“Y’all” is pleasant enough on its own, but to hear it more than a dozen times during a ballet class in New York City is a happy find. As in: “I want y’all to move a lot more. If you fall off your pirouette that is ohhh-kay.”
That voice, that word, that Southern sound — Jenifer Ringer is back in town.
Ringer, a former principal with New York City Ballet, is now the director of the intermediate and advanced divisions and artistic programming at the company’s School of American Ballet.
As Ringer, 52, called out combinations in a recent technique class, starting with a simple plié sequence at the barre, she reminded her students of the basics: To press all 10 toes into the floor. To pull the legs together, wrapping their muscles for increased turnout. To contract the stomach into the spine. Preparation is important to Ringer: She likes to talk about where dancers should be holding weight in their bodies so that they can move in any direction.
“When y’all move, it’s so much better,” she said. “So much better.”
As a teacher, Ringer is precise and firm, yet encouraging. She can get carried away. Before the class, she warned: “I get very frizzy and red faced, so I’ll lose my dignity, probably.”
Her face did grow more pink, just as her smile became more joyful. She did not lose her dignity, but she did make her students want to dance bigger, bolder — to hear the music and to be on it. For her, musicality and efficiency matter.
Ringer is part of a restructured leadership at the school, which is headed by Jonathan Stafford, who is also the artistic director of New York City Ballet. The school is now run by a team of three: Ringer; Aesha Ash, who is head of artistic health and wellness; and Katrina Killian, the director of the children’s and preparatory divisions.
The school, considered by most to be the country’s most prestigious ballet academy, trains dancers for City Ballet — the majority of the company comes from the school — and beyond. Stafford decided to restructure after Darla Hoover’s short stint as chair of faculty, a job she took on when Kay Mazzo retired. Stafford said that he realized it was too big a job for one person, that “we needed to have multiple people leading different aspects of the school.”
And after the pandemic, the school was going through a transition. Wellness has become a priority. “This was a much broader effort,” Stafford said, “to support the students at the school beyond the tendus and pliés.”
Last year Stafford invited Ringer to be a guest teacher for a week. Simone Gibson, 16, described that time as “a breath of fresh air because it felt like she really wanted to be there.” Gibson said, “She was like, I’m coming here, I’m here for you, like, I’m ready to learn with you and learn about you as a dancer.”
All the while Stafford had something bigger to pitch. “I wanted to sit with her face to face and tell her that I really felt I needed her at S.A.B.,” he said. “I wanted to work together with her at the school.”
The job offer came as a surprise to Ringer, though she and Stafford know each other well. At City Ballet, they were dance partners, a relationship in which, Stafford said, “a person’s character is laid bare in those stressful, pressure-packed, vulnerable moments.”
When he saw their names on a casting sheet or a rehearsal schedule, he would be filled with relief. “I would internally celebrate,” he said.
Ringer, whose romantic presence and musical dancing could bridge drama and humor with ease, never really thought of herself as a teacher. “I wasn’t one of those dancers that studied class,” she said.
But her teachers at the school left important afterimages. She studied under the best, including Stanley Williams, Alexandra Danilova, Antonina Tumkovsky (or Tumi) and Suki Schorer, who still trains dancers at the school.
“All so very different,” Ringer said. “Tumi worked on our strength and stamina. Suki worked on our precision and our presentation quality. Stanley was subtlety and control. And Danilova had the perfume and the magic.”
Her own teaching career began gradually. After retiring from City Ballet in 2014, she moved to Los Angeles to direct the Colburn Dance Academy, and in 2017, she became dean of its Trudl Zipper Dance Institute, where her husband, James Fayette, another former City Ballet principal, was associate dean.
Being at Colburn and caring for students over the course of a year transformed her ideas about what a teacher could be. She liked planning for them: “What repertory is good for these students to learn this year?” she said. “Knowing that I could have goals to work on — seeing them and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, we really need to work on arabesque and planning that for a month.’”
