Budding Choreographer Aleisha Walker Preps for a Joyce Theater Premiere
Aleisha Walker stands at the center of the dance studio in a gray leotard and shorts, her curly brown hair pulled back in a low bun. She listens deeply to the music—eyes closed, fingers tapping out the counts, nodding—before opening into an exquisite fan kick on relevé. After landing, she pauses again, switches the position of her arms and checks herself in the mirror with a pensive “Hm.” The American Ballet Theatre corps member is rehearsing for The Joyce Theater’s Ballet Festival UNITE, which will open August 13. This year’s festival, organized by ABT principal dancer Calvin Royal III, features works by masters like Sir Kenneth MacMillan and George Balanchine alongside emerging choreographers. At 23, Walker is the youngest choreographer on the program to present a world premiere.
After Walker finishes rehearsing, we sit at the front of the studio and speak about the inspiration for her new solo, Impatiens. She tells me she’d been on the bus one morning when she noticed a bright pink flower out the window. “I don’t know,” she says with a shy shrug. “It kind of felt like me, as a flower.” Then she glances back at Royal, who is warming up in the corner while we talk, wearing headphones and warm-up booties but clearly there for her.
When I ask Royal, later, why he invited Walker to join the festival, he says, “I knew she was a budding choreographer, and thought what an incredible opportunity it would be to allow her to not only create a new work but to create it on herself, where she could explore and discover and share the things that she’s good at and the things that she likes.” Then he adds, “She reminds me a lot of myself when I first joined the company.”
Like Royal, Walker came to ballet “late” (Royal at age 14 and Walker at 11). Born in Houston, Texas, she says she was a clumsy child—though this is hard to believe. Her mother put her in a praise dance class in hopes that it would help her gain some grace. She gained not only grace but a true love of movement. She went on to attend performing arts schools where she studied ballet and modern dance. Then, at the suggestion of former Houston Ballet principal Lauren Anderson, Walker tried out for the Houston Ballet Academy, which she attended from 2012 to 2017.
In 2018, Walker attended ABT’s Summer Intensive and knew she’d found her home. “I loved the teachers, the city, the whole environment.…After my first day I was like, ‘Mom, I want to go here. This seems like the place for me.’ ” She began training at the ABT Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School that September.
From there, things moved quickly. Walker joined ABT Studio Company in September 2019, became an apprentice with the main company in November 2022, and joined the corps de ballet in June 2023.
During the pandemic lockdown, the Studio Company took classes together on Zoom. One of those was a dance composition class, led by choreographer Amy Hall Garner. The timing was right for Walker, who felt she finally knew her body and what it was capable of. “I could just play around,” she says of the class. “There was no grade, and no one else there, really. I felt like I could do it just for me.” In that freedom and solitude, she discovered her passion for choreography.
Studio Company artistic director Sascha Radetsky noticed Walker’s talent and urged her to create an original variation for the Young Creation Award at the Prix de Lausanne in 2023. Walker submitted a solo, Do You Care?, set to “Nocturnal Waltz,” by Johannes Bornlöf, and performed by Madison Brown. It was selected as one of five finalists worldwide, and then one of two winners at the competition. It was such a hit that many dancers chose to perform it as their solo for the 2024 competition.
Impatiens will be the first piece Walker has choreographed for herself, and though the process has been challenging, it is helping her “grow as an artist and a person.” She is learning to trust how movement feels in her body, and that she is drawn to large shapes and clean lines. “I like covering space and feeling good.”
Despite the title, the solo is not flowery. “It’s pretty,” she says, “but, like nature, it’s not perfect. That’s what I’m going for here. Nice, pretty shapes, but also there’s more than what meets the eye.”
