All The Way Back

David Hallberg spent a lifetime preparing to be the best male ballet dancer in the world. But he wasn’t prepared for his body to betray him.

- Rebecca Milzoff

ON NOVEMBER 4, 2015, David Hallberg posted a photograph of himself on Twitter, though the person in the photo did not much resemble the David Hallberg his thousands of followers knew. In the photo, Hallberg — a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre and the first American to hold that title simultaneously at the renowned Bolshoi Ballet — sat hunched on a Chelsea stoop, holding a coffee cup and, out of frame, a cigarette. His head was shaved and his stare piercing; he looked a bit like Eminem. “Goodbye New York,” he wrote in the caption. “There’s some stuff I have to take care of once and for all.” The day after taking that photo, Hallberg flew to Australia with one suitcase, on a one-way ticket, unsure if he would ever dance again.

“Everyone was very worried,” Hallberg, 34, recalls. He’s sitting in his Chelsea apartment, one foot nonchalantly plunked inside a bucket full of ice. (“Oh, it’s no thing,” he assures me.) “Shaving my head was so cathartic. This is my métier,” he says, gesturing at his now-regrown blond locks, which, it’s true, are a Hallberg signature. “This is my calling card, and it has been my entire professional career. To be able to do that was like: Restart. Let’s disappear. Let’s go as far away as possible and figure my shit out.”