An ethereal dancer, Indiana lived in Chestnut Hill until age seven on Crefeld Street. Her mother, Amanda, was married to Stanley Woodward, of the iconic Chestnut Hill Woodwards. “She was an adorable little girl and best friends with my granddaughter,” Barbara Zamochnick told us. (Photo courtesy of NYC Dance Project)[/caption]

By Elizabeth Coady

Indiana Woodward breathes the rarefied air of a ballerina with the New York City Ballet (NYCB), the nation’s premier ballet company. Pretty, petite and polite to a fault, the great-great granddaughter of the founder of Chestnut Hill's George Woodward Company has achieved fame in her own right as a soloist with the revered New York dance company. NYCB was founded in 1948 by the legendary choreographer George Balanchine. (Ed. Note: Click here for more on George Woodward, who dramatically transformed the face of Chestnut Hill in the early decades of the 20th century.)

No less than the New York Times hailed her performance as Juliet in Peter Martins’ production of “Romeo & Juliet” in February. In an article headlined "Arriving Is Such Sweet Ecstasy,'' the writer gushed that Woodward's "footwork and turns aren’t just properly placed, they sparkle with fluid musicality. It’s lovely to watch because it’s so natural.''

“It's definitely an honor,'' Woodward, 24, said of the Times' review during a telephone interview last week. "That's a big compliment."

Although she lives in New York's West Village, the compliment is not one Woodward remembers having heard because she avoids reading about herself in the media. She competes only with herself and relentlessly chooses to look at the positive.

"There could be something bad,'' she explained. "You don't need to see what they say. It could hurt your feelings ... It's more important to not rely on that as your reward because then you're ... not in the moment. "

Woodward should have scant worry about bad press: her modesty and self-possession shine through in conversation and in every story published about her. She's the good girl whose grace and achievement make strangers praise the parents they've never met.

But it's her dancing that has landed her in the spotlight. And at the risk of writing clichés, Woodward admits that her acceptance into the New York City Ballet at age 18 and her ascent to soloist reads, well, like a fairy tale.

"It has been a dream,'' she said with wonder. "It's not something that you think would happen, and then it does. When you're a ballet dancer, you have to love it. You have to have a deep love and admiration. If you want to do it, you start to dream about it when you're 15. I knew I wanted to be a ballerina dancer when I was 10."

Born in Paris, Woodward moved to Chestnut Hill when she was three and a half with her parents, Amanda Rabin Kofsky, a ballerina-turned-choreographer born in South Africa, and Stanley Woodward, the great-grandson of Dr. George Woodward and Gertrude Houston Woodward, who founded the George Woodward Company in 1921.

"I feel like I have a voice more when I dance than when I speak,'' Indiana said, "so I think it's my best way of expressing myself.” (Photo by Paul Kolnik)[/caption]

Woodward doesn't recall many details of her days in Philadelphia other than that she had a "favorite pancake restaurant'' and that she attended The Miquon School in Conshohocken. She thinks she still has cousins in the area.

Her time here was short-lived as her parents divorced when she was seven. Her father then returned to Paris while she relocated to Los Angeles with her mom and brother. She has talked often in interviews about her itinerant childhood spent traveling between the U.S. and Europe.

"When I was little and traveling between my parents, I felt like I never quite found myself,'' Woodward told Pointe magazine last year to explain a cloud tattoo on her wrist. "I spent so much time in airplanes that I was most at home in the sky, in the clouds."

Though she still travels back and forth between here and Europe, it's on stage where she most often soars today. "She's the rare dancer who can project worldly glamour and youthful exuberance simultaneously, who can toggle between the precision of the Russian style and the freedom of Balanchine's style," Pointe magazine effused in its 2017 profile.

The New York Times insisted this has been a ‘’standout season’’ for Woodward, declaring her “alluring’’ as Calliope in George Balanchine’s “Apollo” and as “fetching” in Jerome Robbins’ “The Four Seasons.”

By many measures, Woodward is a typical American girl who chews gum, bikes to work, listens to music on her iPod and walks her rescue dog, Luna, whom she takes to work with her.

“I've had her for almost a year now,’’ the dancer said of the terrier mix. “She’s an angel. She's brought a lot of happiness into my life."

In an interview on the New York City Ballet's website, Woodward says she would choose a grilled cheese and a "real big" chocolate milkshake as her last meal on earth. Her favorite superhero is Batman. And she enjoys making ‘’slutty brownies’’ – a mixture of cookie dough, Oreos and brownie mix — for the dancers of the NYCB.

But when she speaks of dancing on stage, an ethereal eloquence emerges. "I feel like I have a voice more when I dance than when I speak,'' she said, "so I think it's my best way of expressing myself.

“I grew up with fairies and magic,’’ Indiana said last year in a cover article about her in Pointe magazine, the nation’s most prestigious magazine about ballet dancing.[/caption]

“It's like my breath, you know? At least that's what it feels like. When I'm onstage, it feels just like heaven ... It's my happiest place and also my hardest place."

That heaven was preceded by many years of earthly practice. As a teenager in Malibu, she began training extensively with Yuri Grigoriev, who was previously a Stanislavsky Ballet principal and Bolshoi Ballet Academy instructor.

She studied at the School of American Ballet, the New York City Ballet’s official school, during the summer of 2010 and enrolled full-time that fall. After a five-month apprenticeship, she joined the ballet company in December of 2012 and was promoted to soloist in February of 2017.

She says her love of ballet came from her exposure to it through her mom. “She just would always expose me to different art forms,’’ Indiana recalled. “We would go to the ballet ... I always loved it.’’

And mom also gets credit for her unusual first name. In her interview with Pointe, Woodward, who said she “grew up with fairies and magic,’’ says the name came to her mother in a flash of light. “She saw a little light land on her pregnant tummy,’’ the ballerina recalled, “and suddenly she knew Indiana was the name.”

Observers might wonder what’s left for Woodward to accomplish, but she assures that “there’s a lot more to do in this career.’’

And she is already thinking about what will follow dancing. “I'd like to go and travel and help animals,’’ she said. “That's what I'll do after dancing, I think: do activist work.’’

For more information, visit www.nycballet.com.