New York City Ballet’s Jovani Furlan on Lightness, Resilience and Hope

BORN in the vibrant city of Joinville, in southern Brazil – home to the world’s largest dance festival, which even holds a Guinness World Record – dance entered Jovani Furlan’s life early on, especially at family parties where he would groove to 90s-inflected tunes.

“I could do a split with no formal training, and I guess I had rhythm and not too much shyness,” he tells me from his New York home. Joinville is also home to the only Bolshoi Theatre School outside of Russia, where Furlan received all of his ballet training. “I wasn’t interested in ballet at all, but my grandmother said I should try out, and so I did,” he says.

“I was ten years old when I auditioned for the school, and a year later I was stretching and shaping my body for ballet’s demands within the Vaganova method,” he recalls. “I fell in love with the discipline, the soreness, and the sweat, but I hated the smell of rosin mixed with the wood floors,” he says coyly. “There were forty boys who joined the school that year, twenty in each class, so being a boy in ballet felt very normal to me.”

_{Photograph: Andrew White & Sam Bates}

The first time Furlan truly felt like a ballet dancer was when he learned his first step with only one arm at the barre. “I held my arm in second position, then did a plié and a tendu, and immediately said to myself, with so much excitement and a sense of belonging, that I felt like a ballet dancer,” he says.

Those first years were defined by work and grit. “It was demanding, repetitive, and required so much discipline, and that’s where I thrived,” he says. “My passion for ballet definitely started with the discipline it required of me. Only after a couple of years at the barre could I begin to feel its beauty, and that’s when I truly fell in love with it all.”

When YouTube started becoming popular in Brazil, Furlan was finally able to watch ballet stars from all over the world: Svetlana Zakharova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Sylvie Guillem, Natalia Osipova, Ekaterina Krysanova, and, most of all, Vladimir Vasiliev and Ekaterina Maximova. “Being exposed to these performers, and realising that ballet was their profession, pushed me toward wanting a career in dance as well,” he says.

_{Photograph: Andrew White & Sam Bates}

Furlan trained at the Bolshoi School in Brazil for seven years, from 2004 to 2010, before earning a scholarship to the Miami City Ballet School after competing at the Jackson IBC. Encountering the Balanchine style was like love at first sight: a moment when everything he knew about ballet suddenly made sense, even though it was completely different from the training he had received.

“My first teacher at Miami City Ballet School is perhaps the most impactful teacher I’ve had in my entire journey as a dancer,” he recalls. “That first class is forever imprinted in my brain. Everything I had learned during my years studying the Vaganova method was required of me again, but sharper, stronger, more musical, longer, and, to me, more beautiful.”

_{Photograph: Andrew White & Sam Bates}

Throughout his years at Miami City Ballet, he discovered so much about himself and his dancing. “It was my first job and also where I discovered my sexuality and came out as gay,” he confesses. “It was also where I experienced my first serious injury, underwent surgery, and felt so much fear. The company felt both familiar and completely new at once. There were so many Brazilians like me, but culturally it was different because they came from a completely different part of Brazil.”

In his first year as a professional dancer, Furlan travelled to Paris for three weeks while still discovering so much about himself. He danced in some of the most beautiful ballets, including Theme and Variations, Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, Square Dance, and La Valse, all by Balanchine. He rose through the ranks and took on more and more roles, becoming especially enamored with the romanticism of characters like Romeo and Albrecht in Giselle. “Through them, I understood how I love, and I am so grateful for those characters,” he says.

In 2019, he decided to send an email that would change the course of his life: an application to dance with New York City Ballet, the house of Balanchine. “Every week since joining NYCB has felt like a highlight of my life. New York City will swallow you whole if you don’t learn how to digest yourself and carry your days and plans with a level head,” he says.

“The growing pains have been as extreme as the glimmers in my days. Since moving to NYC, I’ve started my own business, performed nonstop, met new people every week, fallen in love, and genuinely felt so lucky to experience the full spectrum of human emotions my life has given me,” he says. As for the rest? You’ll probably read it here first.

_{Photograph: Andrew White & Sam Bates}

On Dance as a Form of Expression

“I always feel naked in my elaborate costumes. Naked but dressed with the music and the steps bestowed upon me. I can normally communicate my emotions very well as a person, but I feel as if the sensations that I get when I am dancing are the most raw and primitive parts of me that I don’t have conscious access to. They are only accessible when the music plays and I get to become it.

