Artistic Reintegration

While the television show Severance has been exploring the pitfalls of a complete division between people’s work and home lives, Sara Mearns’s recent solo show at New York City Center presented the dangers of the inverse. The opening piece, “Don’t Go Home,” examined the problems created by conflating the occupational and the personal. Oddly enough, as in Severance, Mearns’s production employed a doppelganger (a humorously bewigged Anna Greenberg), a destabilizing narrative, and mysterious period styling. Given that Mearns is a famous ballerina, it was surprising that “Don’t Go Home” was more of a theatrical piece than a dance. But Mearns has acted on the City Center stage before, in the title role of the Encores! musical revival “I Married an Angel” in 2019. Then, as now, she proved herself to be a gifted actress. She was even more convincing this time around, possibly because this was an autobiographical endeavor, with a script by Jonathon Young sourced from Mearns’s own diary entries (a diary kept at the insistence of her therapist while she navigated burnout, depression, and divorce). The border between character and pseudo-self (Mearns played the dual role of Sara/Claire) was deliberately fuzzy—with some eerie Lynchian crossover—making “Don’t Go Home” a fascinating self-portrait of an artist in crisis.

Performance

Sara Mearns: “Don't Go Home” by Mearns, Guillaume Côté, and Jonathon Young / “Dance is a Mother” by Jamar Roberts

Place

New York City Center, New York, NY, April 2025

Words

Faye Arthurs

Sara Mearns in “Don't Go Home” by Guillaume Côté. Photograph by Julieta Cervantes

Genre-spanning memoir dances are in right now. Martha Graham Dance Company principal dancer Lloyd Knight also explored the inextricable bonds between his home life and his career in his solo turn at the Guggenheim in January. And like Knight, Mearns tapped some talented friends to help shape her biography into a dance drama. “Don’t Go Home” was co-conceived by Mearns, Young, and Guillame Côté, Mearns’s sometime dance partner who also choreographed a dance for her solo show “Piece of Work” at the Joyce in 2022. (Côté and Young also shared direction credit; Côté did the choreography.)

Her team seemed to understand her: “Don’t Go Home” read as authentic even though the costumes (by Marc Happel) and scenery (by Ryan Howell) had corporate ’80s American Psycho vibes. I’m not sure why the apartment belonging to both “Sara” and “Claire” had the looming desk, masculine leather lounge chair, and slatted blinds of a detective agency, or why the New York City Ballet principal dancer Gilbert Bolden III was dressed in business casual garb throughout the piece in his trio of overlapping roles: Mark/Gilbert/Adam. But Young has worked often with the choreographer Crystal Pite, which was evident in the moody and intermittently specific alternate-reality milieu of “Don’t’ Go Home.”

The darkness of the plot was intermittently specific too. This was not an airing of dirty laundry; the audience was not privy to the details of Sara/Claire’s external threats at work or at home. There was clearly tension with her boyfriend, her dance partner, and the unseen, judgmental Director (the actor Frank Wood, voicing his lines from the balcony like an all-powerful deity). “Sara,” while auditioning for the role of “Claire,” explained to the Director that she understood the character well: “I get what she’s going through. Her home life is catching up with her and her work is no longer safe.” As far as statements of empathy go, that’s pretty vague. However, the audience was fully let into Sara/Claire’s mental turmoil. She spoke her inner dialogue while rehearsing, while auditioning, while dancing, while elevating her calves and shaking out her legs. “I just gotta get out of this headspace” she said over and over. During most of the dance sequences, she shouted “No!” at her own efforts repeatedly. Also: “I missed my chance,” and “I held back.” Sara/Claire lamented that she was unable to muster the will to “show up” at work, yet she also didn’t want to be home, where she was unable to stop fixating on her work anyway. She was caught in a self-destructive loop.

Anna Greenberg and Sara Mearns in “Don't Go Home” by Guillaume Côté. Photograph by Julieta Cervantes

“What is she here for? What is she thinking?” “Sara” asked of “Claire” at the top of the show. Both are questions I’ve asked myself about Mearns while in the NYCB audience on and off in recent years. She has sometimes been hesitant where she used to have a take-no-prisoners boldness of attack; and she’s often had a downward gaze and an inward focus in contrast to her former outward confidence. “Don’t Go Home” was therefore an illuminating, and heartbreaking, peek into the challenges Mearns has faced in her wildly successful, unusually paced career. At only 19 years old, she vaulted to the top of the ballet scene practically overnight, excelling in a surprising debut in Peter Martins’s “Swan Lake.” In a conventional ballerina arc, Odette/Odile is a capstone role. One of the problems Mearns has faced is: where do you go after you hit a home run to win the World Series as a rookie?

