After two decades of lyrical dancing punctuated by offstage drama — injuries, eating disorders, critical snark and a horrifying assault on her family — Jenifer Ringer is retiring. On Feb. 9, she’ll take her final bow with New York City Ballet before joining her husband in Los Angeles.
“I’ve had many leavings and returnings in this career,” the 40-year-old, raven-haired ballerina said lightly the other day at Lincoln Center’s Koch Theater, her second home. “This will be my final leaving, with no return!” She’s captured all the tumult — the letdowns and comebacks — in her memoir, “Dancing Through It,” out Feb. 20.
Born in North Carolina, she came to New York at age 15 and joined
NYCB soon after, in 1990. Noticed early for elegant dancing with a maturity well beyond her years, she rose steadily, becoming a soloist in 1995.
Somehow, that wasn’t enough.
“If people told me I was dancing well and I looked great, then I felt great for about five minutes,” she says. Injuries led to both anorexia and binge-eating, and finally a weight gain of 40 pounds. Just two years after her promotion, the company wouldn’t renew her contract.
Today, she says, she has no hard feelings: “I needed someone to kick me out. I would have lingered.”
Cut loose from dancing, she drifted. “There’s about six weeks of my life that I don’t remember,” she says. She pushed herself to finish an English degree at Fordham, but mostly holed up in her Upper West Side apartment, watching TV and eating, emerging only to shop or go to class.
Finally, she explains, “what brought me out of it all was my faith.” She’d grown up in a religious household, and reconnecting with All Angels’ Episcopal Church gave her back her equilibrium.
“I went from the darkest place I had ever been to standing on my own two feet,” she says. “So many people helped me that it’s impossible to say.”
One of those people was her future husband, fellow NYCB dancer James Fayette. They’d been booked for a guest engagement for a small company upstate. Overweight and out of shape, she told him there was no way she could perform, but he insisted on dancing with her.
“A couple of weeks after, we were preparing for another performance,” she says, “and what I thought was a rehearsal turned into a date.”
Gradually, Ringer got herself back into shape. With Fayette acting as liaison, she asked for a meeting with NYCB.
“They took a chance and took me back,” Ringer says gratefully. The chance paid off: She was promoted to principal dancer in 2000. A few months later, she and Fayette wed.
From then on, when she left, it was her choice. She took time off to have two children, Grace and Luke, now 6 and 2. After each birth, she worried that she wouldn’t be able to get back in shape, yet she did, returning to dazzle audiences — well, most people.
After opening night of “The Nutcracker” in 2010, New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay carped that Ringer “looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many” — an incident she refers to now, with a smile, as “Sugarplumgate.”
That slam provoked a nationwide outcry — but it also led to appearances on “Oprah” and the “Today” show, as well as the offer to write her memoirs.
But the biggest trial of all came last October, when her husband and 18-month-old son were attacked by a scissors-wielding madman in Riverside Park.
“I was getting my daughter ready for school,” she recalls. “There were four messages on my phone from James telling me he was on the way to the hospital. Then I got a call from the police.” Horrified, she pulled out of the week’s shows — she couldn’t put her performances above her family. Thankfully, both father and son escaped with only minor scars.
Fayette has since moved on to become managing director of the LA Dance Project. Next month, Ringer and the children will join him there. But first, her farewell performance: For her final time on the NYCB stage, she’ll dance two signature parts in Balanchine’s “Union Jack” and Jerome Robbins’ “Dances at a Gathering.” For the latter, she’ll be dancing a quiet duet in the midst of a tempestuous finale.
“It’s like the eye of a storm,” she marvels.
And so, perhaps, is she.