New York City Ballet (NYCB) Principal Dancer Ashley Bouder will give her final performance with NYCB on February 13, following a 25-year career with the Company, including 20 years as a Principal Dancer. Bouder was promoted to Principal Dancer 20 years ago today, on January 22, 2005, which is also the anniversary of NYCB co-founder George Balanchine’s birth.
For her farewell performance, she will dance the title role in Balanchine’s Firebird, a role that she first performed during the 2001 Spring Season, less than a year after joining the Company.
Bouder was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and began her ballet training at the age of six at the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet with Marcia Dale Weary. After attending the 1999 Summer Program at the School of American Ballet (SAB), the official school of NYCB, she was invited by SAB to continue her training during the Winter Session. As a student, Bouder performed featured roles in Balanchine’s Danses Concertantes and Stars and Stripes for SAB’s 2000 workshop performances.
Bouder was named an apprentice with NYCB in June 2000, and became a member of the corps de ballet that October. She was promoted to the rank of Soloist in February 2004, and in January 2005, Bouder was promoted to Principal Dancer.
Since joining NYCB, she has performed featured roles in numerous ballets by Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Mauro Bigonzetti, Christopher d’Amboise, Jorma Elo, Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon, among others. In addition, Bouder has originated featured roles in works by Kyle Abraham, Warren Carlyle, Albert Evans, Douglas Lee, Edwaard Liang, Wayne McGregor, Susan Stroman, Richard Tanner and Troy Schumacher, among others.
In 2002, Bouder appeared in the nationally televised Live From Lincoln Center broadcast “New York City Ballet’s Diamond Project: Ten Years of New Choreography” on PBS, dancing in Christopher Wheeldon’s Mercurial Manoeuvres. In 2011, she danced the role of Dewdrop in PBS’ Live from Lincoln Center telecast of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, which was also screened in movie theaters around the world.
Bouder was the recipient of a 2019 Benois de la Danse award for best female dancer. She also received SAB’s Mae L. Wien Award for Outstanding Promise in 2000, and was the 2002-2003 recipient of the Janice Levin Award, which is bestowed annually on a promising member of NYCB’s corps de ballet.
For complete program information, visit nycballet.com.
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