Bouder in her Lincoln Center dressing room. (Michael Sofronski)
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She flies through the air like a shooting star, but she crashes to earth like one, too.
Ashley Bouder, a principal ballerina with the New York City Ballet, is among the finest ballet dancers in the world. But, man, she wipes out a lot.
“I’m famous for falling,” Bouder tells The Post, with a shrug of her shoulders. “Everyone knows that I fall. Everybody in this company knows, everyone in every other company knows — that’s just my deal. Those are the cards I was dealt.”
Like many great artists, she got an early start on her signature move.
“The very first time I fell onstage, it was in a debut and I was 17 years old,” she recalls. She was performing as Dewdrop in “The Nutcracker.”
“My first thought was, ‘Is that the floor?’ My face was like 2 inches from it. And my second thought was, ‘Well, it can’t get any worse, so I might as well get up,’ ” Bouder says.
After seven years as a principal with City Ballet and, by her estimate, more than 20 onstage tumbles, Bouder has an inner calm about her crashes. The 5-foot-5 dynamo ticks them off like a diner waitress listing the day’s specials.
There are face plants, stomach slides and butt bounces. There’s the time she fell on national television, the first time she wiped out as Dewdrop; the second time she wiped out as Dewdrop (during a film shoot); the time she fell just walking onstage; the three times she’s fallen while dancing “Divertimento No. 15,” in two separate roles.
“I fell through my partner’s hands once,” she says. “I’ve been traveling backward in an arabesque and fallen on my knee and my face. I’ve fallen [turning] in a bourré.”
Bouder, who is known for her athleticism, says her stumbles often occur when her foot slips after she leaps into the air like LeBron James. But, she shrugs, “Ballet is a live art form. It’s not meant to be perfect.”
In fact, she says, her falls might be a draw for some.
“I think there’s a contingent of the audience that comes to see me hoping I’ll fall,” she says. “It’s exciting.”
At the opening night of City Ballet’s winter season on Jan. 17, that contingent wasn’t disappointed. Bouder stepped across the stage during “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” lost her footing and went down. The audience gasped, Bouder hopped back up, finished the piece without a hitch, walked into the wings and tweeted to her 4,500-odd followers: “Well, I guess it wouldn’t be a NYCB season without a Bouder fall. You’re welcome. Let the season begin!”
Although the 28-year-old dancer normally has a sense of humor about her tumbles, that night she did not.
“I was really angry because I was stepping across and landed on my butt. The floor was just slippery. I wasn’t doing anything big.”
But company ballet master Peter Martins comforted her in the wings, she says. “He said: ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, come here,’ and gave me a big hug.”
Bouder tweets about her smash-ups partly because she doesn’t like the way ballet is sometimes seen as an inaccessible, archaic art form. She uses her Twitter feed to comment on everything from politics to her puppies to her injuries.
“People don’t know what ballet is,” she says. “They don’t know who we are. They consider this an elite art form and they think it’s very closed off. They should know what’s going on in our lives. ”
And sometimes, that includes running on stage and falling flat on her face, like she did when she debuted “Donizetti Variations.” Before she even danced a step, she “did a double-butt-bounce slide across center [stage] with no hands. I actually left skid marks on the floor, which the stage manager showed me later,” she says, laughing. “I was supposed to run out and pose, and I ran out and posed on the floor. I was so excited —and then BOOM!”
Her partner, Andrew Veyette, says he was so confused — one second she was on his arm, ready to begin the performance, then, suddenly, she wasn’t.
“It must have looked to the audience like I was trying to sabotage her,” Veyette says. “All we had done was walk out onstage.”
“She definitely likes the ground,” jokes former NYCB dancer Charles Askegard, who was once laid low by Bouder in rehearsal. “But I have a lot of respect for her. She jumps so high, so maybe it’s a way of evening things out. Yin and yang, I guess.”
Even at a world-class company like City Ballet, falls are not fatal to a career. In fact, they are somewhat encouraged.
“That’s the culture at City Ballet. [George] Balanchine [who co-founded the company] encouraged this — the dances are often off-balance and they cover a lot of space in large movements. They can be very fast, so there is a lot of room for dancers to be in positions in which their feet would come out from under them,” says Jennifer Homans, author of the book “Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet.”
“It’s applauded in our company,” agrees principal dancer Megan Fairchild. “It means you weren’t saving yourself — you were going for it.”
And Bouder is always going for it.
“She’s dancing 110 percent all of the time,” says Veyette. “She’s always pushing the envelope of what’s safe when she’s dancing.”
But, Fairchild admits, the ‘Ohhhhh’ sound from the audience after a topple is “the worst sound you’ve ever heard.”
Still, the dancers manage to find the humor in it. Someone in the company made a blooper reel of all the spills during the most recent “Nutcracker” performances and
e-mailed it to company members, she says. Bouder’s Dewdrop drop made the montage.
Last week, Bouder’s virtuoso skills were on display during Balanchine’s “Tarantella,” a piece inspired by Gypsies who believed they could dance the poison of a tarantula bite out of their bodies. Bouder, as always, performed as if her life depended on it, pirouetting and leaping her way through a frenetic six minutes, all the while flirting playfully with her partner, Joaquin De Luz, and the audience.
The performance earned her and De Luz four curtain calls. Those hoping for a plummet that night had to settle instead for perfection.
scohen@nypost.com