Jennifer Archibald Has Commissions Seemingly Everywhere This Season—But Don’t Call Her An Overnight Success

January 31, 2025

Jennifer Archibald will never ask you to check your emotions at the door.

“I’ve never been the person that says, ‘Leave everything out in the hallway and come back into the studio.’ That’s just not realistic to a human,” says the Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based choreographer.

Embracing the whole range of human experience—from the sticky to the aspirational to the dark—and developing a movement vocabulary that blends classical ballet with hard-hitting street styles have helped make Archibald one of the dance world’s busiest choreographers. In the 2024–25 season alone, Archibald is debuting nine world premieres, including a full-length for BalletX in May and, this month, a work for The Washington Ballet.

Overnight Success? No Such Thing

Archibald began building the foundation for her current success at a young age. “When I was 10, I just wanted to make dances,” Archibald says. “It was very clear that I wanted to become a choreographer.” 

Jennifer Archibald perches on a stool at the front of a rehearsal studio. She is glimpsed in the negative space created by a blurry dancer in the foreground of the image resting a hand on their hip.
Jennifer Archibald leading rehearsal at Grand Rapids Ballet. Photo by Scott Rasmussen, courtesy Archibald.

Growing up in Toronto, she studied at Canada’s National Ballet School. She also embraced house music and club culture, participating in an otherwise all-male dance crew. “Allowing my body to release after a really structured class—that was how I fell in love with house,” Archibald says. “You are literally there dancing for hours at night, and it’s just because you love to move.” 

After two years at York University, she was eager to train at the home of a childhood dream company: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She graduated from The Ailey’s School’s three-year certificate program, where she choreographed for her fellow students. Entrepreneurial by nature, she taught hip hop after long training days and sent videos to the likes of the New York Knicks in search of commercial work.

Archibald started getting opportunities on the college circuit, teaching at Bates Dance Festival, and securing a residency at the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program, where then–Atlanta Ballet director John McFall saw a tech rehearsal and invited her to fly to Atlanta to set work. From there, then–Cincinnati Ballet artistic director Victoria Morgan asked Archibald to become that company’s resident choreographer, a multiyear position. 

“These 10-minute pieces, they give you a chance,” Archibald says. “They do well, then you get these 24-minute pieces. Then it’s a long road.” Archibald’s extensive resumé now includes commissions from Ballet Memphis, Kansas City Ballet, Tulsa Ballet, and Ailey II, and commercial gigs with MAC Cosmetics, Nike, and many more.

A symmetrical cluster of 15 dancers face upstage, where a large mirror reflects them. Those in the center stand upright with their arms stretching overhead. Those to either side lean out and back, face toward the center. Their costumes are shades of pale purple and yellow., the women in skirts and pointe shoes and the men in trousers.
Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre in Archibald’s Sounds of the Sun. Photo by Mike Henninger, courtesy Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre.

Pushing the Art Form Forward

Archibald admits that the balance between commercial and concert work has not always been easy. “If I move this way, they will think I can only do this, and if I do this, they will think I can’t do that,” she says. When presenting a reel, “I even had agents who were like, ‘What are we supposed to do with this?’ ”

BalletX artistic director Christine Cox, who bonded with Archibald over their mutual love of club dancing, is among those who recognized Archibald’s unique voice as something exciting in the industry. “It’s a merging of cultural inspirations,” says Cox. “I believe she’s truly revolutionizing ballet and making it modern and fresh and unique.”

Two dancers lock eyes as they face each other, one lunging forward to rest fingertips against the other's chest. The dancer on the ground leans back, as though flinching away from the contact. To the right, a line of eight dancers crouch low to the ground, some focused on the pair at center and others moving upstage.
BalletX in Jennifer Archibald’s Maslow’s Peak. Photo by Whitney Browne, courtesy BalletX.

Cox didn’t hesitate to give Archibald her longest commission to date, one of the first such ballet commissions for a Black female choreographer. Maslow’s Peak, set to debut in May, is inspired by Lord of the Flies’ dark story and themes. Mentally, that’s a lot to deal with. While Archibald inspires dancers to be their utmost selves and embrace the “humanized space” she cultivates in the studio, she first excavates those emotional layers herself. “I’m going through that process mentally and physically so that I can prepare to walk into the space and get [the dancers] to understand why they’re moving and acting,” she says.

Archibald’s ability to connect with the dancers, to create a space of trust and vulnerability, means that they often find personal connections to her movement. “It’s a positive atmosphere, but a demanding one,” says Washington Ballet dancer Ashley Murphy-Wilson. “She’ll say, ‘Do it again. Try something else. Make another choice.’ And those are all things that help bring out your own artistic quality, because she’s not just going to sit there and tell you what to do.”

Two dancers in rehearsal wear face each other in opposing fourth positions. The woman extends an arm so it drapes across her partner's downstage shoulder; he holds her around her waist while intently holding her gaze. In the background of the rehearsal studio are other couples moving through and marking the same moment.
One of Jennifer Archibald’s rehearsals at The Washington Ballet. Photo by Ceylon Mitchell II/M3 | Mitchell Media & Marketing, courtesy The Washington Ballet.

