"To the uninitiated, a ballerina’s life may seem like a frothy confection of princes, silky pink ribbons and countless curtain calls, all wrapped in tulle. The reality is quite different: hours of practice, day after day, year after year. Nowhere are the results of that effort more evident than at the New York City Ballet, the company founded in 1948 by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein that is home to some of the best dancers in the world. The troupe, which opens its spring season this month with a festival of Balanchine’s famously stark Black & White ballets and a new staging of current ballet master-in-chief Peter Martins’s “La Sylphide,” counts 93 members in its ranks and hundreds more in its prestigious School of American Ballet. Here, a brief chassé through their world." - Jessie