Q: What has your professional dance journey been like, and how did you come to dance with the New York City Ballet?

I started dancing in Spain when I was six years old. I didn’t know anything about dance. I was just very a hyper kid, and whenever there was music, I would start moving. I used to say that I wanted to be a singer, or a backup dancer for a singer. My mom started the adventure to take me to a studio in my hometown for jazz and ballet training. I did jazz, which I loved, for a year or two and then was tricked into taking a ballet class by my teacher and my mom. I found myself in a ballet class and I never looked back. From that studio, I went to a big ballet school near my home that someone told my parents about. There was a well known dance teacher who had produced some of the best dancers and teachers in Spain. I went with my dad, she took one look at me, and told me to come the next day. I started to train with her, and that’s how my journey got more serious. That’s where my ballet training really took off. The training, the studio, and the dancers were so inspiring that I never looked back. Years later, I went to the San Francisco Ballet School summer program because of a teacher who eventually became their artistic director. She was the daughter of my teacher in spain. After the summer program, I really wanted to stay, but being Spanish in 1993, if you were a foreigner, it wasn’t easy to get a scholarship to stay for the year––I couldn’t do that. So I went back to Spain, and my teacher sent me to a competition called the ‘Prix de Lausanne’ in Switzerland. It was an international competition for young dancers and I was barely 15. That year, the final was at the Bolshoi Theatre in Russia. If you made it to the semi-finals, they flew you there to compete with the dancers in Russia. I did very well. I won the gold medal that year, and got a scholarship that took me back to the San Francisco Ballet School for a few years. Then I joined the company. I danced with them for 11 years and became a principal dancer for the San Francisco Ballet. From there, the opportunity came to dance as a guest artist in the New York City Ballet in 2004, for a celebration of the George Balanchine Centennial. In 2007, I joined the New York City Ballet as a principal dancer. I left San Francisco looking for other mentors, dancers, and opportunities. I’ve always wanted to live in NYC and experience what being an artist there  meant. It was very interesting, transitioning to New York and living in a place with the energy of all the arts. It was hard, because San Francisco had become my home. It’s an incredible dance company, but being a ballet dancer has a very limited timeline, and you have to make the right decisions at the right time. So much is about timing, and a little bit of luck. I have been a principal at the New York City Ballet since then.


Q: What have been some challenges in your pre-professional or professional dance career? (Adversity as a minority artist…)
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My biggest challenge was leaving home. I was 15 years old when I took my suitcase and went across the world to San Francisco. I’m a twin, actually, and I also have an older brother and an older sister. My family is big and loud and we’re all very close. It was very hard to leave that environment so young. My parents had to take a leap of faith in many ways. In the beginning, the culture shock was hard. When you’re young, though, you don’t think about it, you just jump in and hope you can swim. Fortunately, the passion for dance and desire to become a professional dancer and dance these roles I’d dreamed of dancing, led me to overcome the struggles of leaving my family behind. I was also lucky my family was incredibly supportive. They never missed any recitals; they were always there. My parents became passionate about what I did. I was supported, but definitely the biggest struggle was the decision to leave Spain. Having my family far away and always being discontented about life in other places, not being able to be there, has been a constant struggle in my life, starting very young. Even now with the pandemic, Spain is not doing great, and I’m not home with my family. Being far from them at an early age was hard, but you get used to it and your career and goals take over.


Q: Do you believe dance can be a platform for social justice topics? If so, how? and/or Have you used your art form to make a difference?
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Dance can bring people together. It can evoke powerful messages about relationships, about life, about stories. I think everyone can relate to dancing in their living room and wanting to dance with someone for the first time in high school. Dance has a huge power to connect us. And through the right people and choreography, it can translate into a message about a lot of different topics and injustice. I think it can be tricky, because people go to the theater to be entertained and to escape a lot of things. To me, it’s possible, but I think in order to take the right shape, it needs the right conditions. It needs people who are passionate about what they are saying.  It needs the dancers and the choreographer to have the same message and the right environment to share that message. Otherwise, it can also just mean nothing if that’s not true.


