Chloe Misseldine’s Athletic Feats

Later that afternoon, Misseldine appeared on Zoom, her cheeks flushed and her long hair tucked into a black hoodie. She accessorized with an elegant and deceptively lightweight set of pearl earrings, which she bought off Amazon and often wears in the studio. Cross-training is important for all athletes, but Misseldine’s upcoming schedule had her especially focused on building her strength. “We’re preparing Firebird, which is very difficult, stamina-wise,” she said. At Equinox, she’d jogged and walked on the treadmill, worked on her upper body strength, and done lunges on a bosu ball to help stabilize her knees. “I’m a very tall dancer,” explained Misseldine, who stands at a willowy five-foot-nine. “When I start doing high-impact jumping and running, it can strain the joints.”

She was a little less than three weeks out from her debut as the titular Firebird, a fierce and protective creature who helps a noble young man rescue his lost love from an evil sorcerer. It would be the latest in a string of iconic roles for Misseldine, who, at 24, has ascended the ranks at ABT with astounding speed. She spent only a year in the corps de ballet — the company’s ensemble — before being promoted to soloist. Two years later, as she was taking a bow after her New York debut in the dual role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake, ABT artistic director Susan Jaffe came onstage to announce that Misseldine would join the highest rung of dancers at the company.

By that point, Jaffe saw that Misseldine possessed the technical skill and artistry of a principal dancer. “What made the decision clear was her ability to connect — she brought a sense of magic and immediacy to the stage, and audiences responded to her as a leading artist,” Jaffe wrote in an email to me. “The promotion simply recognized what she was already demonstrating in performance.”

Misseldine told me that she loves everything about dancing onstage: the audience, the music, the costumes, hair and makeup. “But only if I’m well-prepared,” she added, with a laugh. “If you feel underprepared, that’s when things start to get scary.” So she errs on the studious side. Between company class in the morning and rehearsals in the afternoon, Misseldine spends most days at ABT from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., before returning back to her Upper West Side apartment to rest, sew pointe shoes, and review choreography counts.

When she began working on Firebird, she spoke with colleagues who had danced the role (they warned her about the stamina issue) and watched old tape of the ballet. “I realized the technique is very hard, so I had to approach it step by step. I learned it little by little, progressively,” she said. Misseldine steeped herself in Stravinsky’s score, aware that its unusual rhythms sometimes cause dancers to lose their count.

Misseldine has relationships and interests outside ballet — her older brother, a radiologist, lives in her building, and she likes to draw, sew, and go out to eat with her friends — but when she’s working on a challenging role, it’s constantly running in the back of her mind. “When I premiered Swan Lake, I was so fully invested in it. I wouldn’t say my life revolved around it, but I was always thinking about it. It’s like that with every ballet I do,” she explained.

I told Misseldine that I had seen her perform a portion of Swan Lake in February 2024, several months before her big promotion. ABT was touring the ballet before bringing it home to New York, and Misseldine made her debut in the lead role at D.C.’s Kennedy Center, back when that was still the theater’s name. I bought a $15 ticket to an open tech rehearsal, during which ABT’s Odette-Odiles took turns onstage and the company periodically assembled, in white tutus and slouchy warm-up clothes, to receive notes. The audience watched with interest as Misseldine took several runs at the show’s finale, in which Odette leaps off a cliff to her death.

“I never practiced that until the tech rehearsal. When I went to do it, I held back — I was kind of scared. You have to land on a mattress. I jumped so poorly,” Misseldine recalled. “It took me a minute to get over the fear, because you have to really reach your chest out and land flat. It knocks the wind out of you, and sometimes, if you’re not ready, it cracks your whole back.” Now, she doesn’t seem so scared of the fall. By the time Misseldine is nearing the end of the grueling ballet, “the blood flow is just crazy.” She barely feels the impact.

Despite her aptitude for preparation, there are other moments when Misseldine feels nervous: for instance, when she’s rehearsing a ballet in front of the full company and artistic staff for the first time. A few days before our interview, she was working with one of ABT’s physical therapists when a colleague started playing Alysa Liu’s gold medal-winning Olympic free skate on their laptop.

“We were just fascinated by her because she was so free and not even nervous. It was as if she was alone on the ice,” Misseldine said. “Seeing that is really calming… I definitely don’t think I’m there yet — I tend to overthink things when I’m onstage, if I make a mistake or don’t do something perfectly — but it’s fun to watch that and see a person so confident in themselves.”

Nerves don’t translate into panic for Misseldine, though. Her mother, Yan Chen, told me that Misseldine doesn’t get frazzled easily — she just puts her head down and focuses on the next step. And she possesses an uncommon openness to feedback, both from the artistic team and from Chen, who performed as a soloist with ABT until 2001 (when she was pregnant with her daughter) and who now teaches at the company. Misseldine consults her mother near-daily: “I had someone film a run-through of Firebird and showed her the videos. We talked about certain moments that she thinks I can do better or bigger.” (She has also co-opted some of Chen’s vintage dance sweaters, layering them over her preferred studio uniform of a simple leotard under pink tights with leg warmers.)

Three weeks after our interview, I took the train up to New York to see Misseldine perform in Firebird. She had told me about her pre-show routine, so I had a pretty good notion of what she would be getting up to that day — namely, giving herself plenty of time to lock in, mentally and physically.

For a 7:30 p.m. curtain, Misseldine takes class at the ABT studios from 10:30 a.m. to noon, before a short rehearsal with her partner for the night. (“Sometimes I’ll wear my costume if I want to feel extra prepared.”) Then she’s off to her dressing room, where she gets her equipment set up for the evening: multiple pairs of pointe shoes, makeup, sewing kit, toe pads and spacers. By 1:30 p.m., Misseldine leaves to fuel up on pasta or a sandwich, take a nap, and shower, before heading back to the theater by 5 p.m. Then it’s hair and makeup, a barre warm up, tons of water, and showtime.

That night, the Koch theater at Lincoln Center was buzzing with the sound of hundreds of older New Yorkers, tourists, chic women in their 30s and 40s, and at least two members of Gen Z with cute shags and New Balances. After the first act — a courtly ballet called Raymonda: Grand Pas Hongrois — the curtain went up on Firebird. Soon enough, Misseldine was racing across the stage and throwing herself into incomprehensible back bends, her movements alternately sinuous and spiky. Dressed in red, with feathers in her hair and streaming from her hips, she wasn’t a smiling 20-something but a wild creature, full of mysterious intensity. Misseldine might not have been up for an Olympic gold medal, but her confidence onstage was undeniable.

After a performance like that, Misseldine always finds herself buzzing with adrenaline. She wouldn’t be tired, or even very hungry, for several hours. From cross-training and carb-loading to recovery, athletes know what their bodies need. “Usually what I crave,” Misseldine told me, “is a really crispy Coke.”

Eliza Brooke is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. She is the author of The Scumbler, a weekly culture newsletter.