Dance Spirit: How 20-Year-Old Gianna Reisen Balances Choreographing for NYCB and Dancing With L.A. Dance Project

By Olivia Manno

9 October 2019

It was fall 2016. Gianna Reisen—then 17 and in her final year at the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet’s official training school—had just been made the offer of a lifetime: the chance to choreograph a work for the company’s fall gala. She would be the youngest person ever to do so.

Two weeks later, Reisen went from an all-time high to an all-time low: She found out she wouldn’t be getting an apprenticeship with NYCB. “I absolutely deflated,” she remembers. “Imagine if, after seven years of working towards something, it simply doesn’t happen. It’s sort of heartbreaking.”

But Reisen, now 20, handled the roller-coaster ride with aplomb. And her career has only accelerated since that fall. She’s created not just one ballet for NYCB but two: Composer’s Holiday, that first commission, which premiered in September 2017, and Judah, which premiered in September 2018. She spent a season at Dresden Semperoper Ballett before joining Benjamin Millepied’s trailblazing L.A. Dance Project, and recently created a new work for LADP.

With such a full plate, when does Reisen stop to catch her breath? As it turns out, she doesn’t need to: Constantly creating is her oxygen.

Read the full article in Dance Spirit.