Dancing Out of Time

It’s a law of the universe, immutable as gravity: if you’re a ballerina, in December you’re dancing “The Nutcracker.” But on a December evening in 2023, as her colleagues leapt and spun to Tchaikovsky, American Ballet Theatre dancer Zimmi Coker lay in bed, steeling herself for the pain she knew stepping onto the floor would bring. Just a few months earlier she’d been dancing with ABT in front of an audience of thousands, performing not only corps de ballet roles but featured ones, too, the kind of casting that signals management sees a dancer’s potential. This was the career twenty-four-year-old Coker had trained for since her first ballet classes at age six, and she’d been excelling, a stand-out even in the exceptional ranks of a top company: chosen by Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” list and praised in the New York Times. But that December night, Coker knew that just putting one foot in front of the other to cross the floor would unleash excruciating pain radiating from her injured left foot. A jeté or an arabesque was unthinkable. That night, she would have to crawl just to cross her apartment. What would it take for her to get back on stage and dance?

“I’m at this point now where I’ve given up time,” Coker tells me two years later, as we sit in a Manhattan café on a gray February afternoon. “I think time is irrelevant when you’re coming back from an injury. You have to take it moment by moment.” Coker is petite and flame-haired, with an outsize presence and confident demeanor that belies her small stature. Her coat is draped over the back of her chair: a fluffy, snow-leopard-print faux-fur that she wrapped herself in to walk over after company class at ABT’s studios. “I’m hoping to come back for Met season,” Coker says, referring to ABT’s annual six weeks of summer performances at the Metropolitan Opera House. “That is my goal and I’m working towards it. And if plans change, plans change. Today was a good day. Tomorrow could be crap, but you know what?” She smiles. “You go with it.”

“I’m learning to trust my gut now,” Coker asserts, “I had people telling me No, you can come back! It’s mind over matter! Push yourself through!” She shakes her head. If only it were that simple. As a dancer, Coker has been honing her persistence, will, and endurance since she was a child. If she had been able to just grit her way through severe, at times debilitating, plantar fasciitis, that would have been easier (and, she will tell me, she did try). But she couldn’t. In the words of her mentor at ABT, soloist Zhong-Jing “ZJ” Fang, she had to “let go a little . . . turn her fire a little lower.” “Because when you’re injured,” Fang tells me, “that fire can hurt.”

“Here’s the thing,” Coker says, “dancing is your identity when you’re younger. And when that’s taken away from you—what’s left? Nothing. My job was my life—it wasn’t my life, it was me.” Paradoxically, she discovered that she had to explore who she was outside of dance, to start her path back to dance. But Coker, like many professional dancers, had few memories of her life and herself before ballet.

Coker still remembers the night her dreams became a goal. It was 2013: she was thirteen years old, fired up to dance, and thrilled to have earned a spot in American Ballet Theatre’s Summer Intensive for five weeks of training in New York City. It was thrilling, too, to step into the jewel box of the Metropolitan Opera House to attend an American Ballet Theatre performance of “Swan Lake.” Her brown eyes are bright twelve years later as she remembers how “the production as a whole, all the swans . . . it took my breath away.” That evening Gillian Murphy was dancing the swan queen Odette, but at the first intermission, something unusual happened as Coker settled back into her plush red velvet seat. An announcement was made: Murphy had been injured during the second act and couldn’t finish her performance. Fellow principal dancer Hee Seo had been called in to dance in her place. Despite the shadow Murphy’s injury cast, Coker remembers walking out onto Lincoln Center’s wide marble plaza that night with her ambitions newly focused: “I told myself, I want to be here, at this company.”

Two years later, at fifteen, Coker moved across the country to enroll in the ABT Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School on a full merit scholarship. JKO is a school for pre-professional dancers, admitted by audition, where students balance math and English with classes in pointe technique, character dance, and pas de deux. It’s a demanding program, designed to prepare students for a demanding career. As a dancer, Coker thrived at JKO, but as a teen she had her struggles. The holistic wellness program JKO has today hadn’t yet been implemented; Coker doesn’t remember much discussion of managing anxiety at the school or in the broader culture it reflected. And for the first time in her life, she was feeling real anxiety. She was away from her family: her brother, her father Eddie, a musician and songwriter, and her mother Michele, a retired dancer who’d performed with Texas National Ballet and Ballet Austin and taught Coker “the joy of artistry and movement.” Adjusting to life in Manhattan was challenging, coming from the tiny mountain town of Manitou Springs, Colorado, best known for its cog railway up to Pike’s Peak. “I couldn’t differentiate uptown and downtown for the life of me,” Coker laughs as she remembers “My dad actually gave me a compass! So that I could at least know that uptown was north and downtown was south.”

