A Striking Ballet Gets a New Life. So Does a Budding Ballerina.

Olivia Bell, 20, a radiant member of New York City Ballet, reprises the role she knocked out of the park as a student: “I want to do it right.”

Olivia Bell walks to the front of the stage where a piano sits. She rests a hand on it and nods to the pianist for the music to start — the first sign in “Signs,” a ballet of mystery and depth. The curtain rises behind her; the dancing begins. Bell is the ballet’s unflappable leader, both lithe and resolute. She is its lighthouse, its anchor. “In a lot of the movements that I do, it’s kind of me controlling everyone, but not in a controlling way,” she said. “I’m the conductor of the ballet.”

Bell was 17 when the choreographer Gianna Reisen made “Signs” for the 2022 Workshop Performances of the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet’s affiliate. Now 20, Bell is dancing the role again, this time as a member of City Ballet during the company’s fall season. It’s rare that new ballets, even good ones, get a chance at a substantial second life: To have “Signs,” a company premiere, reborn with its original young dancer in the lead feels like a gift.

Bell attracts the eye no matter the part. But this part is big, and it is hers. “I want — for myself and Gianna — to help the ballet come to life as I feel like it did when we were in the school,” Bell said. “It’s such a beautiful ballet, and I want to do it right.”

This won’t be the same “Signs” — its cast is no longer made up of students but professionals. But from its opening section, “March of the Mourning Dove,” the ballet has a youthful, questing spirit and flow. It’s a dance unafraid of beauty, both sweeping and serene.

In her vivid solo, Bell raises her right arm, palm facing out, before taking a few steps back and rounding over. She rises and, for an instant, shields her eyes with a hand.

She crosses the stage back and forth, commanding the space with straightforward walks that suddenly melt into undulations. At one point, she stops and stares to the side as she raises her hand to snap her fingers. She rocks forward and back, turns and rushes ahead with a pointed finger, pulling up her other arm to frame her head like a crown.

Her authority is magnetic. When she walks, her gaze is direct, but you also have the sense that her mind is alive, that “there are wheels turning,” as Reisen said at a rehearsal. Bell’s shapes involve her entire body as she dives in and out of waves of choreography. If, in one moment, her arms hold the air, her legs are free to skitter, to stumble.

Creating “Signs,” Reisen was flooded with anxiety. It was her first work since the pandemic. But soon she started noticing things.

“I was receiving some interesting little signs in the universe that were relieving some of those anxieties,” Reisen said, citing one in particular: a mourning dove on her fire escape every day. The bird, she discovered, represents new beginnings.

That resonated for Reisen, for herself as an artist and for the progress she saw happening in the ballet world — more female choreographers and more diversity among dancers, epitomized by Bell. “She felt like the perfect mourning dove,” Reisen said. “She’s kind of beyond her years, I think, as a human.”

That maturity might be linked to how early Bell began dancing: at 2, on a dance drill team in a competition school in Texas. At 9, she saw Dance Theater of Harlem, and fell in love with George Balanchine’s stark, groundbreaking “Agon” (1957). She was struck by its simplicity and fierceness. “I got out of the show and was just like, ‘I need to do ballet, like I need to go there.’” She took a summer intensive at Dance Theater’s school, before training at the Dallas Conservatory and elsewhere, including the Ailey School. (Melanie Person, her cousin, is its co-director.)

City Ballet, the original home of “Agon,” was her dream. During her last year at the school, however, she was told that she could audition for other companies or return for another year. She accepted a spot with the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago. “So I finished here with ‘Signs,’ which was maybe a little beautiful,” she said. “Maybe that was my sign.”

As she was packing to move to Chicago, she received an email requesting a meeting with Jonathan Stafford, City Ballet’s artistic director. Her mind was racing: Was she in trouble? Had she left rosin on the stage?

Instead, he offered her an apprenticeship. He had followed her development through that last year, he said in an email. “She really fully blossomed onstage in ‘Signs,’” he wrote, adding that he felt she was ready for the demands of City Ballet.

“I simply couldn’t not ask her, despite the fact that she was already planning to move to Chicago,” he wrote. “I was thrilled when she accepted.”

The reality of her position, she said, comes in waves. “Sometimes I’m onstage,” she said. “Sometimes it’s right before we perform. I cannot believe that this is my job.”

Stepping Into the World of Dance

• Fifty years ago, New York City Ballet performed “Coppelia.” Original cast members look back at George Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova’s staging of the 19th-century ballet.
• Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, a “godmother of contemporary dance,” apologized after dancers said she ran her company in a tyrannical style that endangered staff members’ health.
• The plucky London City Ballet collapsed in 1996. Now it’s getting a second life with a new mission: to stage little-known, small-scale works.
• The National Ballet of Ukraine dancers will perform Alexei Ratmansky’s “Wartime Elegy” in New York. Touring is “like taking a break,” one dancer said, “because we can finally sleep.”
• For “R.O.S.E.,” the choreographer Sharon Eyal turns the Drill Hall of the Armory into a club at which her dancers appear at intervals, behaving oddly.