From New York With Love: Reflections on Life, Ballet and Becoming a Doctor
Woolf Works, American Ballet Theatre. Company photos by Marty Sohl and Kyle From. Photos of the Metropolitan Opera: Olivia Merola
June 17, 2025
Dear Reader,
Recently, my days have become a kind of ritual. I wake up, usually around 7 am, make a coffee, go for a brisk walk—if I’m lucky, I’ll catch the sunrise over the gentle hills of Central Park. I come back to my apartment, settle at my kitchen table, and begin my studies for the day.
So, I’ve felt myself kind of entering a different era of my twenties. I’ve been thinking about it like a christening, like I’m hidden away in a cocoon and then I’ll emerge beautiful and changed…something like that.
A few months ago, I chose to start working towards becoming a doctor. It’s a challenge that requires hours of studying and difficult moments where I often question if this is something I can actually do. But this isn’t the first time I’ve run into these questions. As a dancer and musician, I’ve spent years rehearsing and second-guessing myself, working through the repetition with composure and grace. Now it’s a different kind of rehearsal, perhaps the hardest one yet.
Tonight, I stepped into the red velvet glory of the Metropolitan Opera House. American Ballet Theater was performing Woolf Works by choreographer Wayne McGregor, and composer Max Richter.
Woolf Works is the journey into the life of Virginia Woolf—a story filled with nostalgia, memory, yearning, grief, and death. McGregor and Richter’s collaboration blends new and classical tradition within themselves and with each other. McGregor’s obsession with sculpting contemporary pathways within balletic form meets Richter’s gift for entwining classical melodies with bass-heavy electronica, ambient soundscapes, and voice. Their duet created something beautifully haunting on stage.
I found myself drawn to the pas de deux. It was a female-female duet—sensual, poised, and powerfully reflective. The vignette seemed to be less of a “step of two,” and more of a mirror of one woman looking at, and dancing with, herself. I looked on at them the way I sometimes look at myself: working through a difficult science passage, or struggling to stay motivated during long stretches of study. They held each other up, caught each other from falling, nurtured one another, as if they were one person in dialogue with her past, and her present. I began to wonder: how do we care for the selves we used to be? And the selves that we are now?
The end of the ballet led us to the shore of the ocean, the place where Woolf ultimately walked into the water and ended her life. A swarm of dancers filled the stage, with the rolling of the sea projected onto the scrim behind them, their bodies moving like particles inside the tumult of the tide. The solo Woolf wandered the stage, and seemed to look back on everything, the fragments of herself scattered across time. The only grounding moment was the subtle motif of the rond de jambe, a step in ballet where the dancer creates a circle around themselves. Maybe my own cyclic days are a kind of rond de jambe. So, perhaps in those moments, where it feels like the chaos builds into an all-encompassing wave, I can return to that small gesture. A step from a past self that keeps me anchored in my present.
In reflection,
Olivia