Navigating her new social world was even harder than navigating the city. “I was really lonely. There were all these people from New York [at JKO] and they had so much in common. I was the youngest one, always the youngest one in every single year. I felt so out of place.” But Coker was there to dance, and that was her focus day after day after day. “I was just a bunhead. I would go to class, I would come home. I would watch ballet videos. I would write corrections down [from ballet class]. I was obsessive with it. In the best way.” There was never, Coker says, a plan B for a life outside of dance. She’d known since those first classes at age six that the compass needle of her heart pointed to ballet.

Though Coker didn’t have a plan B, it’s not a given that dancers from elite schools like JKO go on to have professional careers. There are far more dancers auditioning than there are spots in ballet companies. But for Coker, “everything I wanted just lined up.” In her graduation year, she was offered a contract to perform with ABT’s Studio Company; then, after two years gaining performance experience, a year-long apprenticeship with ABT; and then, in 2018, the moment Coker had hoped for since that “Swan Lake” performance at age thirteen: a place in ABT’s corps de ballet.

In the corps de ballet Coker was a cygnet. And a ghost. A peasant, and a princess. It was an adjustment: in Studio Company, a lot of her dancing had been solo work. She’d been trained to stand out, not dance in unison, but in the corps de ballet her job was to perfectly sync her movements with all the other swans, peasants, and ghosts on stage. This was an extra challenge for Coker because, at five feet four inches tall, she was the shortest woman in the corps—and therefore, always positioned at the front of any onstage group. “If you’re in the front, if you go to that mark in two steps, the other ladies need to know it’s two steps. If you do it in four, they’re like ‘what are you doing? No, no, no. This is how it’s done.’ So you just felt like you couldn’t do anything right,” Coker recalls. Though some senior corps dancers and her official company mentor, soloist Zhong-Jing Fang, were “so kind, and so patient” in helping her adjust to the company, others were less kind. There were angry whispers on stage, angry not-whispers backstage. It stung.

Coker adapted as she had during her adjustment to JKO: by being “obsessive, in the best way.” Though ABT dances ballets both classical and contemporary, narrative and abstract, the majority of its repertoire is story ballets set in the distant past. So Coker researched: “character, background, setting, the composer, the counts, everything.” If she was dancing as a townswoman in “Romeo and Juliet,” she’d read about Verona. She’d learn about Prokofiev’s score for the ballet. Even when her role was one of twenty-five nameless peasants, she prepped as if she were crafting an individual character. Quickly, she began getting cast in soloist roles: the pas de trois in “Swan Lake,” the peasant pas in “Giselle,” an Odalisque in “La Bayadère,” featured roles in Twyla Tharp’s “Deuce Coupe” and “In the Upper Room.” She started earning bigger soloist parts and even principal ones, like Princess Praline in Alexei Ratmansky’s“Whipped Cream” and Gertrudis in Christopher Wheeldon’s “Like Water for Chocolate:” characters with names and stories, who stand out on stage in their own individual choreography.

In July 2023, New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas opened her final review of ABT’s summer season by praising a “standout performance in the peasant pas de deux in ‘Giselle’” by “luminous” Coker and Jake Roxander. “Why isn’t she a soloist?” asked Kourlas, “And how long till they are leads in ‘Giselle?’” Coker’s career looked like an arrow, speeding towards its target. And then, one day in the late summer of 2023 she went for a run that would change her life.

As she rounded a corner, she felt a pull at the bottom of her left foot. Mindful of her body, Coker headed home to rest. But when she woke up the next day, she felt a searing pain at the base of her left heel. She tried some time-honored dancer remedies. Calf stretches. Massaging her foot. “Doming” her foot, as though a small ball was cupped under its arch. Rolling out her leg on a frozen bottle of water. Resting. Nothing helped.

