Jonathan Stafford, 38, who has been running the company for more than a year on an interim basis, will become the new artistic director of City Ballet as well as its affiliated academy, the School of American Ballet. Wendy Whelan, 51, a star ballerina who danced with the company for 30 years, will become City Ballet’s associate artistic director. The two said they intended to work as partners.
They are taking over a company that has been shaken over the past year and a half. Peter Martins, its longtime ballet master in chief, abruptly retired early last year amid allegations of physical and emotional abuse, which he denied. Then, with the company being led by an interim team overseen by Stafford, three of its 14 male principal dancers were forced out after being accused of sharing text messages of sexually explicit photos of women.
Stafford and Whelan, whose appointments were announced at a meeting of the company Thursday morning, said that healing the rifts within the company and improving its backstage culture would be a big part of their work.
“We both will really be working on the cultural elements of the company,” Stafford said during a joint interview with Whelan. “We agree on dancer development, dancer enrichment, making sure we are providing a safe space for them to really thrive as artists and as people, not just in the theater but in their personal lives as well.”
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Whelan, who has enjoyed a fruitful second act in contemporary dance, said she intended to exercise her control over programming and commissioning new works to push for “more women choreographing, more diversity on stage, bigger ideas, more open ideas, more daring ideas.”
Unlike their predecessors, neither is a choreographer. Justin Peck, City Ballet’s resident choreographer, will take the new title of artistic adviser.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.