Of all the many roles principal ballerina Sasha De Sola has performed, she has a new one to try out: leader. As part of the inaugural cohort of the San Francisco Ballet’s Raising Leaders programme, De Sola is embarking on a year-long education in learning about the transition from stage to boardroom.
Raising Leaders consists of monthly meetings with an executive coach at Stanford, visits to the LinkedIn corporate office and shadowing Nicolas Le Riche, Artistic Director of the Royal Swedish Ballet. San Francisco Ballet Soloist Julia Rowe is also participating in the programme, though she is on a different track than De Sola.
Yet De Sola’s participation in the programme doesn’t mean she’ll be reducing her dance schedule in any meaningful way. ‘Thankfully I feel very happy and good,’ she says. ‘I’m not in a space where I want to divert my attention.’
De Sola’s on-stage roles – from Giselle to Carmen, from Titania to Odette-Odile – have been the passion of her dancing career, all of them opportunities to inhabit different realities. The principal ballerina will never forget the first time dance inhabited her. She was seven years old and practising a tap number in her hometown in Florida. ‘I started improvising and it shocked me,’ she says. ‘When you’re fully lost in it, your body will take over, and you can be surprised by the things that bubble up.’
‘When you’re fully lost in dancing, your body will take over’
The way De Sola takes up space in the real world – light, airy, effervescent – gives the impression she could navigate stepping into other personas with ease in the performance world. Yet her physical presence offers a contrast to her mental one: tenacious, stubborn and academic-leaning.
The San Francisco Ballet dancer has been with the company for 18 years, working her way up from apprentice to principal dancer. Her favourite role is whatever she’s working on at the current moment – and is why she loves complex, nuanced characters. ‘You can take facets of your own life and different experiences and really embody a character.’
De Sola was at first uncertain if she had anything to contribute to the leadership programme she calls ‘boundary breaking in our field.’ Yet part of putting on this new costume, she soon understood, was realising that she had been wearing it all along – because De Sola has always been in the process of expanding her offstage experience.
De Sola earned a bachelor’s degree in performing arts at St Mary’s College while pursuing her career as a ballerina – by taking one course at a time. ‘It took me forever to finish,’ she says. As a principal ballerina since 2017, she has also had numerous other creative experiences outside of the opera house. She collaborated with local Mexican author Catalina V Monterrubio on a bilingual children’s book, On Tiptoes/De Puntitas (De Sola was born in Florida of Venezuelan parents and grew up speaking Spanish). For both De Sola and Monterrubio, it was important to open ballet up to the world by including not only Spanish but also a male main character – and to demonstrate how hardship could open up pathways to learning. ‘One of the best qualities you can develop from a young age is perseverance in the face of challenges,’ she says.
‘One of the best qualities to develop is perseverance in the face of challenges’
A comment on social media led to another creative collaboration, this time with local jewellery purveyor Fiat Lux. De Sola partnered with store owner Marie McCarthy to develop a signature line benefiting Dancin Power (a longtime supporter of this nonprofit that teaches interactive dance classes to hospitalised children, De Sola once showed up at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland in a tutu to lead a workshop).
One piece she created with Fiat Lux straddles the historical and the modern by evoking both the classic fede ring symbolising friendship and a modern ballet hold. ‘It’s a perfect analogy for how Sasha can bridge two worlds,’ McCarthy says. The small business owner says the partnership was seamless: De Sola was creative, had impeccable body awareness for photo shoots and the two immediately understood each others’ work processes. ‘Jewellery is the same as ballet,’ McCarthy says. ‘It’s gnarly in the back, but the end result is glamorous and beautiful.’
‘A misconception that dancers have is that their skills don’t translate into other fields’
Yet key to her participation in the Raising Leaders programme has been the realisation that her experience as a dancer is its own leadership preparation, even if it can be hard to recognise. ‘One of the misconceptions that dancers have about themselves is that their skills don’t translate into other fields,’ she says. De Sola can point to numerous skills she’s built as a dancer that can prepare her for being a leader: working with teams, understanding how to work towards a specific vision, finely honed communication abilities and creative, outside-the-box thinking.
De Sola cites Tamara Rojo, San Francisco Ballet’s groundbreaking artistic director and Kerry Nicholls, the founder of Raising Leaders, as two women who inspire her. ‘The more we can encourage each other – especially female leaders in the art form – the greater opportunity there will be for excellence,’ says De Sola. But lest anyone be concerned that De Sola’s participation in the new programme is sending smoke signals of her retirement, they needn’t be: ‘my priority at this point is still very much my dancing.’
Julie Zigoris is an author and award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the San Francisco Standard, the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, HuffPost and the Boston Globe.
