Jonathan Stafford, 38, who has been running the company for more than a year on an interim basis, will become the new artistic director of City Ballet as well as its affiliated academy, the School of American Ballet. Wendy Whelan, 51, a star ballerina who danced with the company for 30 years, will become City Ballet’s associate artistic director. The two said they intended to work as partners.
They are taking over a company that has been shaken over the past year and a half. Peter Martins, its longtime ballet master in chief, abruptly retired early last year amid allegations of physical and emotional abuse, which he denied. Then, with the company being led by an interim team overseen by Stafford, three of its 14 male principal dancers were forced out after being accused of sharing text messages of sexually explicit photos of women.
Stafford and Whelan, whose appointments were announced at a meeting of the company Thursday morning, said that healing the rifts within the company and improving its backstage culture would be a big part of their work.
“We both will really be working on the cultural elements of the company,” Stafford said during a joint interview with Whelan. “We agree on dancer development, dancer enrichment, making sure we are providing a safe space for them to really thrive as artists and as people, not just in the theater but in their personal lives as well.”
In a company buffeted by accusations of misconduct at the hands of powerful men — and at a moment when women are still underrepresented in the ballet world’s top jobs — Whelan’s appointment to a leadership position cannot help but send a message. Whelan, who has enjoyed a fruitful second act in contemporary dance, said she intended to exercise her control over programming and commissioning new works to push for “more women choreographing, more diversity on stage, bigger ideas, more open ideas, more daring ideas.”
It is a rare changing of the guard at City Ballet, often considered the nation’s most important ballet company. Choreographer George Balanchine, whose works helped define 20th-century dance, founded the company in 1948 with Lincoln Kirstein. Martins, a Danish-born dancer and choreographer, succeeded him in 1983, running the company for several years with choreographer Jerome Robbins, and then on his own — until his abrupt departure forced the company to grapple with the question of succession sooner than it had anticipated. (A company investigation of Martins, after several former dancers had accused him of physical and verbal abuse, called the allegations uncorroborated.)
The appointment of Stafford and Whelan signals a generational change at City Ballet. They will be its first leaders not to have worked with Balanchine — he died the day Whelan was performing one of his works for the first time as a student in 1983.
But they are also the first two leaders to have come of age in the two institutions that Balanchine helped create: They both trained at the School of American Ballet and both made their dance careers at City Ballet, learning from dancers who learned from Balanchine.
Unlike their predecessors, neither is a choreographer. Justin Peck, City Ballet’s resident choreographer, will take the new title of artistic adviser. That will allow Peck, 31, who has enjoyed success on Broadway and is now working with Steven Spielberg on a new film adaptation of “West Side Story,” to continue making work for the company and to bring new choreographers into City Ballet’s fold, as he has with Kyle Abraham and Pam Tanowitz. Peck will stop dancing with the company, where he is now a soloist, after the spring season.
Stafford will be responsible for supervising the company’s artistic operations and working on its day-to-day management with the company’s executive director, Katherine Brown, who oversees its administrative and financial operations.
Whelan — who not only danced much of the core Balanchine and Robbins repertory but also originated roles in ballets created by William Forsythe, Twyla Tharp, Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor and others — will have more sway over programming. She will be responsible for conceiving and planning seasons; commissioning new work; and working closely with dancers in the rehearsal studio, both teaching class and coaching works in the company’s repertory.
Whelan said that while she has had only limited experience staging and coaching ballets, “I have a lot to say about the ballets that I know, and I have a lot of experience and knowledge and insight to bring.”
The search to replace Martins was a long one.
A committee made up of members of the boards of the company and the school made a listening tour, speaking with 220 artists, employees and figures in the dance world, before drafting a lengthy job description of what they wanted — and what they did not. After receiving dozens of nominations — some from the dance world figures they spoke with, others from aspirants putting themselves forward for the position — they whittled down the list to 20 candidates to interview. They ultimately decided to split the job in two.
“It’s too much for one person to really effectively do the job,” Stafford said, noting that he had come to rely on his colleagues on the leadership team during the transition period. “The company has grown so much, the school has grown so much, it’s really work that you need two people for.”
When Martins and Robbins initially served as coequal leaders, things did not always go smoothly. Charles Scharf, chairman of City Ballet’s board, said the search committee had decided to put Stafford in charge because it felt that clear lines of responsibility were important, but that it viewed Stafford and Whelan as a team.
“The expectation is that they will function as partnership,” he said in an interview.
Early reaction to the appointments was mostly enthusiastic. Ashley Bouder, a principal dancer at City Ballet who has publicly urged ballet to embrace feminism, wrote on Instagram: “It was a long and often difficult road, but finally NYCB has a solid direction. I cannot express how THRILLED I am to have such a strong woman, Wendy Whelan, as part of the new era.”
But some questioned why Whelan should report to Stafford. Lauren Wingenroth wrote in Dance magazine: “The set-up begs the question: If the two leaders will truly be ‘partners,’ why are they not co-artistic directors? Considering the company’s recent scandals — and the troubling historical gender dynamics of the company — the arrangement sits just a bit uncomfortably.”
During their interviews with the search committee, Stafford and Whelan independently suggested that they would like to work with each other on the management team. They overlapped at the company — she danced there from 1984 to 2014; he, from 1998 to 2014. But they rarely danced together — in part because they were cast in different repertory.
“Jon’s a Tchaikovsky guy, and I’m much more of the Stravinsky girl,” Whelan said.
But there were a few times. Stafford remembered partnering her briefly in the Robbins ballet “In G Major” when he was 19 and she was a star, and thinking “I’m partnering Wendy Whelan!” The time they remember best, though, was in the back of a rehearsal studio, when a young Stafford was trying to learn Balanchine’s “Diamonds” as a group of principals were being coached in the front of the room. Whelan walked in.
“He was all alone, without a girl, and I was all alone, without a guy,” she remembered. “I thought, let’s just see what happens.”
“I didn’t really know it,” Stafford recalled, “but she sort of taught it to me as we went. And some of it sort of clicked — we were able to make some things work.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.