Meet City Ballet’s Next Generation of Leading Men

At a time when the arts, and especially ballet and opera, feel particularly beleaguered, one highlight of the young year so far was the premiere last month of Alexei Ratmansky’s new work for New York City Ballet. Inspired by a No Kings protest, Ratmansky, the company’s artist in residence and a creator who has often combined artistic brilliance with increasingly pointed social and political commentary in recent years, presented “The Naked King,” a retelling of the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairytale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” that was sharply and bracingly current.

Alongside its biting satire, aimed directly at a president who has decimated national arts budgets and turned the Kennedy Center (where City Ballet often performs on tour) into a travesty, the work—the company’s five-hundredth original creation—also offered a showcase for some of the company’s most exciting talent. Besides bringing back the longtime and recently retired principal Andrew Veyette in a fat suit to portray the witless monarch, the dance’s first cast included Preston Chamblee, David Gabriel, and KJ Takahashi, three fast-rising soloists who have been especial standouts over the past year. All three have different strengths—Chamblee is known for his elegance, Gabriel for his precision, and Takahashi for his athleticism—but together they offer a broad scope of what City Ballet has to offer. As a vision of the company’s continued excellence and a promise for the years to come, whatever they may bring, these three young dancers are helping lead the way into an uncharted future for the art form.

DAVID GABRIEL

At just twenty-three years old, David Gabriel is one of City Ballet’s youngest soloists and also one of its newest, having reached that rank in 2024 after less than three propulsive years in the company. “I feel like I deal with pressure pretty well. I do feel it,” he admits. “Every time I go on stage, I get nervous and I feel like there is a pressure to perform well because I was promoted so young, so I feel like I have to prove something.”

Still, from his recent performances, it’s clear that Gabriel is exactly where he deserves to be. After dancing his first principal role in a Balanchine work in “Ballo della Regina” in only his second year in the corps, the Coloradan has demonstrated a sharp and rigorous technique beyond his years in a wide range of works from the company’s repertory, from classics like Peter Martins’s Swan Lake to contemporary works by Justin Peck and Kyle Abraham. A recent highlight was working with Ratmansky on “The Naked King,” in which Gabriel played one of the three duplicitous tailors who contrive to sell the monarch an “invisible” suit. “This is actually my first new work process with Ratmansky,” he says. “He’s so demanding yet commanding of the room and so inspiring to work with so I’m really excited. It’s extremely demanding, physically, but it’s also so much fun. We get to play up the theatrical side of ballet, which I’m really excited about.”

Growing up in Glenwood Springs, with a population of fewer than ten thousand people at the crux of two rivers, Gabriel considers himself “lucky” that his hometown had a ballet studio to nurture his budding passion. He remembers discovering at the age of two a video of Baryshnikov performing in The Nutcracker and being transfixed. “I can’t really explain it because I was very young when I saw this video, so it’s really been ever since I can remember that I’ve just loved to dance,” he recalls. “I would just dance, perform in my living room for my family, and copy the moves from the videotape. I can’t explain it. It’s something that just comes from inside me.” Like many others, he knew right away that he had found his calling: “I feel like there was really no other passion for me. I have just always loved to dance and I’ve known from a very young age that that was what I wanted to do for my career. I feel kind of lucky in that regard, that I had something that I was so passionate about that young.”

After starting tap lessons as a young child, he moved into ballet, a new endeavor for his local studio. “They were super excited because they had never had a boy that was interested,” he laughs. He studied locally in Colorado and then in Pennsylvania before moving to New York at seventeen to attend the School of American Ballet, which trains the vast majority of City Ballet’s dancers. He was named an apprentice in 2021, performing the featured role of Tea that winter in The Nutcracker, usually danced by much more experienced artists. In his first season after being promoted to soloist, he made a notable impression in “Le Baiser de La Fée” alongside principal Indiana Woodward. “I remember feeling really proud of myself after that,” he says. “That was sort of confirmation of, Yeah, I can do this and I’m making my way up.”