Q: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you as a performing artist?
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As artists, physical artists, it’s a very hard thing to go through. I get up in the morning and I need to move, but I also need the energy of the room with other artists. I need live music, I need to be able to let go through dance on a daily basis. Right now that’s very hard to do. I think people have been creative in staying physically active. There are so many Pilates and zumba classes online to stay in shape, but there’s nothing like a live dance class, grabbing a barre, doing center with other dancers beside you. It’s very hard, because as dancers we need the energy and connection with other dancers. Being in the studio and creating things and moving together is what keeps me going. As a dancer, you think a lot about yourself while you’re also reacting to the energy of other dancers and artists around you. I’m always inspired by those around me. I am constantly looking around the room and I see a young or an old dancer and am inspired by all of them. I see the pianist, I see the light from the outside coming into the studio, bouncing off the piano; it all inspires me. As much as you can try to get creative, you just don’t have any of that right now. I can do yoga at home—it allows me to not go bananas, crazy—but it’s a struggle because dancers need that connection and energy. I really miss that right now. Dancers also look at time as such a precious thing - we are always looking at that ticking bomb of, “When is this going to end?” and it is not the coronavirus, it is the amount of time we have left as a dancer. For myself, I just turned 40 and I’m in a great place. I had a great year and am working a lot with a lot of momentum. I was also planning for the future, for my retirement, for becoming more of a teacher. Missing one Spring season, to me, feels a little like the end of the world because I feel like I will never get that back. If I retire in the winter, I’ll have missed a season. At this point in my career, time is so important right now because I know I have limited time before I retire. I also surrender to what is happening, because as an artist, you need to learn how to accept and surrender. Dancers are so wired to accept disappointment from the very beginning. We learn how to handle rejection and get better, to be better because of bad things. Dancers are so wired for a crisis in so many ways. I need to take this whole thing day by day. As much as I want to think about the future, I need to be in the present and accept this is a human crisis around the world and that is the most important thing right now. 
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The New York City Ballet, we dance a lot throughout the year. We have a Fall season, we tour, and then we have “The Nutcracker.” Right after, we had the Winter season—which was very busy and rewarding— and right as it ended, we were hearing about this crisis. My mom was visiting from Spain the last week (she came to watch me do “Swan Lake” and a new premiere by Justin Peck). We were watching the Spanish news on my TV and Spain was already seeing cases in Madrid. That was when Italy started locking down. We were seeing things abroad that were not reported on or talked about in the U.S., and I remember going to work to perform that night after watching the news, going to the theater and thinking it was insane, like a Sci-Fi movie. We think, because we perform in front of thousands of people at Lincoln Center, our lives are amazing, and we feel untouchable, that nothing like this will happen. My mom left at the end of the week, and that next week, things got crazy in Spain. I remained watching the Spanish news, because a little bit was spoken about here, but not a lot. Me, my partner, and his family were already getting worried. We started wearing gloves, not leaving the house as much. I was on a break with the company for a couple of weeks, so we had time to see what was happening. I was walking around Manhattan and no one was aware of anything. I remember thinking that it was crazy, that it was going to hit us hard soon. And soon enough, it got bad here. We were supposed to go to London to do a Justin Peck premiere. There were 13 dancers and that got cancelled. We were supposed to leave literally three days after the travel ban was put in order. Two weeks later, we were supposed to go to Washington D.C. at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which was also cancelled. Once that got cancelled, they said they would see what happens in the next few weeks, but we were supposed to be in rehearsal for the spring season that would have premiered two weeks from now. I knew there was no way it would happen, but they were giving us the news day by day here. It was clear that it would get worse here even though we were being told it would be fine from our leadership. Why would we be different from the rest of the world, especially in critical U.S. cities with so much travel on a daily basis? In my hometown in Spain, I was hearing that all of these cases were happening weeks ago. I remember thinking, “Why aren’t we hearing about this in the US? Why do we think this is not going to happen in NY?” I started taking precautions earlier than a lot of people in my neighborhood. I still went out and got things for a couple of weeks at a time. Now it’s been three weeks and I’ve pretty much just left my apartment to get groceries. 


Q: Have you all been taking company class on Zoom?
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Yeah, we have been taking company class on Zoom. It’s our second full week of Zoom classes. The company provided a class by Craig Salstein, who teaches company class during the season. We have a 10:30am to 11:45am class. I have created a space in my living room and I got a mirror. It’s very slippery. I’m waiting to get some Marley floor. I am lucky because I have a deck outside; I haven’t been able to go out, but once the weather is better, I ordered a bar and I’m going to try and put my studio outside. But again, some days are better than others. For the most part, it’s hard. You get ready for the day and you’re excited for the class, but then you realize there are so many limitations for what you can do. These company classes help, because I can see these faces I miss seeing every day on Zoom––I can keep that connection and not feel alone. It’s something that helps me keep my mind in a healthy place. There is only so much you do with that, but the company classes are a saving grace mentally, and physically in some capacity. I’ve been teaching for the Ballet Academy East and the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, where I’m faculty. We’ve been doing Zoom classes for the students for the last two weeks. Being able to teach is more rewarding than doing my own class. Seeing the students, how creative they are with space and how determined they are to keep moving, is very inspiring in so many ways. We’re lucky we can live in a time where we can use the Internet for amazing things. If we didn’t have that, if this happened 20 years ago, it would be different. We’re spoiled in many ways.