GIANNA REISEN

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In a sun-washed rehearsal studio high above Lincoln Center, it is difficult, at first, to differentiate the choreographer from her dancers—until her sneakers give it away. At just eighteen, Gianna Reisen, a recent graduate of the School of American Ballet and a newly minted apprentice at the Dresden Semperoper Ballett, looks at ease amongst her peers, her former classmates, but, with her new work about to premiere at New York City Ballet’s Fall Gala, she is set to become the youngest person ever to choreograph for the company, and she is completely in charge.

Raised in New Jersey, Reisen’s first encounter with ballet came, as it does for so many, at a young age with The Nutcracker. She started dance classes soon after, initially focusing on jazz and tap before being singled out by a ballet teacher for private lessons thanks to her ability. By eleven, she had been accepted to the City Ballet-affiliated SAB, one of the world’s leading ballet schools. “When I auditioned, I did it with no expectations at all,” she admits. “When I did get in, it was this weird, immediate switch in my brain that, ‘Oh ok, maybe this is something that I can do.’ But it wasn’t until I actually came to SAB that I started to take ballet seriously.”

Reisen, who spent seven years at SAB before graduating earlier this year, credits the school, where students have constant exposure to City Ballet, with opening her eyes to the serious opportunities available in dance. “Before, I was just doing it for fun, but seeing all these talented people around constantly, I realized that this is something that I could make my profession,” she recalls.

She had her first taste of choreographing thanks to the school’s annual student choreographic workshop, which allows high-level students to create short works on their classmates, and even as a teenager, she says the experience was already a long time coming. “When I was around fourteen, I became aware that SAB had this program, but I wasn’t eligible yet because I wasn’t old enough,” she explains. “I had been thinking about it and picking out music for like three years and I was so excited to do it. It was something I found really intriguing, but it wasn’t until I actually choreographed my first little three-minute ballet that I found a true passion for it.”

Last fall, while still a student at SAB, she advanced to the New York Choreographic Institute, a City Ballet initiative founded in 2000 to support up-and-coming choreographers that counts Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon, Justin Peck, Benjamin Millepied, Jessica Lang, and Larry Keigwin amongst its alumni. Having performed as a dancer in previous sessions, Reisen says it was a fascinating opportunity to see it from the other side. “I danced in the New York Choreographic Institute a few years and that was really, really amazing to see how those choreographers worked from a dancer’s perspective and to have a piece made on you,” she says. “That’s a really important part of being a choreographer yourself, because you can take those things from other more seasoned people. As somebody who’s being choreographed on, you’re being told what to do. It’s not coming from your head, but you have to retain the other person’s vision. The shocking transition from dancer to choreographer is the fact that now you’re the boss and you have to tell other people your vision and try to articulate it and translate it as well as you can.”

Reisen’s vision will come to life on the grand stage this week, when her Composer’s Holiday debuts on a program with pieces by three dancer-choreographers from City Ballet’s ranks, Peck, Troy Schumacher, and Lauren Lovette, a striking demonstration of the company’s depth of talent. The dozen dancers in her piece, led by a quartet of three fresh corps members and a brand-new apprentice, are remarkably young, most of them freshly plucked, like Reisen herself, from SAB. “Using my friends and classmates in a ballet has its pros and cons,” she says. “The pro is that these are my classmates that I see dance every day. I know what they’re good at, I know what they’re not so strong at, I know where they shine the most because I’ve been watching them for so many years. Probably the con of working with your peers is keeping it serious and keeping it contained and keeping the respect between the choreographer and the dancers, but I didn’t have a problem at all.”

Watching Reisen at work, it’s clear that she has managed to strike just the right balance. She calls her decision to cast mostly friends and acquaintances “strategic” to avoid any additional stress from having to work with strangers given the already heightened stakes. There is a certain unavoidable buzz around being the youngest to accomplish any given thing, but she is approaching the situation with a surprising equanimity. “I feel a load of pressure, yes, but I think in a way it’s a blessing that I’m so young because I haven’t established a name for myself yet,” she says. ”I don’t have this huge name like someone like Justin Peck has now where there’s so much expectation on him because his work is so well known. Nobody know’s who I am.”

That certainly isn’t true about Peter Martins, City Ballet’s ballet master in chief, who made the decision to commission Reisen last December. She was ordered not to reveal it until the official announcement was made this April, which meant, she says, “a lot of time to be in my head about it and be very closed off to the world.” Her initial reaction at the time was probably not what Martins expected. “I think I might have been in so much shock that I didn’t really react, which was strange to him,” she laughs. “I remember him being like, ‘Are you surprised? Are you nervous? What are you?’ Because I kind of had this blank face and was like, ‘Ok…’ It was incredibly shocking, but at the same time, the excitement was beyond, because it’s something that I wanted to pursue. After I did the Institute I was wondering where else choreography would take me, so when he asked me to choreograph for the company, it was such an honor.”

Set to Lukas Foss’s Three American Pieces, with three movements each expressing what Reisen calls “a completely different emotion, but still being a collective piece,” Composer’s Holiday also features, as part of an annual collaboration with notable fashion designers at City Ballet’s Fall Galas, costumes by Off-White’s Virgil Abloh. Known for his sophisticated and progressive reinventions of streetwear, Abloh is not an obvious choice for ballet costumes, but—as with Humberto Leon’s hoodies and tank tops for Peck’s The Times Are Racing and Iris Van Herpen’s plastic dresses for Millepied’s Neverwhere, it’s exactly that element of surprise that drew Reisen to his designs. “His work is very fresh and new, but also incredibly sophisticated,” she explains. “There’s a beautiful simplicity in his work which I found would translate really well on a ballet stage.”

Soon after the premiere, Reisen is set to return to Germany and her day job as an apprentice, just the first step in her career as a dancer. Thanks to this commission, she had less than three weeks to initially settle into her new home earlier this summer—her first trip to Europe was to Dresden to find an apartment—but she says she is acclimating comfortably to her new surroundings. Like any young company member, she’ll take daily classes and start off with performing corps roles away from the spotlight, but her promising choreography career will help set her apart. “I plan on trying my best to accommodate both,” she says, “because I really do love and have a true passion for both dance and choreography. I haven’t really had to deal with balancing them yet, so it’s something that I’m going to have to experience sooner or later.” With severe understatement, she adds, “I’m going to try to take every opportunity with choreography that comes my way, because it’s really rare at my age to be doing something like this.”

Composer’s Holiday premieres tomorrow at New York City Ballet.