The theater for the New York City Ballet sits quiet and empty, with its endless rows of velvety red chairs and halos of golden light cast from a high-above chandelier. Even without the audience, the clapping and oohing and aahing, or the sound of a dramatic musical score, it's easy to imagine the magic of a performance. It's a feeling that ballerina India Bradley knows well, she tells me as we sit down to talk on a Monday in mid-January.
Bradley, 25, has been a member of the Corps de Ballet since August 2018. But this past December, she made history starring in George Balanchine's The Nutcracker as the first Black dancer cast as a Dewdrop, a role where she glides and pirouettes across the stage in a whimsical costume and tiara.
While Bradley doesn't consider herself a crier, she was moved by the crowd's response, especially since she wasn't expecting such thunderous applause. "It was so much pressure, and I was really nervous," she says. "The responsibility of [existing as] the first Black anything is something you cannot explain the feeling of. It's something on your shoulders that is really heavy. And when I came out and the audience had that reaction...it was just so emotionally supportive and really sweet." Her mother sat in the crowd, sobbing.
By the time I met Bradley, the curtain had closed on The Nutcracker. Bradley was on her day off from rehearsals, but she was busy preparing for the continuation of the company's 75th anniversary season. That meant working long days, starting at 10:30 a.m. and ending as late as 10:30 p.m.
Bradley is used to it, though. After all, there really is no before she was a ballerina, it's who she's always been.
She grew up in Detroit, Michigan, where her mother taught dance (she was previously a professional dancer for Alvin Ailey, as well as a choreographer). "My mom was teaching a lot of masterclasses around the city, and I would just have to go with her [since] I was really young," Bradley says. As her mother instructed college students, Bradley remembers "doing whatever everybody else [was doing]," which got her mother's attention. "I think [my mom] was like, 'Okay, this girl is really a busybody, and she clearly likes to dance.'"
Her mother put Bradley into her own dance classes, and by the time she was 6 years old, evenings were filled with long drives to the Academy of Russian Classical Ballet, where eventually she was practicing five or six times a week. "When you take ballet as a kid, the hours are late because you can only go after school, so [classes] would be until nine or 10 o'clock," Bradley says. "I just remember it being a bit exhausting, being sleepy, and everything having to be done in the car, but I was having a lot of fun."
By 13, Bradley received a scholarship to the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and she ended up moving to New York City with her mother. No longer dancing in a predominantly white space was a "huge identity moment" for Bradley. Being at the Harlem school taught her that "ballet can feel like a family." She adds, "Something that I know for a fact is that the percentage of Black women in your ballet class when you're 9 years old is going to be very slim. That's just the reality. In 2005, there were not that many Black girls in ballet school."
But the moment of experiencing a mostly Black environment didn't last more than a year after Bradley enrolled at the "extremely competitive" School of American Ballet, the New York City Ballet's official school. There, Bradley would officially earn her apprenticeship into the company.
It was a dream accomplished for Bradley. But it also proved the most challenging. "Your body's aching; I never felt that much pain before. The toes are bruised," she says. "And I was like, I don't know if I am physically cut out for this. Multiple people have told me they've had this experience in their first few days in the company. And I just cried."
Her first day at the New York City Ballet, she looked up at the sky and questioned whether she could continue. "A ballet dancer knows that feeling you have when you're 8 years old and you make that decision," Bradley says. "This is the same feeling you have when you're 18 and you're like, Well, I signed up for this shit. And most of us hate quitting, so we don't, and just go back and do it again and you get stronger, and that's just the life that it is."
The life that she wants. During 2020, the pandemic halted the Ballet's performance schedule, so Bradley took on a few modeling gigs. "I believe people on the set of photoshoots need to get things done quickly and need somebody who knows how to take direction and can physically move their body," she says. "You realize that everything a dancer has practiced their whole life is how to take direction, how to move." She enjoyed adding the accomplishment to her résumé, but "never chose modeling the way [she] did dance."
This February, she was on stage for Tiler Peck's Concerto for Two Pianos. The morning after her first performance, Bradley can still feel the energy, she tells me in an email. There were the Zac Posen costumes. "To wear something that is really well-thought-out, and that was such a process to create with so many hands involved—it really reminds you that ballet takes a team." There was the excitement of it being New York City Ballet dancer Peck's first time choreographing a ballet. "We really just wanted to make her happy," Bradley writes. And there was, of course, the dancing. "We were a little nervous, a little palms sweaty. It always feels good to get that first one done, and then you can build out from there." For a dancer, it's always about the movement.
