Sara Mearns on Finding Her Way Home

By Alastair Macaulay

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

“How do we get back that simple, unclouded, unburdened joy that we had when we were eight and ten years old walking into the dance studio? Because it’s still there. But how do we access that every day now?”

The ballerina Sara Mearns—aged 39, the Artist at the Center for 2025—is talking about the loss of spontaneous delight as one of the perils of a high-exposure dance career. But she recognizes this as a problem she shares with other experienced dancers and with many professionals in many careers. How do you rediscover—how do you tap—the original joy that impelled you?

Over the almost 22 years since she became a member of New York City Ballet, Mearns has danced her way back from injury, heartbreak, Covid, and depression. “The world sees me as this perfect ballerina who has it all. But I’ve been through periods when I don’t have the confidence to get to the studio in the morning—and periods when home no longer felt like home.”

For Mearns, her Artists at the Center program (April 3–5) is a way of showing New York sides of her it hasn’t seen before. Don’t Go Home is a layered drama—plenty of talking—that arises indirectly from these dark crises of confidence that Mearns, like other dancers, has weathered. When she was first preparing the season, her Canadian dance partner and colleague, Guillaume Côté, suggested that she make these crises the subject of a story or drama based around some part of herself (she had already involved Côté: “he draws on such experience in partnering, I never have to worry about anything with him. Also neither of us take ourselves too seriously: our way of joking around in rehearsal has kept the energy really stress-free. But we’re both very present, dramatically emotional, performers: we click onstage”). Côté reached out to Jonathon Young, the writer who has worked with the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite on such much talked-of creations as Betroffenheit (2015), The Statement (2016), Revisor (2019), and Assembly Hall (2023). Young, understanding that Mearns had found recent years “a little rough,” suggested that she send him thoughts. Mearns responded by sending him notes she had made over the last two years, often very dark (“thoughts that otherwise shouldn’t see the light of day”). Young responded by sending her a story he had concocted around those thoughts.

For Mearns, Young’s story—titled Don’t Go Home—highlighted all the moods through which she’d been going “The burn-out, the depression, the stage not being my safe space anymore, the sense that home wasn’t safe either: he compiled it into this 26-minute dance-theater piece. He really is good!” Mearns and her colleagues have built this work into a performance piece, with choreography by Côté. “I’ll be on point; we haven’t yet decided what clothes I’m wearing—but you’ll see my legs.”

For the program’s other half, Mearns has chosen to collaborate with the dancer-choreographer Jamar Roberts, for many years a leading dancer of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. “It had always been my dream to dance with this man. He’s massive but he moves so fast, and covers so much space! Then we were both artists in residence at the Vail Dance Festival last summer.

“I was amazed: I found we have the same energies, the same humor, the same attitude to the creative process. So I asked him to choreograph for me, but thinking he was now retired from the stage. Then he texted me, out of the blue, asking if he could include himself as a dancer in the piece. I screamed, I was so happy—in my text, that was just a row of exclamation marks.

“Watching Jamar re-emerge as a dancer in rehearsals has been fantastic—we’re trying to keep up with him! It’s going to bring the house down. (I won’t be on point, but I also won’t be barefoot. We’re still deciding on the kind of footwear.) He’s motivated and ready to go, like a freight train.”

Though Mearns speaks of the pains and troubles she’s been through, she is in a good place when she speaks about this program. After a period when she was in pain even from waking in bed each morning, and when a torn ankle coincided with a back/pelvis nerve issue, she is happily astonished to relate that she completed her recent series of performances of Swan Lake with no back pain whatsoever.

Even though Mearns does not hide from the dark areas of the soul she has encountered, she is one of nature’s enthusiasts. She loves to praise her colleagues (not just Roberts and Côté, but City Center’s VP and Artistic Director, Dance, Stanford Makishi—“he’s been with me every step of the journey for this program”—and the young City Ballet principal Gilbert Bolden III). She loves to dance strong and big. And she loves choreography that challenges her imagination as well as her body.

Alastair Macaulay is a critic and historian of the performing arts. From 1994–2007, he was chief theatre critic of the Financial Times (London); from 2007–2018, he was chief dance critic of The New York Times. Since 2019, he has curated and presented a number of educational programs for City Center Studio 5.