Not far removed from his own years as an aspiring young student, Gabriel says that the best advice he can offer to those just starting out is to “let your passion drive you,” a lesson that he took all the way to one of the most lauded stages in the world. “If you truly love this art form, put everything you have into it,” he adds. “If you’re in a small town, don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. Go to auditions, go to summer programs—that’s how you get seen. It’s hard, but every ballet dancer has experienced moving away from home. Just don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and follow your passion and your dream.”

KJ TAKAHASHI

KJ Takahashi is a soloist at New York City Ballet, one of the most prestigious classical companies in the world, but his greater claim to fame may be a nearly-decade-old YouTube video showcasing him freestyling to DJ Snake and Justin Bieber’s “Let Me Love You” on the corner of 57th and Broadway, a few blocks south of his current stage. In the video, which has been viewed nearly thirty-five million times, Takahashi demonstrates the smooth agility garnered from his years of hip hop dance training, which now add a unique spin to his ballet performances.

Takahashi first began dancing at around the age of eight, watching Michael Jackson and street dancers on YouTube before he started posting his own. “I would be hooked watching these videos, and I’d be in front of the computer, trying to emulate what they did,” he recalls. “My dad just saw some sort of potential, so then he started recording me doing these videos and then he posted them on YouTube. The videos did really well. Then it started turning into a weekly thing where I was just going out into these public spaces and freestyling.” His YouTube channel, where he is usually seen dancing to R&B, now has nearly half a million subscribers.

Takahashi studied under the former City Ballet dancer Paul Mejia before moving to New York at thirteen for the School of American Ballet and was named an apprentice at the company in 2019, performing featured roles in The Nutcracker before joining the corps in 2021. Two years later, he was promoted to soloist. Even in the short few years that Takahashi has been with the company, the lines between ballet and other forms of dance have blurred, thanks to groups like City Ballet which have invited choreographers from other genres to create for their stage. One artist of particular note for Takahashi has been Kyle Abraham, whose own dance language pulls from hip hop and rave culture as well as the classical vocabulary. “When I was training in ballet school, it really was black and white, either you’re a ballet dancer or you’re a hip hop dancer, and that’s how I saw it,” Takahashi recalls. “Then once I joined the company and Kyle Abraham came to choreograph, he was the main catalyst for me to be like, Whoa, both worlds can be mixed. Then I got the opportunity to perform his ‘Love Letter (on shuffle).’ One of the solos he made for [principal] Taylor Stanley was exactly that. There are obviously ballet steps in there, but there are still big influences from hip hop that were added into that solo and I was like, Wow, this is perfect.”

After years in which his sidewalk freestyling and his barre training seemed worlds apart, Takahashi says he was invigorated to find that they could be combined into a sum greater than its parts. “There’s definitely still a lot of works in the company that are very strictly classical, which I do appreciate as well, given New York City Ballet’s history,” he says. “It’s a ballet company, but also the whole purpose of New York City Ballet is to create new ways of dancing, create new ways to see dance, so that’s where I appreciate Kyle Abraham coming in and creating works.”

As he firmly establishes himself in the company thanks to his abilities, Takahashi says he approaches his position with a new perspective and a healthier mental attitude that has come with experience. “Now that I’ve been in the company for almost six years, I know I’m not the new, young talent. I have years behind my back now, I have experience under my belt,” he explains. “I do feel that sense of responsibility to step up and perform the way people expect me to perform, but also I don’t want to put that much pressure on myself to perform for somebody else. In the end, it’s really about performing for myself. My career was never perfect; everybody has lows and highs in their career on stage. I’ve learned from those lows, and I’m in a good place now. I have a more refreshed approach to performing now.”

But he says that even as he becomes a staple in the company’s roster, he will never be content to take it easy. Recalling a lesson from his younger years, he advises, “learn as much as you can. Especially at a young age—you learn the most when you’re young. Then, once you do make it to the professional level, still try and learn as much as you can. This is a belief that has been shared amongst me and my friends that you’ll always be a student. Regardless of whether you make it to principal or you’re still in the corps, you’re always a student. You’re going to be learning the whole time, and I still am as well. Put the ego to the side and just learn as much as you can.”

