Many little girls dream of becoming a ballerina, but few have the talent to fulfil that dream. Skylar Brandt is one of the lucky few — although luck has very little to do with it, as her formidable gifts and unwavering determination are the driving forces behind her success.
Now a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, one of the US’s leading companies, she delights audiences with her speed and exuberant style, but is equally at home dancing more lyrical works.
Last year she was named by Forbes Magazine as one of its “30 under 30” influential people in the Arts and Style category (she turned 30 this January). She has come a long way since her first rather reluctant steps at a local ballet school in Westchester, New York.
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Skylar's grandfather 'Larry Superstein'
“At first it was too slow for me, the pace wasn’t quick enough and I was a little bored,” says Brandt. “It wasn’t fun to learn the positions of the feet when I was just six years old.
"When I ended up training at a more serious school in Westchester, with a Russian teacher and a teacher who had danced under George Balanchine at New York City Ballet, the environment was more intense.
"I liked that because it felt that I was being treated like an adult and I enjoyed all the challenges that ballet presented. It made me look at it in a different way, it was striving for a certain perfection which I hadn’t previously had in my creative movement classes, waving a schmutter around.”
Brandt comes from a close-knit Jewish family. “We were always bonding over those Jewish holidays and that really warm feeling that comes with all of that territory,” she says.
“My godfather is a Holocaust survivor, and he is still alive, which is incredible. He is just about the strongest man I have ever met.”
Her grandfather was also a ballet dancer who came over from Pinsk in Poland. He migrated to Canada where, upon arrival, was told he would now be known as Larry Superstein, instead of Israel Zipperstein. “They handed him a banana and he had never seen a banana in his life, so he ate the whole thing with the skin and got so sick that he never ate one again.
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Skylar in rehearsals (Connor Holloway)
“I was bat mitzvahed but we are not very religious, we just embrace the traditions, the heritage. We’re sort of more culturally Jewish than practising.”
Dance and the arts were already in the family: Brandt’s eldest sister excelled at hip-hop, becoming a Knicks City dancer for the New York Knicks basketball team; her other sister also danced and her mother was a well-known fitness guru who at one point trained Cyndi Lauper. Her cousin is film director and writer Miranda July.
The three sisters were regularly treated to Broadway shows, concerts and ballet performances — the latter struck a particular chord with the young Brandt.
“The story ballets spoke to me because I was largely doing the same thing in the privacy of my own home — I would dress up and dance, so I said, here are grown people doing this for a living and are supported by an entire cast of other dancers, they are wearing exquisite costumes and the music is incredible.
“It was just the storytelling component that made me fall in love with it to the point that I wanted to pursue it.”
She auditioned for local productions of The Nutcracker — the ballet has a wealth of roles for children — but was acutely aware of a clash with her own Jewish upbringing.
“I remember at the time feeling a little weird about it because it is not my story, it is not my own personal experience, it is not the culture I was growing up in.
"We didn’t grow up with a Christmas tree [it plays a pivotal part in the story], we celebrated Chanukah, so for me to find a certain comfort level playing Clara and telling the story that didn’t feel like my own was interesting.
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Skylar rehearsing (Connor Holloway)
"I quickly realised that if I was going to become a professional ballerina, I would have to take on all different kinds of stories and characters and this was really no different.”
She tells an anecdote of how, later on, another dancer at ABT surreptitiously added a touch of yiddishkeit to the company’s production of The Nutcracker.
“A friend of mine was going through with her conversion process as she had met a wonderful Jewish man and she was converting so she could get married. She put a little menorah under the tree with all the rest of the props and presents — that was really sweet!”
Aged just eight, Brandt knew where her future lay. “I decided that I wanted to become a professional ballerina and my parents were quite taken aback because most people don’t know what they want to do when they graduate college, so they were thinking, how does my eight-year-old know what her career path is already? Thankfully they supported me.”
That support came in the form of a move with her parents to a small apartment in New York, where she was able to attend a school that allowed her time to concentrate on her extracurricular ballet studies. She joined ABT’s junior company at 16, using tutors to continue her academic work, and was accepted into the main company in 2010. Ten years later, during lockdown, she was promoted to principal.
“It was so surprising. It was in September 2020, we hadn’t gone back to work yet and I didn’t think that my ballet company was in any kind of position to promote people.
“Nobody knew what was happening — I didn’t even know if there would be a ballet company once we came back to life, so it was just this incredible moment that my eight-year-old self made happen. This was my lifelong dream. I did it. This was what I had been working for, for over 20 years.”
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Skylar perforrming
During lockdown, Brandt moved back to the family home in Westchester. “I was meant to make some important debuts that year and those performances ended up getting cancelled. I was crushed by the fact that what felt like a pivotal year for me was not coming to fruition, but then I realised everybody was in the same position.
“Then I said to myself, this is great. I wouldn’t have this gift of time until I retire and I get to spend some time with my family. I used the pandemic as a time to assess what I wanted coming out of it —whenever that would be.
She feels she thrived during the pandemic once she had switched her thinking. “I started teaching a lot, I was still taking private lessons through Zoom with my coaches and collaborating on projects that could be filmed remotely, which was really cool.”
One was Swan Lake Bath Ballet, a three-minute BBC film depicting 27 of the world’s top dancers at home in their baths as they reinterpreted Tchaikovsky’s masterwork.
Alternately moving, clever and amusing — there were a lot of feathers flying around — the short piece was a brilliant creative response to the enforced lockdown.
Happily, Brandt is now back on stage, thrilling audiences, with her parents among them.
“It is very heartwarming for me that now that I have made it, they can come and just enjoy sitting in the audience, watching the ballet, watching what they were so largely responsible for.
“To me that is the greatest gift that they could give me, and I could give them.”