After a few weeks she went to see one of ABT’s staff physical therapists. Dancers, Coker says “are notorious for coming up with [our] own diagnosis,” but the PT confirmed her suspicion was correct: plantar fasciitis, a condition in which the band of fibrous tissue running along the sole of the foot becomes inflamed. For some, plantar fasciitis is a mild condition, annoying but manageable. For others, it can be severe, becoming extraordinarily painful and limiting their ability to walk, let alone to dance, and resulting in microtears to the fascia and other physiological issues as the body struggles to cope and compensate. For Coker, this was entirely new ground: she’d been the lucky dancer to make it to her mid-twenties without ever having had an injury. Be careful, she was told, but don’t worry too much. She took a few weeks off from dancing, but “it just kept getting worse, and worse, and worse” Coker recalls, her voice falling like a stone with each memory of what “worse” felt like. Still, she was determined to perform in the company’s fall 2023 New York season, though she was given the option by company management to take further time off. To her disappointment, the pain became more than she could push through. Jumping, particularly, was agony, and she had to pull out of performances she’d been cast in both in the New York season and the company’s 2023 tour to China. By that point “I could barely walk,” Coker remembers, “with plantar fasciitis, you feel it with every step you take. You feel it as you’re sitting.” She’d been in denial, she realized, about the extent of her injury. Feeling defeated, she knew she should not even attempt the annual run of “Nutcracker” shows.

For an American ballet dancer, missing “Nutcracker” is like stepping out of time. December is defined by the tinkling celesta of “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy.” Instead, Coker was on bed rest in Colorado, surrounded by real snow rather than the paper flurries of the Waltz of the Snowflakes. It was the lowest she’d ever felt, despite the unwavering support of her family. Remembering this winter two years later, Coker’s eyes well with tears. “There were weeks where I would just sit in bed, unable to move. My body just physically shut down. I’d have to mentally prepare myself to get up from a chair, because I just knew I was going to feel an insurmountable amount of pain.”

Since that terrible winter, Coker’s recovery has been gradual and non-linear. By the summer of 2024, her pain had lessened, though it wasn’t gone. Burning to be back onstage and keenly aware of the time and opportunities that were passing by, she decided to do the summer 2024 season at the Met. She debuted a major new role: Olga in John Cranko’s “Onegin.” But devastatingly, she couldn’t finish the season. Everyone in the company had known promotions were on the horizon, and at the end of that 2024 Met season, Jake Roxander and other corps dancers Coker had performed alongside were promoted to soloist. Coker was not.

It was a moment of reckoning for her. She’d tried to target the site of her pain in so many different ways. She’d tried PRP injections, then shockwave therapy. She’d tried acupuncture during the fall 2023 ABT tour to China. She’d tried PT on her injured heel. She’d tried bed rest. She’d tried pushing through her pain. Nothing had yet yielded a sustained recovery. “You have to reach your lowest point to understand what you need,” Coker says. What she needed was to step back and zoom out. Instead of looking at each upcoming season as a looming deadline by which she had to fix her injured heel enough to dance, she took her mentor Zhong-Jing Fang’s advice to “not be a slave to ballet.” She started exploring interests outside of dance. For the first time, she took college classes, enrolling in English composition and other core curriculum courses at Fordham. She began making and then selling jewelry (@cokerchokers, on Instagram). And she started therapy, to gain understanding of who she was as a person, not just a dancer. “It’s not just ballet that brings me happiness,” Coker learned.

“Injuries are mind, body, and soul,” Coker tells me, “If you’re mentally in a bad state of mind, your body will seize up and then you’re not sending blood flow to your body. There are so many things that go into an injury.” The holistic view that Coker has of her injury and healing today has been influenced by months of work with Dr. Kate Besong, a physical therapist who specializes in working with performing artists who Coker began seeing in August 2024.

With each patient, Dr. Besong observes “There are so many symptoms and so many sensations. It’s like looking up at the night sky and seeing all the stars. I look for the constellation. I ask, what’s the pattern?” With Coker, she notes “it’s a work in progress. There are a lot of stars in Zimmi’s constellation.” Dr. Besong finds these patterns, especially the ones that are more complex than “obvious, Big Dipper things” through careful questioning that takes a holistic view of patients’ lives. How’s their jaw tension? What’s going on with their pelvic floor? Do they wear a lot of tight clothing? How do they get around the city? How are they feeling, in their mind as well as in their body? (The body’s fascial network connects all the way from the mouth tightened in stress down to the toes.)