PRESTON CHAMBLEE

Preston Chamblee is quick to admit that, unlike many professional ballet dancers, the art form was not always his first love. “I hated it, I hated ballet,” he laughs about his first experience at the age of ten. “I didn’t want to do any of it.” Coming from a background in competitive dance and having focused on jazz dance until then, he recalls being bewildered after being thrown into an intermediate ballet class at his small studio. “I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t have the flexibility, I didn’t know what a tendu was, none of it. I was just lost and hated it.”

It wasn’t until a few years later, when he took a summer intensive at the nearby Carolina Ballet with the former City Ballet principal Suki Schorer that things began to connect. “That’s when I was introduced to Balanchine, that’s when I discovered what New York City Ballet was,” he recalls. “That’s when I found that ballet could also be enjoyable and fun and free, and it was more about the movement rather than the rigidness of the technique. That’s when I could find the joy in it.” He continued training in North Carolina and first attended the School of American Ballet in New York at seventeen. After a successful run at the Youth America Grand Prix for young ballet dancers, Chamblee found himself faced with the difficult decision between returning to SAB or taking one of the job offers he had already received. “It was a huge risk and a big gamble because I had so many job offers and scholarships from the year before,” he says. “So it was, go for the sure job or go after what you really want, which was to go to SAB. It was a really big decision and it took a while to decide. I felt like in my heart, I knew what I wanted to do, but I was battling a lot with, what’s the smart thing? It was really tough, but I decided to go to SAB and see what happened. I am so, so, so grateful that I took the risk.”

Chamblee’s venture paid off when he was invited to become an apprentice at City Ballet the following year, and it took only a few short months before he was promoted to the corps de ballet. “I got thrown into ‘Rodeo,’ and that was the ballet that got me my corps contract,” he recalls about resident choreographer Justin Peck’s celebrated 2015 work reimagining Aaron Copland’s classic score. “A special moment was that I got to be coached by [former City Ballet principal] Albert Evans for that role. We got to be in the studio, just the two of us, and he really combed through the role with me. I did the performance. I was crying and I was so happy, and then after the performance, he came up to me and he looked at me and he just said, ‘You’re home.’ That was a huge, huge, pivotal moment for me. That was a big role for me and one that will stick with me for forever.”

In the years since, Chamblee has established himself as a refined dancer equally comfortable with both classical and contemporary works. As he has found himself as a performer, he has also come into his own as an artist, coming of age in a time when the company and the arts world at large have been undergoing a major upheaval. “I think one of the biggest changes that’s been really interesting to see over my career here is the strength of the dancers. When I first got into the company, it was very just, do what you’re told. It was very much about surviving and trying to make the best of a very intense and sometimes toxic situation,” he says. “I think we’re in an era in the world, in the arts, that people are less afraid of their own voice, and they are truly understanding the value that we have. I think the pandemic was a big wake-up call for a lot of us. Realizing that we weren’t, quote-unquote, essential workers I think made us fight even harder for the place that we have in society and in the world and in arts. I feel like we are so essential to the world. Without the arts, the world will die.”

Along with his fellow performers, Chamblee says that the last few years have taught him how to stand up for himself and what he believes in, no longer content to serve as just a part of someone else’s vision but intent on embracing his own agency. “The dancers have really taken that to heart and now are getting to an era where we demand the respect that we deserve and we’re truly able to fight for our place. I think as time has gone on, understanding what that means to me in my career has been difficult but really eye-opening,” he says. “I’ve always been a little bit more of a soft-spoken person, but finding my own courage, finding my own voice, and speaking up for what is true and what is right and what I think is just has been really wonderful. I think without New York City Ballet, I don’t know if I would have found that inner strength and that inner voice. I think the dancers have really stepped up in the culture that we’re in and have found an inner strength. I think the world is starting to listen, and that’s really encouraging.”

New York City Ballet’s spring season begins on April 21 at the David H. Koch Theater, New York.