NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- On Mondays, the day most ballet dancers spend soaking their aching feet, Skylar Brandt, a soloist at American Ballet Theater, takes a different route. First, she has ballet class, then Pilates; next, a two-hour private coaching session at a City Center studio and, finally, a visit to the chiropractor.

“Sometimes my days off are harder than my days at ABT just because I make it that way,” she said. “It’s a total investment in myself.”

She likes to work. Soloists, generally, have down time — too much for Brandt’s taste. “I just turned 27, and I feel like at this point I should be starting to experience more growth,” she said. Or some growth. It’s not just about being promoted; she really just wants to dance.

At Ballet Theater, Brandt has found that her best opportunities have arisen from filling in for injured dancers in prominent parts like Medora in “Le Corsaire,” Princess Praline in “Whipped Cream” and Columbine in “Harlequinade.”

She has been placed on standby — waiting backstage in costume and makeup, just in case — for Kitri in “Don Quixote” and Lise in “La Fille Mal Gardée.” She has never performed those parts, but she knows them because of those Mondays spent working on roles she might, at some point, get the chance to dance. As Kevin McKenzie, Ballet Theater’s artistic director, put it, she “has her focus so in place that nothing seems to rattle her.”

But while she is happy that McKenzie trusts her enough to give her “three days’ notice to learn a three-act ballet like ‘Le Corsaire,’” she said, she doesn’t want to build a career that’s dependent on her friends’ getting injured or sick.

Now she has a part to call her own. And it’s not a hand-me-down. It’s Giselle — although for just one show.

Securing the coveted debut — opposite Joo Won Ahn on Feb. 16 at the Kennedy Center in Washington — wasn’t easy. Each year, after Ballet Theater’s spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Brandt meets with McKenzie to discuss what she might want to work on over the summer. This year she took a bold approach and flat-out asked him what she would be dancing the next year.

“He mentioned ‘Giselle’ and said something like, ‘keep a strong eye on it,’” she said. “So he alluded to it, but it didn’t seem definitive.”

Still, that was enough for Brandt to delve into the role under the guidance of husband-and-wife team Maxim Beloserkovsky and Irina Dvorovenko, former American Ballet Theater principals who have been coaching her privately for four years.

The three worked on “Giselle” the summer. But when Brandt checked in with McKenzie in the fall, it seemed as though the part was no longer an option. She noticed, though, that there was a performance at the Kennedy Center with a cast to be announced. “I had to basically push for that show myself,” she said. “It would have been nice if I didn’t have to go in and keep pushing, but I also understand that sometimes that’s what you have to do to move forward.”

Or at least that’s what she has recently started to understand. Brandt, who has been part of the Ballet Theater world longer than most — she began studying at its Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in 2005 before joining the company in 2011 — doesn’t like to ask for parts. She prefers to operate on the assumption that good work is rewarded.

Brandt will debut as Aurora in Alexei Ratmansky’s “The Sleeping Beauty” in New York this spring, but she sees “Giselle” as presenting a different kind of artistic stretch. During the course of its two acts, the heroine — a peasant girl with a weak heart — falls in love with Albrecht, a nobleman disguising his true identity. When she realizes that he is betrothed to another, she goes mad and dies, ending up in the land of the Wilis, or spirits of women who died before they could marry. Brandt, tiny and radiant, is a technical virtuoso; Giselle calls for that and more.

“I have never been really great at adagio and moving slowly,” she said. “But I don’t know if I’ve ever tried or been coached in that kind of thing. In the second act especially, you have to be graphically precise because it’s so bare and so raw. That’s why I’m grateful to Irina and Max for sculpting and shaping me.”

Beloserkovsky, in a joint interview with his wife, called Brandt “the pioneer of the Irina and Max training program.”

In coaching a specific part, they like to give options. “We highlight what looks better, what looks more exciting,” Dvorovenko said. “But it’s her choice. You need to be in your skin. If you feel good, but it doesn’t project we’ll say that we need to try to do something else.”

