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Devon Teuscher, a Poet in Ballet Shoes, Takes On ‘Swan Lake’

Devon Teuscher of American Ballet Theater. After a decade of waiting in the last line onstage, Ms. Teuscher is a soloist with American Ballet Theater and will make her New York debut this season.Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

Devon Teuscher knows, perhaps more than most, that being a dancer for American Ballet Theater is a waiting game. Now a soloist, she joined the company as an apprentice about 10 years ago.

“There were so many times when I was like, should I jump ship and go somewhere else?” Ms. Teuscher, 28, said in a recent interview at the Metropolitan Opera House. “I thought, no, be patient. Stick it out. Keep working.”

It paid off. Among her leading roles this season is the dual part of Odette/Odile in “Swan Lake,” in what will be her New York debut. “I always wanted to do it, but part of me also never believed that I would,” she said. “I don’t believe in myself as much as I probably should.”

Ms. Teuscher, nearly 5-foot-7, is a poised, long-necked beauty who doesn’t seem to be lacking in confidence in person, but the ballet world can send even the most self-assured down a dark hole of doubt. After her first performance in Washington earlier this year, Ms. Teuscher burst into tears.

“The bows were so surreal,” she said. “There were so many shows that I had done as a member of the corps de ballet, standing in the very last line and watching the ballerina take her bows. To be that person in the front — and to know what it takes to be in the back — was very incredible.”

After her second performance — Ms. Teuscher filled in for an injured Gillian Murphy — she had more control over her emotions. But Kevin McKenzie, Ballet Theater’s artistic director, didn’t. “He told me, ‘The first show you cried,’” she recalled. “‘The second show you made me cry.’”

Ms. Teuscher is the complete package, a mixture of astonishing technique, grandeur and ease. She doesn’t show you how she’s dancing a role; rather, she embodies it with a natural vivacity of breathtaking coordination and elegant strength. After he watched Ms. Teuscher perform in “Swan Lake,” Mr. McKenzie was elated.

“It’s a rare bird — no pun intended — that can take a ballet like that with the technical demands and expectations and all of it and subjugate the technique to the dramatic through-line and then deliver the technique like she’s reciting poetry,” he said. “There’s no apparent effort.”

As Mr. McKenzie sees it, Ms. Teuscher is a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s, an era when dancers may not have had the technical capability that they do today but could “invoke and elicit a response from the observer that resonated as the truth. It feels like the pendulum is swinging back. Devon might be the symbol of that.”

Ms. Teuscher began dancing around 9 or 10; she wasn’t suited for sports, but her parents knew she needed a reason to move. Ballet seemed to be a natural fit. She first trained with Deanna Doty in Champaign-Urbana, Ill.; when her family moved to Burlington, Vt., she began to study under Alexander Nagiba, who taught her male variations.

A natural jumper and a turner, Ms. Teuscher had no idea that the steps she was learning were intended for men. She breezed through them.

After she completed her training at Ballet Theater’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, Ms. Teuscher danced for a year with the Studio Company before becoming an apprentice and, in 2008, a member of the corps de ballet. In 2014, she became a soloist.

For ballet dancers, the rank of soloist can be frustrating: In recent years, Ms. Teuscher’s biggest fear was that she would grow stagnant as she had seen others do. “I was questioning, is this going to happen for me or not?” she said. “You can’t be sure. You can’t tell. I learned that you have to put it all out there now.”

But the past year has been momentous. She was the 2016 recipient of a Leonore Annenberg fellowship, which afforded her the ability to work with the acting coach Byam Stevens, as well as spend time at the Royal Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet and the Stuttgart Ballet.

“To go somewhere where they don’t know you at all is like having a clean slate,” she said. “They’ll call you out on things. I raise my eyebrows when I turn. No one told me that here.”

It also forced Ms. Teuscher to be receptive to any suggestion or criticism. “I was there to learn and to grow and to try anything they said,” she explained. “The biggest thing I took from it was that I need to stay open. For the rest of my career.”

That was November. When she began work on “Swan Lake” in New York, she had a plan: Be as present as possible. “You never get your first one back,” Ms. Teuscher said, referring to her debut in that ballet — or any. “So just be there.”

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Ms. Teuscher and Alexandre Hammoudi during a rehearsal for “Swan Lake.”Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

In preparing for “Swan Lake,” Ms. Teuscher was faced with a paradox. She discovered that she had more in common with Odette, the Swan Queen placed under a spell by an evil sorcerer, but was more comfortable with the virtuosic choreography of Odile, Odette’s doppelgänger, who seduces Prince Siegfried at the ball.

“I love turning,” she said. “I was like, great, this is easy. But I did not feel in any way confident in the persona of Odile. I have a really hard time feeling like a sensual woman.”

At the same time, the technical aspects of Odette intimidated her: “I can’t do arabesque balances — that’s not my thing,” she said, laughing.

But Ms. Teuscher, who is Mormon, could relate to Odette’s deep vulnerability. “I’ve always had questions about what is right and what is wrong and how to live your life,” she said. “That inner struggle and those emotions are easier for me to tap into. The doubt, the questioning, the fear — those are things I was constantly facing and still am.”

Ms. Teuscher didn’t end up relocating to another ballet company, but four years ago, she did make an important change. She left Manhattan. “I was like, O.K.: I’ll move to Brooklyn instead of going to Europe,” she said. “That was huge.”

She now lives in Fort Greene, where she feels like she’s part of a community. She takes her dog to a nearby park; her neighbors, nondancers, attend her performances. “It’s healing to be where there are green trees and neighbors and people I like,” she said.

All of this has helped guide Ms. Teuscher along her path as a ballerina, for which she has a clear ambition. “Ballet has become such an athletic, physical sport,” she said. “There’s so much focus on the technical ability: How many of this can you do? How big can you do that?”

She’s after something else. “I would like to make this remain a beautiful art form that moves people and that people can relate to,” she said. “That has been lost. I would really like to bring it back.”

As for now, Ms. Teuscher is still a soloist, not yet a principal. But a promotion is not on her mind. “I’m not saying this might not change, but honestly I’m just happy to be doing the roles I’m doing,” she said. “It’s not even a necessary thought. Even if I don’t get promoted, I’m still dancing ‘Swan Lake.’”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: A Poet in Ballet Shoes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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