of a ballerina quality, and sometimes I just obsess over, 'why did I have to do that?' and I really think about it, and you know it's such a long time between seasons. It seems like we do these ballets all the time, but I haven't done PC No. 2 — I did it yesterday and last Saturday, but I haven't done it since last July. That's a long time to pass in between. I had time to think about those steps or maybe practice them once in awhile, I just knew that the next time I rehearsed it, months later, that's something that would be thought about and would be fixed."

Maria Kowroski and Ashley Bouder in The Blue Necklace
© Paul Kolnik

I asked about examples, and whether she was happier with her performances this season. "I was happier with my first solo the second time around. I think I got actually more nervous this time than I did last time, but I know how to get out there when I was nervous, I knew how to calm myself down. Just do the turns, just listen to the piano, just do it and pretend like three thousand people weren't watching me. I was proud that I could eventually handle it better onstage, and calm myself down. Specifically, throughout the ballet there were a few things more in the adagio that I kind of found my own way to do, things being a little softer in places, or being a little grander in places, that I felt, watching the video, I had fallen a little short on the first time."

Does she get much feedback from others she can use in reworking a role? "I get a lot of feedback from Merrill (Ashley), a lot from Sarah Leland, and Peter and Sean (Lavery). They always have good things to say after a show, and they always have a few things I should fix. I get a lot from that, and there are a couple of my dancer friends in the company who come and watch my stuff and I always ask, 'What did you see? Anything?' and it could be 'Oh, you need to point your foot here, ' or it could be, 'well, it just seems kind of harsh.' One person I really trust, who I always talk with is Jared Angle (another principal). We're alway asking each other, 'Did you see anything I should fix?'"

What about critics? "I read them, I read all the reviews that City Ballet has in the Times, in the Sun, in the Post. I try to read all of them. I just want to know what kind of press is out there about us. I'd say, though, I take other dancers, like ballet masters and my peers, advice because they see me every day and know my dancing inside out. Critics, there are some I really trust in their opinions. Some are so knowledgeable, and you can tell that they really know dance, and other critics really don't know a lot. They were never dancers, they never studied dance, so sometimes you take their opinions with a grain of salt. They know what they're looking at, but not like a dancer."

City Ballet sometimes has a reputation as a place where dancers can languish from lack of artistic guidance. Between the ballet masters and her dancer friends, did she feel she had enough feedback? "I think I do. Sometimes you get a little more criticism than you're prepared to take. You know, you thought your show was pretty good, and people will be like 'Good job! Good job!' and someone will start in right away with corrections. Sometimes you just get overloaded with them and you just got offstage and it's like, 'Can I just enjoy the fact that I got through it and made my fouettés?' Sometimes you're ready for it, and sometimes you just want to go home and 'I'll talk to you tomorrow.'"

Ashley Bouder and Benjamin Millepied in Ballo della Regina
© Paul Kolnik

I was struck by her repeated references to nerves. With her onstage demeanor which some have called smug, Bouder's the last person one might think of as suffering from nerves. Did they go away as soon as she was onstage? "Sometimes, but other times it really doesn't. I go out there and I'm nervous, and in PC No. 2 I'm nervous that whole solo until I get offstage, and then I can calm down. I think a lot of people don't realize. I sit backstage on my little stool and people come over and talk to me and I'm like, 'Please, just don't talk to me, I'm really nervous.' A lot of people are like, 'Oh my god, you're nervous?' They never really see me like that, but a lot of times I really don't let people know."

"It doesn't matter how nervous I am, I don't want the audience to ever know that I'm not sure I can do this, because I hate watching a dancer onstage look nervous. I hate seeing someone go 'oooh, I don't know if I can do this!' and you can almost see their thoughts, and I hate that, and I want to see someone who just dances. The last thing I want is for anyone who's watching me onstage is to think, 'oooh, she looks nervous!' We're performers and we're artists and we're supposed to show the role and the character of the role and the steps and just the dance, and not that you're nervous about it.

I asked if she had any role models, dancers she might've wanted to be like as she was growing up. "I don't think I ever wanted to be like one person, but like facets of dancers. I liked someone's arms, I liked how soft they were, and how much they looked to be like my ideal of a ballerina. I like other dancers' technique. I never wanted to emulate someone or be exactly what they were. I always wanted to be different than everyone else, but I wanted to steal little things from people."

Has she succeeded?

"Oh yeah!"

With her talk of "stealing" steps, did she consider herself competitive with other dancers?

"I think I'm very competitive with myself. I think every show should be better, especially since I'm so young. I feel like I'm not anywhere near my peak. Every performance should be better. I mean, there's no time in my career to just go, 'OK, that was good, and that's how it's going to be.' It always has to be a little better. I'm not sure that I'm actually so competitive with other dancers who do the same parts. Some aspects of the roles I think they do better, but as long as I'm better than I was last season, I feel good."

What about her musicality? "I think I hear things differently than most other people. Once I hear a piece of music, I kind of know it. Sometimes I get in trouble for rushing, and then I think, since I'm rushing, I have to pause. I think I just hear it differently. Sometimes I watch someone and I don't understand how they can not... And maybe they just don't hear it, and I think I must hear differently."

I asked her about roles she'd like to dance in the future, and she quickly answered: "Giselle. It's such a major role, and in the first half she does a lot of little allegro stuff, and the second half is so drastically different. I'd love to have that range. I love the Mad Scene. I love all the acting in it." Did she have a favorite Giselle? "I've seen several I liked. I saw Vishneva do it, and I really liked her. I like the old, old videos of people, dancers no longer dancing, like Carla Fracci or Gelsey (Kirkland). People you can't see live anymore. I'm more partial to those than anything I've seen recently."

And at City Ballet? "I want to do Theme and Variations." I volunteered that she seemed likely to get it the next time it came into the repertory.

"Oh, I intend to!"