Adrian Danchig-Waring Bid Farewell to New York City Ballet With a Post-Show Rave

How do you measure a storied ballet career? You can look at time spent in the ranks, shaped by rigorous training and its corresponding toll on the body. Or repertoire: the historic roles a dancer has come to define in their own way, along with the new commissions they’ve breathed into being. You can consider the reverberation of influence, both on younger dancers and the company itself. And then there’s an energetic quality, at times radiating light and other times shining it—with or without pulsing strobes—on others.

All of these facets were front of mind on Sunday when the New York City Ballet principal Adrian Danchig-Waring took his final bow with the company, beside a heap of ribbon-tied white roses. Ever since the California native moved into the dorms at the School of American Ballet, its sister institution, in 2001, and joined NYCB two years later, he has been a quietly majestic interpreter of George Balanchine’s canon. Along the way, Danchig-Waring has been equally engaged with today’s dancemakers, both in the studio and in his role as the artistic director of the New York Choreographic Institute.

To sign off, Danchig-Waring didn’t just curate a matinee program with needle-moving classics alongside 21st-century works that reflect his love of process. Rather, fitting for an artist with an expansive sense of the medium’s possibilities, he also gathered his friends for a post-show tropical rave at Performance Space in the East Village. The double whammy meant the usually subdued attire inside the Lincoln Center theater was peppered with disco brights (the comedian-poet Alok Vaid-Menon), buttercream suiting (the playwright Jeremy O. Harris), and Carmen Miranda-esque fruit appliqués (the filmmaker and producer Drew Denny).  

“Dancing for me has never been about the solo—it’s about the collective experience of bringing these works to life,” Danchig-Waring said ahead of the show, referring to the four pieces he chose for Sunday’s send-off. The bookends were two of Balanchine’s Black and White ballets—The Four Temperaments (1946) and Agon (1957)—with their pioneering pelvis tilts and flexed wrists, made all the more legible in stripped-back leotards and tights. “These are dances that resonate with me on a cellular level,” he said. “I feel simultaneously at ease inside of their complexity and totally electrified.” He danced the cool-headed Phlegmatic variation in Four Ts and delivered a crystalline pas de deux with Unity Phelan in Agon, to effusive applause. He also singled out two dancers making their debuts in Sunday’s Agon: the soloists Dominika Afanasenkov and David Gabriel. “As I’m stepping off that stage, I want to witness people who are just arriving. I want to roll out the red carpet for them.”

The middle two dances represented the flipside of Danchig-Waring’s identity, as a collaborator alongside choreographers in the present moment. One was Lar Lubovitch’s duet Each in Their Own Time, originally created with Danchig-Waring and Joseph Gordon as part of a 2021 Fall for Dance festival commission, and later added to the NYCB rep with fellow principal Taylor Stanley joining Danchig-Waring. On Sunday, the two men slipped back into their blousy white shirts and pants, taking turns in limpid call-and-response solos before reuniting in a series of looped-arm gestures. 

The other piece, Once With You, was a gift from the choreographer Pam Tanowitz: a new quartet for Danchig-Waring alongside Phelan, Mira Nadon, and Indiana Woodward. “He didn’t want it to be a solo—he wanted to be dancing with friends, which was great because choreographically that’s much more interesting to me,” said Tanowitz, whose work is in dialogue with seminal figures like Balanchine and Merce Cunningham. Danchig-Waring is attuned to her layered process, describing how she has a “series of tools that move ideas—musical, spatial, architectural, mathematical, or intellectual—into the body,” he said.

The costume-design duo Reid & Harriet, known for their longtime partnership with Tanowitz, worked their usual magic. The women wore maroon unitards with subtle puffed sleeves, while Danchig-Waring’s tank unitard featured two faces in profile, each hugging a side of his waist. “It’s me and Pam—isn’t that cute?” the dancer said of the electric blue silhouettes, which even illustrated a wisp of her messy low bun. The wraparound effect reminded him of the knit back warmer he wears in rehearsal—a nod to the cataclysmic spinal injury he suffered in late 2024 before returning to the stage last fall.

The kind of dancer who arranges his swan song with such care—down to the specially requested black-and-white confetti and the prop lute from Balanchine’s Apollo, which Danchig-Waring’s husband, the art adviser Thomas Rom, brought onstage as a parting salute—would naturally take the same approach to the after-party. “I can find ecstasy in this type of dance on the stage,” Danchig-Waring said of the uptown performance, “but the true ecstatic is in the club.” Hence the kaleidoscopic rave the couple threw for a crowd that ranged from nine-year-old nephews to silver-haired patrons. 

On the fourth floor of Performance Space, where Rom serves as the board chair, the elevator opened onto an abstracted video projection of Danchig-Waring in motion. Down the hallway inside the black box theater, a light installation by Studio GUMGUM glowed like radioactive flora. The DJ Illich, stationed behind a thicket of fronds, unspooled an introductory mix of warm, ambient tracks, as guests stopped by the bar for Heavensake cocktails and the night’s signature Disco Eclipse, with mezcal and edible black glitter. On a side table lay Spanish-style fans decorated with photos of Danchig-Waring and lime green earplugs that read “Full Volume.” Later on, as a remixed “Jolene” rang out, boxes of pizza moved in, custom-stamped with the words “Final Bow Full Belly” and the leaping man of the hour.

“Adrian had this idea that usually when dancers retire at the end of the season, their bodies are aching and they’ll go to the beach,” Rom said. The couple’s schedules didn’t accommodate an immediate departure—“so we said, what if the after-party is your tropical holiday and it starts now?” Rom’s own take on their Disco Tropicalia moodboard involved one-of-a-kind pants by the Moroccan label Maison ARTC, layered Chinese and Japanese kimonos, and platform boots. Back out on the dance floor, Danchig-Waring started the night in a floral Dries Van Noten button-down, Issey Miyake tank top, and Maison ARTC pants—sewn from hand-painted French curtains, with roses and cherubs—before changing into a green silk Dries top and reflective Rick Owens shorts; two pairs of Micromega sunglasses capped off the looks. As a circle widened around Danchig-Waring grooving with his mom, the artist Matthew Placek said, “The apple doesn’t fall far!”

As for the happy throng of guests, the dress code was wide open to interpretation, from paillettes to pink marabou. Yvonne Force Villareal, the cofounder of Art Production Fund, wore a leopard-print bodysuit and headband; the curator Samantha Ozer laced up burgundy pants, while the artist Julie Mehretu stuck to classic black leather. The NYCB contingent included Taylor Stanley in a black knit tank, Unity Phelan in a triangle top and nude mesh, and Mira Nadon in a leotard plucked from the Reid & Harriet costume archives. The designers themselves, Harriet Jung and Reid Bartleme, raided their own archive, unearthing diamante-studded mesh and ombré rayon fringe, respectively. Bartleme’s top was a 2025 costume experiment for Kyle Abraham’s 2x4 that didn’t move forward, he explained, but under the strobes, it was definitely in motion.