“[Dr. Besong] was like, your foot is only 3% of your body. We’ve got to look at other areas. We looked at my psoas [a pelvic muscle]. We looked at my breathing. And that is what really transformed my healing process, looking at other areas . . . not just the general area of pain” says Coker. Dr. Besong encouraged her to start charting each morning, afternoon, and night with a traffic light system to help them track triggers, patterns, and progress. Green meant pain-free; yellow meant some manageable discomfort; red meant “angry Freddy.” (Freddy is the nickname Coker and Dr. Besong have given her left heel’s plantar fascia.) Over the past eight months, the colors of Coker’s days have shifted. Gradually, there were entire green days, then rows of them. More and more, green and yellow dominate the chart. No longer does she have days that are red even when she’s resting. Today, she’s dancing in company class and rehearsal pain-free.

“Do you have rehearsal after this?” queries Katie Boren. In the past, I’ve seen Boren on stage at the Met, but she’s now traded pointe shoes, tutus, and a ballerina bun for sneakers, barbells, and a wavy half-ponytail in her second act as a personal trainer. “No,” replies Coker with a smile. “You can kill me.” It’s the last week of March 2025 and Coker’s first week of rehearsals with ABT for the company’s upcoming performances of “Giselle:” first on tour in Minneapolis in late April and then at the Met in June. Boren knows all that rehearsing “Giselle” entails because, until a year and a half ago, she performed it herself: most recently alongside Coker in ABT’s corps de ballet, and before that with Boston Ballet and Staatsballett Berlin.

Many of the exercises Boren paces Coker through at the gym over the next hour are, in their general contours, familiar (lunges, planks, fire hydrants, bird dogs, squats, bridges)—but Boren’s version of them are to those in your garden-variety fitness class as a Shakespearean sonnet is to a nursery rhyme. I watch in awe as Coker, still smiling, does a series of bridges with her back braced against the jiggly dome of a Bosu ball, her hands clamping a 45 lb weight over her torso, and alternating sets of toes raised off the floor. “You’re killing it, Zimmi!” Boren encourages.

Gripping a 25 LB dumbbell in each hand as she does a sequence of lunges on and off two stacked blocks, Coker notes how weight training is helping her with her injury: “When you add a lot of weight, it forces you to lift up, and not sit in your heels,” she says, a body orientation that is especially important for anyone healing from plantar fasciitis. She’s feeling the results in class and rehearsals, noting to Boren that this week she’s seeing how all the obliques work they’ve been doing is helping her in “Giselle” rehearsals.

Then, it’s onto lunge jumps. Coker smiles the whole time, even in the later sets when most would be panting, grimacing, or cursing. “That’s ballet!” she notes brightly, when I point this out; even when it’s gruelling, dancers don’t grimace or curse. But it’s also Coker.

As we walk down the stairs from the gym to the street after the session, Coker exclaims that she’s already feeling the impact of the workout. “This is how I know it was a good one,” she laughs “when I walk down these stairs afterward and I’m like, whoa.” She sounds delighted. It feels good to be able to work hard again.

On a bright April afternoon, I follow Coker through windowless hallways lined with lockers and barrels of prop swords into a light-flooded studio at ABT headquarters that she’s reserved for a private class with Beth Ferrell. Ferrell, swathed in black except for her pink wrist brace and pink split-sole dance sneakers, was scouted by Baryshnikov to dance with ABT and transitioned into teaching after her retirement from performing in 1998. In the fall of 2024, Coker began taking classes with Ferrell, who teaches at both the JKO School and Peridance, an East Village dance center catering to dancers of all levels. She’d realized that her body seized up in stress going to company class at ABT, where she couldn’t help but think of all the opportunities passing by because of her injury. At Peridance, Coker could just dance. She got her confidence back there, and has now been able to bring that confidence back to company class at ABT.

Ferrell directs Coker through the rosary of movements that define every ballet class, from basic to advanced: warming up at the barre with pliés and tendus before moving into faster tempos and then shifting into the center of the room for turns and jumps. As Coker works through the combinations to piano versions of “Stairway to Heaven,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” and “Dancing Queen” piped from her teacher’s iPhone, Ferrell offers corrections and celebrates progress.

Coker is candid that “everything on my left side is harder, still” but she and Ferrell are tracking how far she’s already come. At this point, Coker can find the light even in what remains more difficult: “This left side, it’s drammmaaaa!” she laughs after a series of tough promenades (in which she makes a slow 360-degree rotation in arabesque while balancing on one flat foot).

