“I grew up with boys,” Chloe Misseldine said.
What did being the middle daughter of two brothers give this remarkable American Ballet Theater soloist? Not glamour, she was born with that. But a crucial quality for any young ballerina: thick skin.
“Nothing really bothers me,” Misseldine said. “I don’t get offended easily. If someone says something to me, I ignore it.”
But since she made her debut as Tatiana in the ballet Onegin, Misseldine has noticed unusual internal changes. She has cried. She has used the word “sensitive” to describe what she feels, but that’s not quite right. Perhaps vulnerable? “I don’t know how to explain it,” she says, “but I just have more emotions.”
Tatiana has had a great success: this is the first dramatic role of Misseldine in a full-length ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, where the company is presenting its summer season. On Wednesday afternoon, she will take on Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake,” after a triumphant debut in this dual role at the Kennedy Center in Washington in January.
Word spread. After that performance, former Ballet Theater star Nina Ananiashvili asked Misseldine to perform as a guest artist with her company, the State Ballet of Georgia, at the London Coliseum later this summer. “She’s a rising star,” said Ballet Theater artistic director Susan Jaffe. “Not just in ABT, but in the dance world.”
At 5’9” and 6’1” on pointe, Misseldine, at just 22, has a distinctive preternatural magnetism. This became evident as soon as she joined the ABT Studio Company in 2018. A year later, she became an apprentice at Ballet Theater and a member of its corps de ballet in 2021. She was promoted to soloist in 2022.
Her rise, by Ballet Theatre standards, has been meteoric, but Jaffe, who has been in the job for 18 months, seems more proactive when it comes to new talent. She was just 19 when she first danced “Swan Lake.”
“I come from a time when children started very young,” she said. “You have to start them young, because then they have plenty of time to grow.”
Of course, they also have to be emotionally prepared. “Chloe is totally grounded in reality,” Jaffe said. “Whatever comes her way, she takes it with absolute strength and grace, she works hard and doesn’t panic.”
For all its dramatic and technical demands, Odette-Odile could easily give rise to moments of panic, but it is in a zone where Misseldine is comfortable: classical ballet. She also resembles a swan. Her flexible back gives her a magnificent arabesque; it also accentuates the scope of her port de bras. To prepare her, Jaffe coached her for several months.
“I was definitely nervous,” Misseldine said of her “Swan Lake” experience in Washington, but less so than she expected. “The whole time I was preparing, I was ready.”
The performance itself was like a dream. “It all happened so fast,” Misseldine said. “All of a sudden, Act Two was over. All of a sudden, I was fast-forwarding to Act IV. And then, all of a sudden, people were taking pictures of me backstage.”
In “Onegin,” Tatiana, who transforms from an unassuming peasant girl into an elegant woman, poses another set of challenges: “I grow up a little bit through roles like this,” she says. “I’m only 22. I haven’t lived my life much. I’ve really focused on ABT, my job and ballet. So doing this has really opened my eyes.”
John Cranko’s ballet, based on Pushkin’s novel in verse, is a plunge into drama on a grand scale, particularly for Tatiana, who is initially rejected by Onegin. When she refuses to take back a love letter she wrote him, he tears it up. But in the end, it is Tatiana, now married to another, who rejects and tears up a letter, Onegin’s proclamation of love and regret.
“It was completely different, it was life-related,” Misseldine said. “She was a young girl and she was gushing over an older man. I mean, it’s so natural for a young girl to do that and write a love letter. I wouldn’t say that him tearing her apart in front of her is normal. I feel like people don’t do that. I hope not?”
At her debut, after Misseldine tore up the letter with a mixture of exasperation and sadness, the audience applauded her. That doesn’t happen often. Yet, she said later, she was not satisfied. There were distracting props; it was a matinee and she felt rushed. There were partner problems.
But Misseldine was fascinating. While the role is usually reserved for more mature dancers, Misseldine’s age mattered less than her instincts. She has imagination, deep feelings. If “Onegin” left her a little raw, she knows that’s not a bad thing. “I’m still finding my groove,” she says. “I’m still learning as I go.”
When it comes to her acting, she doesn’t want to come across as over the top: “Nothing too dramatic, but I still want to have the drama of ballet,” she said. “Nothing fake.”
As a dancer, Misseldine knows who she is now, but she wasn’t gifted from the start. Born in Orlando, Florida, she is the daughter of Yan Chen, a former Ballet Theatre soloist who was born in China and trained at the Shanghai Dance School, and a businessman father. Misseldine began taking dance classes around age 3 or 4 at the Orlando Ballet School, where Chen taught. (She is now the lead teacher in the pre-professional division of the ABT Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School and the rehearsal director for the ABT Studio Company.)
Her early training was more of an after-school program than anything else. Did Chen see any signs of what Misseldine would become? “No!” Chen said with a laugh in an interview.
She acknowledged that her daughter had good proportions, but lacked strength. “She was a little bit bigger,” Chen said, “how can I say? Very wet. She was just hanging.”
But when Misseldine was 13 or 14, she decided she wanted to compete in ballet competitions. Aside from musicality and coordination, Chen felt her daughter needed to work harder. She told her, “I’m not going to let you go on stage,” she said. “I’m the professional! When you go on stage, you have to have a certain level of technique. So I started helping her.”
She still does when Misseldine needs it. But Chen is neither a mother nor a ballet teacher who sugarcoats things. “Of course, encouragement is very important,” Chen said, “but there’s a certain point where you have to hear what you need to work on and sometimes give a little nudge.”
They had conflicts, but they were more quarrels, Misseldine says, than anything else. Out of irritation, she would pretend, for example, that she wasn’t doing steps correctly. “But then, as I got older, I started to realize that she was actually trying to help me,” Misseldine says. “I started to trust her.”
Misseldine grew up with another secret weapon: water. “Actually, when I was growing up, before I did ballet — which is probably really important — I grew up on a lake,” she said. “I grew up doing water sports: skiing, wakeboarding, tubing. I think that’s where my balance comes from.”
Her father, who was driving the boat, was pulling her so that the tube was “about 10 feet in the air!” she said.
Her sunny mix of authenticity and audacity must have come from somewhere. “My little brother and I never wore life jackets. We had a raised dock and we would jump in the water. We were 5, 6, 7 years old. That’s where I get my personality from: I lived with my brothers, grew up with boys, but I also did ballet.”