NEW YORK, NY.- “OK” is a word that comes up frequently in a conversation with Unity Phelan. It’s a calming, centering word, useful in many of the sticky situations that arise at New York City Ballet, where she is a principal dancer. During her debut in the Der Rosenkavalier section of “Vienna Waltzes” this season, it suddenly struck her that she was the only person onstage.

“Oh,” she said, remembering the moment in a hushed voice. “OK. It’s just me.”

When she found out 2 1/2 hours before the curtain that she would be making a debut in an excerpt from “Symphony in C” at the fall fashion gala, panic crept in. But then she righted herself: “I’m going to sew a pair of shoes,” she said. “I’m going to do this rehearsal, and we’re going to hope for the best. And if it’s not great, that’s OK.”

Phelan knew that she had three more shots at the ballet this season. “I always try to keep it light even when I’m just stressed out,” she said. “I think if I can convince myself that it’s OK, then I am OK.”

But what Phelan never is? Merely OK.

In one week this season, Phelan, 27, made debuts in signature roles in three major ballets by George Balanchine: “Apollo” (as Terpsichore), “Symphony in C” (the second movement lead) and “Vienna Waltzes,” in which she found herself alone in a mirrored ballroom wearing white gloves, her body draped in a clinging silk satin dress and her head graced with a glittering headpiece. She looked like Audrey Hepburn.

Each season, Phelan performs a ballet that makes her emotional, and this time it was “Vienna Waltzes” and that solitary moment as her arms floated above her head and her elegant hands pushed through the air. “I was like, Oh my God, what’s happening right now?” she said in a half whisper. “I just thought back to the 14-year-old who would sit in the back of the third ring every night at the ballet and watch in awe. In my head, I sang ‘Into the Woods’: ‘I’m in the wrong storyyy!’”

As a ballerina, Phelan is incandescent, with a beauty that seems not of this era. Her understated glamour recalls the kind of women who obsessed Truman Capote — Slim Keith, Babe Paley. Her stage makeup is light, minimal; her bun is never big. She doesn’t need extra.

What shines through in Phelan’s performances are her line and extension — she is 5 feet 8 and she uses her height to luxurious effect — but also the way she flows through steps in the most unmannered, musical way. There’s also another quality, less knowable: The under-the-surface subtlety of her drama. Sometimes it’s witchy and interior (as her eerie, floor-skimming Sleepwalker in “La Sonnambula,” another fall debut), and sometimes it’s playful (her invigorating Terpsichore). Either way, Phelan brings herself to the stage, not a cultivated self.

“I’m clay,” she said she likes to tell the company’s repertory directors.

“Obviously, I have some opinions, but I want the best possible product on the stage, and I want it to be the most genuine,” she said. “What I feel strongly about is that I want to be unaffected and as pure as it possibly can be.”

Capping her extraordinary fall season, which ends for her and the company on Sunday, is her wedding, on Oct. 22, to former City Ballet dancer Cameron Dieck. “I’m delegating stuff all over the place,” she said. “I had strong feelings about my dress, strong feelings about our DJ and the venue. And beyond that, I was like, you have strong feelings about flowers or candles? Here’s the florist’s phone number. Enjoy.”

But onstage, Phelan relishes having choices; she likes to be prepared. She has worked extensively with Heather Watts, the former City Ballet principal. “I have Heather Watts kind of on speed dial,” Phelan said. “Mostly, we’ll talk through the intention.”

Her favorite part of her job isn’t the performance, which she described as “a cherry on top, a fun little whip cream moment.” “I love working,” she said. “Everyone knows that I take class very seriously. And I love rehearsing. I like to feel so comfortable in something that I can kind of let go onstage.”

In “La Sonnambula,” a Poet becomes captivated by a Sleepwalker, a beautiful woman — or spirit — who appears in a flowing white dress holding a lighted candle as she skims across the stage en pointe. Despite the Poet’s advances, she is lost in her reverie.




For her Sleepwalker, Phelan found inspiration in “Jane Eyre” and the character of Bertha Mason, the first wife of Edward Rochester who is locked away. “There are so many ideas out there of who the Sleepwalker is,” she said. “I came up with my own version. For me, she’s a woman gone mad, but still has this underbelly of herself in there.”

She senses the mystery in her role in “Vienna Waltzes,” too, where “everyone is coupled off,” she said, and she’s by herself. “I love that they’ve given me these, like, crazy lady parts a little bit. I love finding my own story.”

Many dancers get pigeonholed into being a certain type of dancer, but Phelan’s repertory is remarkable for its range. Since the winter season, she has made debuts in a wide range of Balanchine ballets — “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” “Swan Lake,” “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” and the lead female in “Agon.” She can jump, she can turn. “I always think with Unity there’s a lot more than what you see,” Watts said. “She has a lot of a lot of facets. Like a real diamond.”

“My running joke with myself and my friends is that it’s big ruse,” she said, “because one day they’re going to be like, ‘Oh she can’t do that! What were we thinking?’”

Phelan, born in Princeton, New Jersey, trained at Princeton Ballet School, where Kyra Nichols, the celebrated City Ballet principal who lived nearby, sometimes took class. Phelan said, “My teacher literally pulled me and was like, ‘Watch. Her.’ Watch how she does everything. And I did, and I was like, ohhh.”

Phelan went on to study at the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet where, at 15, she met Indiana Woodward, a fellow principal who remains her best friend. “People will call us by each other’s names,” Phelan said. “We’re not at all similar in look or height or size — anything. But people will call me Indiana because we are conjoined.”

In 2021, they were promoted to principal within eight hours of each other. Phelan’s news came first. She told Woodward that she was allowed to be sad and told her that her day was coming. “I was like, ‘The one thing that’s missing right now is you being promoted as well,’” Phelan said. “And she only ended up being sad just overnight.”

What made Woodward cry this season? Watching Phelan perform the second movement of “Symphony in C” and seeing her step into the part as “this extremely regal ballerina,” Woodward said. “I’ve seen so many exquisite ballerinas do it, and Unity was one of them now.”

Over the course of the pandemic, many dancers have changed, some for the worse; others think they have changed, but remain the same. And there are those who have reached a deeper place. Phelan is one.

“Everyone said that,” she said. “I worked a lot on my basics. I didn’t have Marley” — a vinyl dance surface — “so I did barre every day on a wood floor. I felt it was better for my turnout, for my technique.”

Phelan, who has a degree from Fordham University in economics and organizational leadership, spent time with Dieck, who now works in finance. “We gardened, we did workouts together outside,” she said. “We cooked a lot of meals. We had a walk every day. I saw my family for the first time — meaningfully, more than 24 hours — and it was really refreshing.”

“It makes us look forward to retirement,” she added. “It’s going to be so fun when we have nothing to do.”

Quarantine taught her lessons: She learned that ballet is not her entire identity: “It’s important to me to continue to not let it overwhelm my whole world,” she said, “because then what do you have when you’re done?”

She credits her studio time with Kathleen Tracey, a City Ballet repertory director and former soloist, as being “very instrumental in getting me to where I am now with my technique,” Phelan said. “She’s really worked with me on building up the confidence — that I can take up space here. I’m allowed to take up space.”

But she was also just happy to be dancing again and back with City Ballet. “I was no longer afraid to be strong or afraid to put myself out there,” she said. “This is who I am, and this is how I’m going to do this. Take it or leave it. But this is my version.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.