If you fall for a ballerina, watch your timing. Beginning with a missed first kiss, New York City Ballet dancers Troy Schumacher and Ashley Laracey’s romance started off with no sense of rhythm.
But they found their groove. Laracey is now Schumacher’s muse, dancing with his troupe, Ballet- Collective, which plays The Joyce on Wednesday as part of the Ballet v6.0 Festival.
And not only is she his dance partner — come June, she’ll be his wife.
“I made him work for it,” laughs Laracey. An NYCB soloist, she looks like the stereotypical “bunhead” — endless legs and long, chestnut hair. But she’s anything but shy.
Schumacher is part of the company’s ensemble and a rising choreographer. Slim and boyish — an “old 26” to Laracey’s 30 years — he says he was struck by her the moment he saw her over a decade ago at the company’s School of American Ballet, where he was a student. By then she was an apprentice, one small leap short of full company membership.
Typical of their timing, he was going into the elevator and she was coming out.
“I wanted to know who she was,” he says. “I thought she was beautiful.”
He made the company but twisted his ankle on his first day on the job. Laracey, meanwhile, was nursing a torn ligament, and he’d go to her Upper West Side apartment to keep her company.
“Troy kept hanging out,” she says. “We bonded over injury.” After one of his visits, Schumacher hesitated for several minutes, working up the courage to go back, knock on the door and finally kiss her.
He knocked twice. There was no answer. Growing up in Florida with a police captain dad, Laracey was taught never to open a door if she wasn’t sure who was behind it. So she didn’t.
When he caught up with her later on and explained, she gave him the classic brushoff: “Can’t we just be friends?”
He was crushed, but moved on. A few years later, when they were part of the ensemble of “Romeo + Juliet,” he started to flirt. Her birthday was coming up and he asked her to dinner. Dinner led to another date and, seemingly out of nowhere, a real kiss.
“He says I did it,” Laracey jokes.
They had already been living together for a few years when he decided to pop the question. Like any good choreographer, he wanted to propose in the perfect setting: a castle in Denmark, where the company was touring. But before he could ask her, fellow company member Jonathan Stafford asked Laracey’s friend Brittany Pollack to marry him. Schumacher didn’t want Laracey to be upstaged.
And so he waited, thinking of clever ways to disguise the box he was giving her so she wouldn’t know it held a pear-shaped diamond engagement ring. Laracey was oblivious: When he told her he wanted to give her something special for her 30th birthday, she says, “I thought it was a dog.”
Finally, on April 25 — two days before her birthday, on the sixth anniversary of their first real date — he brought her back to the building where she ignored his knock, went down on one knee and asked her if she would open the door this time. She started to cry and laugh.
The wedding’s set at a friend’s home in Millbrook, NY. For now, though, they’re busy working. Not only will Laracey star in his “Epistasis” at the Joyce this week, but she’s in a short film he’s choreographing for a fashion boutique.
The happy couple’s dance may have started on two left feet, but it’s become the perfect pas de deux.