For her premiere for The Washington Ballet, which will debut at The Kennedy Center this month, Archibald started with a simple concept: “Who are you after 5 pm?” Are there underground or secret sides to you that the professional world hardly sees? And “if you are going to become that person,” Archibald says, “what do you have to do with your mindset in order to walk in as the other person at 9 am?” Murphy-Wilson describes it as a bass-thumping, all-out rave, where the physical release is so acute that it feels like an underground party. “The lights come up and you’re like, ‘Oh no, I look crazy—but I also had the best time,’ ” Murphy-Wilson says. 

Audiences seem hungry to plumb the emotional depths right alongside Archibald and her dancers. “There’s feedback I get from audience members a lot where they’re like, ‘You took me to a place that I didn’t think that I was going to go through,’ ” Archibald says.

Two dancers dressed in blue perform a duet. The dancer in blue hangs from her partner's arms, back leg raised in arabesque while her straight bottom leg drags along the floor, almost parallel to it. Her partner lunges to the side in the same direction, gripping her under one shoulder and bracing the other to use as a support. Both look off to the right.
Smuin Contemporary Ballet’s Cassidy Isaacson and Jacopo Calvo in Archibald’s ByCHANCE. Photo by Chris Hardy, courtesy Smuin Contemporary Ballet.

Do the Work

Will the dance world at large go there? Archibald’s busy season and success as a Black female choreographer could be seen as the industry embracing untold stories. But if you’re commissioning Archibald to fulfill the diversity aspect of a mission statement (or if you’re a journalist focusing more on her race than the depths of her work), you’re missing the assignment, Archibald says.

She sees these kinds of conversations as many-layered. A dancer of color looking at an all-white roster might ask, “Where do we fit in? And how are we going to be used?” For a board of directors, Archibald says, the question becomes, “Why are we going to invest in these stories? It’s about money, and a lot of the people that are funding ballet need to want diverse stories.” From the choreographer’s per­spective, “It’s beyond color and gender. It also has to do with the story that you’re pitching,” she says, and who should be telling that story. 

Two dancers in rehearsal. One faces upstage as he supports the other on one shoulder. She arches back to look upside down toward the front of the room, one arm wrapped around her partner's waist, the other curving elegantly to the side. Her legs twist and pretzel in the air.
Rehearsals for Jennifer Archibald’s work at BalletX. Photo by Arian Molina Soca, courtesy BalletX.

In addition to her many commissions, Archibald is telling­ stories with her own troupe, Arch Dance Company, and shaping the next generation through her ArchCore40 Dance Intensives. “She has the talent and the drive and the vision to be part of the long-term conversation of dance,” says TWB artistic director Edwaard Liang.

Because of her identity and ability to break boundaries? Maybe. But mostly because of her unique voice and dedication to the work itself. In recent years, Archibald has declined to pursue artistic directorship opportunities at national companies. Though she is open to the possibility someday, for now, she’s setting her sights on the next studio where she can create dances. “It might take another 10 years before I settle down and stay in one building,” Archibald says. “I don’t want to be in an office right now. I want to be choreographing.” 

Running the Room

The dancers and directors who work with Archibald all agree: She knows how to run a room. “Jennifer creates an environment where dancers know the direction that she wants to go, yet at the same time there’s enough room for play, there’s enough room for breath,” says Liang. 

Jennifer Archibald perches on a stool at the front of a rehearsal studio, one hand at a laptop keyboard and the other holding a sheet of paper. She watches intently as one dancer lifts another in a grand jeté. More dancers upstage are visible in the mirror, some dancing and some marking.
Jennifer Archibald leading rehearsal at Grand Rapids Ballet. Photo by Scott Rasmussen, courtesy Archibald.

Archibald partly attributes her leadership prowess to her teaching career. She once taught up to 16 classes a week at studios across New York, and is now an acting lecturer at Yale University. “There are a lot of choreographers that don’t like to teach, but I felt like it was my improvisational session to creatively work through my craft,” she says.

She believes that craft is as much about knowing the dancers who show up to work with you as it is about setting the steps. “You see every single person in the room and what their gift is and why they were hired for the company, or why that child is interested in being in this classroom,” she says.

The Driving Force

The scores for Archibald’s contemporary ballet pieces feature everything from house to hip hop to R&B. The desire to choreograph to house music led to her first work for BalletX, a repertoire piece called Exalt. “It’s hard to be able to execute on a pointe shoe because it’s so damn fast,” she says. “That beat per minute is really challenging.”

Fifteen dancers in rehearsal seem to explode out from a cluster, taking different levels as they look out intently.
Rehearsals for Jennifer Archibald’s work at BalletX. Photo by Arian Molina Soca, courtesy BalletX.

Archibald gets requests for ballets on a range of themes—sometimes set to “popular” music—but she always balances such requests with her own vision. “It takes a lot of reflection to make sure that I’m staying truthful to my voice,” she says, “to make sure that I can still do my work with integrity when I’m so unorthodox in this industry.”