Because of Brandt’s improved artistry and posts of her rehearsals on Instagram, many other dancers — including Isabella Boylston and Calvin Royal III of Ballet Theater — have also worked privately with the couple. The coaches know that their 360-degree approach isn’t for everyone. “Me screaming in one ear and Max in another,” Dvorovenko said, with a laugh. “It’s 3D. Or 4D.”

Because there are so many dancers at Ballet Theater, finding enough one-on-one time with coaches be difficult. Brandt said that even if she has one hour of variations coaching with highly respected ballet mistress Irina Kolpakova — and that’s a lot of time to devote to one dancer — it’s still not enough.

But two consecutive hours is transformative. “It’s going to sink in a lot better because I don’t have the pressure of it ending,” she said.

At a recent rehearsal, Beloserkovsky hummed around Brandt like a bee while Dvorovenko sat in front, tapping a foot to emphasize certain counts as she narrated the action of the mad scene. At that moment, Giselle relives a memory from earlier in the ballet when she and Albrecht counted the petals of a flower in a game of “he loves me, he loves me not.” Albrecht had discarded a petal so that the answer would land on the affirmative. As Giselle realizes Albrecht’s duplicity, the memory comes flooding back.

“It’s like, the flower told me the truth,” Dvorovenko said.

Brandt nodded, but added, “I’m wary of making faces.”

Dvorovenko said: “You don’t need to make faces. It’s strong enough. You’re in the zone. You relive it. And also, you’re delaying everything because you’re still recalling everything.”

Beloserkovsky explained that’s why she needed to be slightly behind the beat: “I need somewhere that look of a crazy person.”

Brandt tried the moment again. Dvorovenko gasped. “That’s it,” she said. “Oh my God, it looks so fragile.”

Brandt wants her Giselle to stand out: not to look like just another village girl. After all, Albrecht chooses her. “I think it might be something about the eyes,” she said. “It’s like there’s got to be a little bit of mystery to her.”

She sighed. “I think my face moves a lot, so that’s something I’ve been working on,” she said. “Sometimes you need to have a half smile. It’s so hard, because you could be feeling something, but you almost have to pull it back. And the use of the eyes. It’s so minute.”

Beloserkovsky is big on projection; the eyes are everything. At one point, Brandt made her eyes ancient and luminous, like an icon. “I explained to her, ‘I’ve seen the ballet maybe 3,000 times, but what you just did I felt my skin,” he said. “We need to keep this.’”

The couple, who will also coach her on Aurora, see her shot at “Giselle” as huge. “It’s a ballerina role,” Beloserkovsky said. “It’s a lottery ticket.”

Growing up in Westchester and New York City, where she shared an apartment with her parents when her training intensified — her two sisters, one, a former Knicks City Dancer, were by then enrolled in college — Ballet Theater was the only company she was interested in. Her mother, Barbara Brandt was a well-known fitness trainer in the 1990s; she trained John McEnroe, Joan Lunden and football player Butch Woolfolk.

“I’m really close with my family,” she said. “Everyone knows my parents. They’re super open and because they’re in New York, they always welcome everyone with open arms into their house, so any friends that I have that have parents in China or wherever they are, my parents are practically surrogate parents to a lot of people.”

For Brandt, “Giselle” is more than a role, however important. It shows that she’s standing up for herself. And of course she would like to be promoted. “I definitely hope to achieve whatever I can at ABT, but if for whatever reason ABT is not able to give me those things, then I’m open to going elsewhere,” she said. “I think I’ve been extremely narrow-minded my whole life.”

Now she is trying to be smart about her future and to put herself out there no matter what happens. “If I decide ABT is the place for me, at least I will be staying from an empowered place versus feeling like I’m waiting for life to happen to me.”

And if she stays no matter what? “Maybe I still would prefer it over being elsewhere,” she said. “Because I chose to be there.”

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