Initially, her answer to that was to push harder and harder. She tackled and tamed all the crown jewels of the Balanchine canon, and she created monster roles in new repertory, particularly in the works of Alexei Ratmansky (the solos he made for her in “Namouna” and “Pictures at an Exhibition” are grueling feats of strength, technique, and endurance). She frequently posted videos of herself doing punishing gym workouts on Instagram. In her down time, she tried as many other styles of dance as possible, taking on the biggest physical challenges in Modern repertory in the process: including Molissa Fenley’s marathon “Heart of Darkness” solo, and several of Merce Cunningham’s demanding passages.

It has now been twenty years since her “Swan Lake” debut, and it’s hard to sustain that kind of Everest-climbing conquest. And she has often looked more invested in her forays into less bombastic, more introspective dances. I’ve been moved by her performances of Isadora Duncan choreography, the Martha Graham solo “Ekstasis,” Ratmansky’s “Solitude,” the Preghiera of Balanchine’s “Mozartiana,” and Christopher Wheeldon’s gentle “The Two of US,” set to Joni Mitchell. Mearns’s 2022 solo show explored less ostentatious ways of moving, but it was almost too reactionary. She tried to negate all that she had been and erase herself from the spotlight. This City Center show struck a better balance. She wasn’t fighting her gifts and her history; she was considering and adapting them. Best of all, she looked fully present and invested in both works. And, despite the heavy subject matter of “Don’t Go Home,” there was levity to it as well. It was laced with humor—both ironic and slapstick. The piece finished on an optimistic note too, as she put her hand to her heart and said—in voiceover—that she had found “her” again.

Anna Greenberg, Jeroboam Bozeman, Ghrai Devore-Stokes, Jamar Roberts, and Sara Mearns in “Dance is a Mother” by Roberts. Photograph by Julieta Cervantes

Mearns looked happier yet in Jamar Roberts’s lowkey, pretty “Dance is a Mother,” set to the string music of Caroline Shaw (which was beautifully played lived onstage by the Bergamot Quartet). Mearns was joined here by four dancers who were an out-of-retirement dream team. Anna Greenberg, formally of the Miami City Ballet, was new to me, but I was thrilled to see ex-Alvin Ailey members Jeroboam Bozeman, Ghrai Devore-Stokes, and especially Jamar Roberts return to the stage. They performed Roberts’s sculptural, curvilinear isolations in unison and alone, clad in Marc Happel’s loose, mint green silk jammies and matching socks.

I liked the unusual flat-footed échappés and pointework-in-socks that Roberts gave to Mearns. He also built in some contemplative, restful moments for her: she covered her face with her hands, she bent over with her hands on her knees. A few times, she projected up into the balcony with what appeared to be real joy, which was heartening to see. She looked especially inspired when the vocalist, Raquel Acevedo Klein, joined in. When Klein entered, the dancers tightened into a supportive flock and swooped around her as she warbled Shaw’s playful mashup of lyrics by Robert Burns, Gertrude Stein, Billy Joel, and Shakespeare in her Disney princess voice.

At this point in Mearns’s career, it seems that she has something to say that is not best expressed through bravura hyperdrive. I hope she can integrate her new approach into her upcoming ballet season. Most sopranos don’t start with Wagner and backtrack to soubrette mode; I understand her unease in trying a new tack at City Ballet—where maximal effort is a hallmark of the style. But there are ways to reinvent yourself and age gracefully even in Balanchine land. As long as Mearns can banish the unease and self-doubt from her delivery, I think audiences will be open to any new artistic choices she may make. She’s earned the right to experiment and evolve, and this proudly candid solo outing was a very brave first step.

Faye Arthurs

Faye Arthurs is a former ballet dancer with New York City Ballet. She chronicled her time as a professional dancer in her blog Thoughts from the Paint. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English from Fordham University. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their sons.

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