He’s famous for lifting ballerinas high in the air — and for landing a sex columnist. Charles Askegard, who married Candace Bushnell in 2002, spun his last pirouette with the New York City Ballet yesterday, closing out a 24-year career.
The good-natured Minneapolis native says he’s excited to be leaping into new ventures, which include founding his own dance company, Ballet Next. And while he’s not a sentimental guy, the 42-year-old says he’s been bidding a silent farewell whenever he was on the Lincoln Center stage this season.
“During each performance, I think: This is the last time I will do ‘Serenade,’ this is the last time I will do ‘Stars and Stripes.’ But that’s made it wonderful, because you appreciate things so deeply when you know that they won’t be there again.”
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What he won’t miss is the unrelenting cycle of rehearsals and performances.
“The schedule is brutal,” he says, folding his 6-foot-4 frame into a chair in the building where he’s spent nearly every waking hour for years.
“We’re here first thing in the morning and don’t leave until 11 or 12 at night, and you see the same people every day. It becomes a little cloistered.”
At least until he met Bushnell. The scribe who gave the world the “Sex and the City” franchise exposed him to a world beyond Balanchine and ballet shoes. “Her friends are writers and in media and painters, so it was a bigger group of artists,” he says. “Finding different points of view and making them relate to what you do helps you grow as a person.”
Askegard is considered the great partner for the ballerinas at City Ballet, thanks to his height and elegance. His ability to partner may sometimes have eclipsed his turns as a soloist, but Askegard says he doesn’t see it that way.
“I love the relationship between a man and a woman onstage,” he says. “I remember someone said to Balanchine, ‘Your ballets have no stories,’ and Balanchine said, ‘Put a man and a woman on a stage together, and you have a story.’ ”
Onstage, his story often involved Maria Kowroski, with whom he was paired from the start. Offstage, it started at a City Ballet gala, when a friend introduced him to Bushnell.
“We just hit it off right away. It was an instant connection,” he says. He remembers that his wife-to-be was wearing an astronomically expensive diamond and had security guards hovering over her. The duo soon jettisoned the jewels and the muscle and ran downtown in the rain, where they danced all night at Bungalow 8.
They’re still at it.
“She’s a good dancer,” says Askegard. “I mean,” he adds with a laugh, “she’s not as good as me.”
Do they dance together often?
“Actually, every night I chuck her up and she spins around the ceiling fan,” he jokes.
He says his favorite episode of “Sex and the City” is the one where Mikhail Baryshnikov, playing one of the Sarah Jessica Parker character’s many love interests, chases down a thug who swipes her purse.
“Misha does this jeté over five bags of garbage,” he marvels. “It was pretty awesome.”
He says he decided to pack it in last winter, a decision he says his wife supported.
“It seemed right to finish on a good, strong note, when I’m dancing well and doing things that I want to do,” he says. “This is part of a dancer’s life. You do this career for a time, and after that, you move on. Dance is a life that happens in the moment. It disappears when the performance is over.”