She also found she enjoyed digging in. “That’s where I think I started to find the passion,” she said. “That’s where I really got a lot of my understanding of what it means to be a teacher.”
Ringer loves that at School of American Ballet, “it’s a given that we’re going to attempt excellence,” she said. “I remember the feeling of being one of these students. I remember wanting to please these teachers more than anything. And now being on the other side and being one of the teachers and knowing how hard they work and how much they care, I find it very touching. And I know that I ask a lot of them.”
But she also knows that they want to be pushed. Kai Perkins, 16, said that Ringer focuses on building strength. “If we’re doing an adagio step, she’ll tell us how to be on our leg before we do the combination,” Perkins said. “So we go in and do it, already knowing how to approach the step. Which I think has actually helped me in all my other classes, too.”
Killian has known Ringer since they both danced at City Ballet. “Her spirit is exactly how she danced,” Killian said. “Which I think is so unusual. Some people are gorgeous dancers, but the way they interact with people is difficult.”
Before she was offered the job, Ringer and her family — she and Fayette have a daughter and a son — were living in Charleston, S.C., having left Los Angeles in 2021 to spend more together as a family and to be closer to Ringer’s parents. (Ringer grew up in Summerville, S.C.)
This year she has been living in a studio apartment in New York and commuting to Charleston on weekends. Her family will join her this summer. Fayette, she said, can’t wait to move back, which says a lot. In 2013, he was stabbed with scissors while protecting his toddler son from an attacker in Riverside Park. Recently, as a family, they returned to the site. “We’re building positive memories,” Ringer said. “There’s so much to love about the city. And obviously there’s other stuff, too.”
At City Ballet, Fayette was one of the company’s finest partners, and Ringer, a marvel of versatility. Always glamorous, with eyes bright enough to shine up to the fourth ring, Ringer could act. She could be magnificently deadpan, puffing away at a cigarette in “Namouna,” in a role created for her by Alexei Ratmansky.
But her career didn’t always go according to plan. “I didn’t have a meteoric rise in the company,” she said. She joined as an apprentice in 1989, and “it was five years to make soloist and then another five years to become principal,” she said. “And in the midst of it, I was let go.”
She suffered from eating disorders. “I felt very much like a failure within the perfectionism of the dance world, and so I got to the point where I really couldn’t function,” she said.
When she left in 1997 — her contract was not renewed — she didn’t imagine she would return to dance. But during her year off, she found her independence outside of ballet and eventually made her way back to dance — and to her job at City Ballet — in 1998.
For the remainder of her career, ballet was a choice. But in 2010, a reminder of her former struggles came when, in a review of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” Alastair Macaulay wrote in The Times that Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, “looked as if she’d eaten one sugarplum too many.”
It caused an uproar. Ringer, who had always been open about her eating disorders, ended up on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Looking back, she said, she can see how it initiated some good dialogue. It also showed her how healthy she had become. “By the time all that happened, I had gone through my stuff,” she said. “It was bizarre. I mean, I got to meet Oprah.”
For Stafford, the way Ringer has faced her own problems means “there’s a realness to the conversation she’s going to potentially have with a student who might be going through the same things,” he said. “She can speak from real experience.”
Beyond helping her to be a better teacher, Ringer hopes her experiences have allowed her to be “a better overseer of a student body,” she said. “It’s really important for us to care for them as humans within that framework of a ballet school. I just think life is messy, and life is hard, and ballet is beautiful, and ballet is hard. There’s just a lot that goes into crafting an artist. And usually the best artists haven’t had it easy.”
She added, “There is a reality to the dance world. But there also needs to be grace and mercy.”
Before the recent S.A.B. Ball, Ringer worked with dancers on their entrances. Sometimes she tells to them to walk onto a stage, stand and say their name in their heads.
“Anybody who’s ever been my student, they know that entrances and exits are really important to me,” Ringer said. “I want them to come out and say, ‘This is who I am.’ That’s what we all want to see.”