In the center of the room Coker, challenging herself, is trying for triple pirouettes though Ferrell notes “most of the time, you only have time for a double!” on stage. She’s not happy with how they’re looking. Ferrell observes that Coker’s hesitating a bit before she launches into her turns. Coker tries again and considers. “I need to stop thinking and sitting in my preparation and just do it,” she remarks and Ferrell affirms: “Just dance. Dance to the music.” Coker tries again and she does a glorious triple pirouette for an audience of Beth, myself, and a stray water bottle labeled Calvin Royal III. I feel an urge to applaud. For a moment, time stops. And then it’s on to jumps.

Coker has two ready answers when asked what her dream roles to dance would be: Juliet and Giselle. To date, much of Coker’s most prominent casting has reflected her bright, buoyant qualities. “I always tend to do more animated roles,” she observes: the sassy, sultry Gertrudis in “Like Water for Chocolate;” sparkling Olga in “Onegin;” spritely Princess Praline in “Whipped Cream;” the capering wind-up doll Columbine in “The Nutcracker;” the pert, playful Adele Varens in Cathy Marston’s “Jane Eyre;” a jubilant “stomper” in “In the Upper Room.” But Coker’s dream roles require a dancer to channel both sunny gaiety (Act I) and profound anguish (everything thereafter). Especially Giselle.

In “Giselle,” dance is both joy and devastation. It’s how the ballet’s villagers come together in community and celebration, and how its central pair, Giselle and Albrecht, show their love for one another. In Act I, Giselle dies dancing, her broken heart giving out as she whirls around the stage. In Act II, a band of ghosts of other heartbroken girls tries to make Albrecht dance to his own death, but he’s saved by ghost-Giselle, who dances with him, giving Albrecht the strength to hang on until all the ghosts are dispelled by daybreak. In “Giselle,” dance can both destroy your life and save it. Following her injury and through her recovery, Coker has now experienced something of this dual nature of dance first-hand.

“Talent is a seed,” Zhong-Jing Fang tells me over the phone, her voice warm “life experience makes you blossom.” Fang is reflecting on her own experiences returning to ballet after time away to become a mother and to recover from injuries (including her own painful bout of plantar fasciitis). “Dancers are obsessed with time,” observes Fang, “The number one concern you have as a dancer is ‘Am I losing time?’” But Fang believes her own time away from ballet has made her a stronger dancer. She has encouraged Coker to consider how her injury could make her a better artist. “It’s so true,” Coker says “some of the best performances are when people take it from their personal lives.”

In addition to Fang, Coker names Stella Abrera, Tiler Peck, and Megan Fairchild as some of the dancers who inspire her as examples of artistic growth from the challenges of dancing post-partum, post-injury, or past the age when many dancers retire—as well as her own mother Michele, who herself recovered from plantar fasciitis. Coker still hopes for the kind of long, successful career those dancers have enjoyed, even as she recognizes that for some dancers, injuries like plantar fasciitis are career-ending. “I’m certainly not going to give up on myself,” she says, but adds “If this is not the place that I was meant to be at, then so be it. And I will…” her voice trails off for a moment. She pauses. “Opportunities are endless,” she concludes firmly.

What would come after dancing isn’t clear yet, and Coker hopes that decision is still many years away. After almost a year offstage, on April 19th she returned to dancing with ABT, performing “Giselle” with the company in Minneapolis. ABT’s summer and fall seasons followed: Coker was once again a ghost, a dancing peasant, and a swan, and stepped into new roles in Twyla Tharp’s “Push Comes to Shove,” as Persephone in Frederick Ashton’s “Sylvia,” the French ballerina in Antony Tudor’s “Gala Performance,” and the Cowgirl in Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo.” Being back onstage feels “amazing,” she reports. Soon, it will be time to start rehearsals for “Nutcracker.” And one day, Coker hopes to dance Juliet and Giselle: to have the chance to take all the joy and the pain she’s found in dance and put it out there, on the stage, where it can be transmuted into performances that step out of time and into memory.

Anna Eastman

Anna Eastmanis a writer based in New York City. She is currently an MFA candidate in Columbia's nonfiction writing program.

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Dancing Out of Time

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Anna Eastman

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Dancing Out of Time

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