Whelan and Jonathan Stafford, the company’s artistic director, were delighted to promote Ball. “He’s such a technician and this classicist and also contemporary and free — he’s a researcher, you know?” Whelan said. “You always love having a dancer like that at your fingertips to guide and help. He could change.
Ball is looking more at acting in his future. He just landed a role in the ballet world series ‘Étoile’, coming to Amazon, by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino of ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ and ‘Bunheads’. He also focuses on choreography: his ‘Purcell Suite’, a work for New Jersey Ballet, will be performed in June at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park. And his personal life has also converged. He is engaged to fashion designer Zac Posen, whom he met at City Ballet and became close during the pandemic.
Disarming and funny, Ball has a spontaneous streak. Much of his life has been erratic and wild, fueled in part by drug and alcohol addiction. (He was fond of cocaine, he said; he’s been sober for more than five years.) Even Ball’s childhood was unorthodox. He began ballet training at age 4 with the now-defunct Charleston Ballet Theater in South Carolina and performed as a child. “I was a little kid and I toured with all these adults,” he said. “During the day, the dancers would take me out for lunch. They all went to a bar.”
When he was about 15, while a student at the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet, he lost his sleeping privileges due to disciplinary action; with the support of his family, he lived by himself in an apartment, he said, while his mother regularly visited him from South Carolina, where she and her husband raised two other sons. Soon he was all alone. “It was a really weird situation,” said Vera Ball, his mother, “but yeah, that’s what we had to do.”
