This is What Joy Looks Like
On Sunday May 24, Megan Fairchild gave her final performance with New York City Ballet, retiring after a 25-year career with the company. She danced Swanilda in Coppélia — the same role she first performed at 19, stepping in at the last minute when injuries sidelined every scheduled principal, performing four times including twice in a single day. She remembers thinking she didn’t know if she could do it once. She did. And it launched one of the most significant careers in American ballet.
Over 25 years she performed leading roles in nearly 80 ballets, more than 30 by Balanchine. She became one of ballet’s brightest stars while earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics and an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business, and becoming a mother to three daughters. In 2014 she left NYCB for a year to dance on Broadway in the Tony Award-nominated revival of On the Town — an experience she says left her refreshed and inspired, holding onto the feeling of what a gift it is to get to do this. She carried that feeling for her last ten years with the company.
She has spoken about the pressure of those early years — crying in the days before her first Coppélia performances, trying so hard to be the perfect thing and look the right way. And then the realization: that all the other aspects of your life, having a full life, is what makes you a good dancer.
Having a full life — and letting that fullness show — is what this painting is about.
I usually create paintings that reach past what dance makes visible — into the psychological and felt experience beneath the performance, the interior life the discipline is designed to conceal. The effort behind the effortlessness. What the dancer carries that the audience never sees.
But this painting isn’t about the suffering. It isn’t the cost or the concealment or the gap between the polished exterior and the private struggle.
It is about the joy to be had in dancing.
Megan is not performing in this photograph. She is not managing her image or constructing a public persona. She is smiling the way you smile when someone you love is being ridiculous behind you and the moment is too good not to share. She is showing us something the stage never shows — not because the stage hides darkness, but because the stage doesn’t have room for this particular kind of light. The ease. The playfulness. The private happiness of two people who have shared a working life inside these rooms for decades.
She chose to post this. And what she chose to reveal was not the dancer. It was the person.
I have spent years painting the gap between exterior performance and interior experience. The psychological cost of discipline. The emotion the performance is designed to conceal. These are real and important things — and they are present in every dressing room, every studio, every stage.
But Megan’s photograph reminded me that the interior life isn’t only cost. It is also this. The lightness that sustains you through decades of extraordinary difficulty. The partnership that makes the sacrifice worth making. The joy that lives in the same rooms as the exhaustion and the doubt — quieter, less visible, but just as real.
Painting is slow. A scroll past this image takes a fraction of a second. Spending hours rendering that smile, that peace sign, that pink bag on the door — it returned to the image something the platform was designed to remove. Not darkness. Not suffering. The fullness of a life that was never only about what happened on stage.
The dancers are seen — fully, privately, with loving attention — in the gap between what they perform and what they carry.
What Megan carries is twenty-five years of making the impossible look effortless. Of carrying everything the performance required and concealed. And through all of it — in the dressing rooms, in the rehearsal studios, in the quiet moments between one extraordinary thing and the next — this. Joy. Partnership. A life that was always more than what the audience saw.
What Megan carries is a whole, luminous, joyful story.
— Jill