We train daily to fine tune our technique to strive for perfection, but for the minute when the music starts, we need to let it go. All that technique is meant to set you free. I heard once that ‘words ruin everything’ but in the musical Billy Elliot, he’s asked to explain how it feels when he dances and I could never find words to explain it better. ‘It’s like you just have been crying, and you’re empty and you’re full; it’s like electricity, sparks inside of me, and I am free; I am free.’”

On The Joys and Thrills of Dance

“When people ask about my days as a professional dancer I always say, ‘every day is the same but completely different.’ We take ballet class, we rehearse, we perform. It’s a simple equation. An equation that I am addicted to all the highs and lows of. Every class, rehearsal and performance pushes you to a sense of ecstasy that is almost impossible to recreate. The uniqueness of the experience is what creates the thrill of it. The curtain rises, nothing can stop you. It’s you, the music and the vastness of a theatre filled with people who are all looking at you and living that osmosis that is only created at that one moment and never repeated again.

And there’s the communal feeling of dance, of friendship and shared experiences. Going through such a daily emotional rollercoaster with people every single season makes you bond in a way like no other. The partnerships that are built within those four walls are so intimate, yet, your job is to share it with everyone. Being responsible for the beauty a ballerina can portray feels like having the weight of the world on your shoulders, but that weight is beauty, it’s ethereal and it is a weight that lifts you up.”

_{Photograph: Andrew White & Sam Bates}

_{Photograph: Andrew White & Sam Bates}

On Dance’s Hardships and Systemic Complexities

“Sacrifices are countless when you choose to be a ballet dancer. We put our bodies through so much daily, my journey has been filled with injuries. Lots of them have made me feel like I’d never dance again, as if I had a finite number of steps that I could use and I had reached my quota. Dealing with physical pain has personally been the biggest hardship in my career.

Also, from a young age I understood that ballet is expensive and inaccessible, and unfortunately, not popular. You have to either have money for it, or be lucky enough to fall into a scholarship to be able to study it. Shoes are expensive, classes are expensive, traveling for courses/competitions is expensive, and those costs create an immense barrier for someone seeking to become a professional dancer. These issues trickle down, or rather, trickle up to the lack of diversity you see in major ballet companies. I see lots of these institutions trying to fix this from the top down, without understanding that if there’s no equitable access to early training in dancing, we will never have diverse companies.”

On Mental Health

“Dance is inherently athletic, we are all athletes but we are most of all artists, and all art is subjective. That may be the hardest thing about ballet. You are not going to be everyone’s cup of tea and learning how to be okay with that is a tough battle. We stand in front of a mirror for almost eight hours a day and we’re supposed to fix what we see while also learning to find beauty within ourselves, we have to learn compassion towards our improvements but also know that there’s always something to improve, to fix.

I am grateful for my tough teachers and the training that I had, but now as I grow as a more emotionally aware adult, I feel that the severity of the training that has brought me here, is also the system that has implemented the voice in my head that keeps screaming ‘you’re not good enough, you need to be better.’

Therapy and a full life and friendships outside of the theatre have really helped me understand that I am more than only my dancer self, even though at times I want to be nothing else but a dancer. I’ve been truly enjoying this balancing act. I want to be whole. I want for every single experience that I have on stage and in the studio to inform my life outside of it, and I want for every experience I have in life to inform the artist that I am. There’s no separation, I am a dancer/human/artist/lover.”

_{Photograph: Andrew White & Sam Bates}

On Future Hopes and Expectations

“I’m 33 right now, I’ve had a beautiful and long career and I want a few more years of healthy dancing. I have struggled a lot with injuries, and I am not sure if they will go away, but the way I deal with them mentally has definitely shifted and I am thankful for that. I want to keep feeling inspired by my peers and the work itself and to also be able to make ballet more accessible. I have been teaching lots of workshops around the world, especially on the Balanchine aesthetic and it’s been so fulfilling to be able to pass down my experience. I hope to keep finding more opportunities to share about my path as a dancer. I enjoy teaching but I have been very happy as a speaker.

Sharing the experiences of moving away from home, landing a job at eighteen, dealing with so much loss while being away, having a healthy mindset, creating bridges outside the studio and just soaking it all in, has been a beautiful way to reflect, digest and communicate all that dance can mean in someone’s life. I dream of writing a book and I have started planting seeds for it and I am really looking forward to actually diving into it.

Furlan Dancewear has been a really amazing journey and creative outlet. I love fashion and marketing, so being able to create something where I can put both of those passions into fruition has given me great joy and a possible full time career after dance. And as a human, I hope to find love: romantic, beautiful, crazy love that makes you lose your breath but also gives you the calmness that it’s only you and them against the world.”

by Chidozie Obasi