23.06.25
Time Well Spent
James Whiteside, Principal Dancer of the American Ballet Theatre, recalls once crafting a lyrical pas de deux set to the undulating melody of “To Be Sung on the Water,” by Franz Schubert.
“It was literally about the passage of time and the things that come in and out of our lives,” the dancer and choreographer said. “It's very beautiful.” Whiteside wanted the piece to evoke a dream, he said, because dreams don’t adhere to the timeframes, rhythms, or logic of waking life. “I made it as though a woman were having a dream about an experience with a man,” he mused. “But it's up for interpretation. And the lyrics, if you speak German, are about sailing on the waters of time and how, ultimately, everything is going to end.”
Whiteside is best known as a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, but his presence stretches far beyond traditional ballet. He is a choreographer, a drag performer, a musician, podcaster, and author. He is a multipennate who has little interest in being boxed in by accepted genres, classifications, or vocational titles. But when asked about the through-line in his expansive body of work, he returns to a deceptively simple idea: time.
“I think about time in the sense that I do live performance,” he says. “And the nature of that is extremely ephemeral. You have an amount of time to prepare for the performances, and then there's a start time to the performance and then two or three hours later it's gone. And it's not on the internet. It doesn't live on in any way other than in the hopefully hearts and minds of the theater goers and myself.”
It’s a sobering truth for any performer—particularly one whose medium is the body. In dance, time is not just thematic; it's anatomical, existential. “Our careers are ... we have a limited time physically that we are able to do this,” he adds. “We are always trying to make the most of our time.”
Part of that evanescent feeling is captured in Whiteside's dance set to Schubert. Though it may resist conventional narrative structure, it does contain a certain emotional logic, human truths expressed through movement: the fleeting nature of intimacy, the repetition of life, its inevitable loss. The dancers embody not so much characters as memories in motion. Watching it, it’s as though time itself were a character, moving through the scene, shaping what the audience sees and what slips away.
Therein lies the contradiction of what live theater embodies, and what Whiteside appreciates about it: permanence through impermanence. Performance, like time itself, resists being captured. Yet somehow, through its very vanishing nature, it leaves a mark.
Time is a spector that hovers over Whiteside’s entire career in another way. Dancing, after all, is a metier known for both its brevity and intensity. “I’m 40 and I’ve been a professional dancer since I was 18,” he says. To be so connected to one’s physical self, he says, is to understand, intimately, how time takes its toll. “So, yes, my body feels … differently than it did,” he says with a slight chuckle. “Let’s just leave it at that.”
Still, it’s in the moments when he’s onstage, dancing for an audience, that he’s able to transcend the confines of time from the world outside. “The theater is pretty much the last place where people actually pay attention to a single thing,” he says. “Everyone agrees to focus on one thing for an hour or two, and that is felt through the fourth wall of the theater. You exchange that energy with the audience and you try to give as much as they give back to you.”
Whiteside makes the most of time, pivoting through different mediums and practices with boundless energy and apparent ease. His dance practice alone, he notes, is strenuous and time-consuming, often rehearsing all day before a short break and reconvening for an evening performance. Those days, he says, he bookends his performance with a large lunch, a pre-show cookie and coffee and a post-performance meal paired with a martini.
Beyond work, you can find Whiteside spending his downtime as many New Yorkers do: reading in his local park (he’s partial to science fiction), seeing films, cooking or dining out, playing video games to unwind. They are activities that help ground him, help him recharge and reconnect him to his own artistic practice.
As for legacy, he’s hesitant to dwell on it. Sure, he’d like to continue choreographing, expanding into different mediums and working with different artists, and he enjoyed writing his book and hopes to do more of that. “I don't really think about that so much,” he admits. “It's not something that I feel comfortable trying to curate. It's going to be what it's going to be and people are going to remember my dancing how they will.”
That sanguine approach seems, at least in part, inspired by the lyrics of that Schubert’s “To Be Sung on the Water” and it’s acceptance—embrace, even—of time’s inevitable mach forward:
Alas, with dewy wings
Time vanishes from me on the rocking waves.
Tomorrow let time again vanish with shimmering
wings, as it did yesterday and today,
until, on higher, more radiant wings,
I myself vanish from the flux of time.
"I think about time in the sense
that I do live performance."
June 23, 2025
By Max Berlinger
27.05.25
Time Well Spent
It is the Urban Jürgensen philosophy that the way we keep time inspires how we spend it. In our Time Well Spent series, brought to life by UJ’s Photography Director, Ellen von Unwerth, we look at what it means to use and spend time with passion, interest, joy, and meaning.
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