By Andrea Sachs

As they say in Hollywood, Lauren Lovette and Daniel Flynn met in a very sweet way. It was around Christmas last year, and they ran into each other by chance in the mailroom of their Upper West Side apartment building. Lovette had moved into the building a month earlier. “I noticed this beautiful girl I didn’t know,” Flynn recalls. “She just turned around and said, ‘Do you know where these candy canes come from?'”

That question was easy to answer: They were from a festive tenant. But the bigger question was how Flynn should properly introduce Lovette. With the help of a neighbor, he hatched a plan to meet Lovette at the nearby VSV wine bar. It worked out perfectly, says Lovette. “We’ve been together ever since.”

Lovette, however, had a story that Daniel didn’t initially know about, a background so fabulous that an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter would have been told the whole story was too improbable to include in a script. Lovette, 32, had a glittering career as a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet before leaving the stage to join the Paul Taylor Modern Dance Company, where she is resident choreographer.

The fact that he didn’t know anything about Lovette worked in Flynn’s favor, Lovette says. “One of the things I appreciate most about Daniel – and there are millions of them – is that he didn’t know who I was online. He had never seen me dance.” In fact, Flynn had never been to the ballet at all. Lovette says, “It was very refreshing for me!” Although he says it was “a steep learning curve,” Flynn has made up for lost time. His hard work paid off. In June, he proposed to Lovette, to which she happily replied “yes.”

When I visited the couple at UWS last week, Lovette was preparing to leave the next day for a two-month trip to Leipzig, where she will choreograph her first full-length work. Romeo and Juliet, for a German companyThe two-hour ballet will premiere on October 26. “It will be hard to be apart,” says Lovette. “But it’s the biggest thing I’ve done in my career so far.” Flynn plans to come twice and be there for the premiere.

Lovettte began dancing at age 10 as a home-schooled child in Thousand Oaks, California, when the director of a local dance studio recognized her potential and invited her to her first ballet class. “We did a performance of Cinderella and we all got to be Cinderella,” Lovette says of her first performance. “I wore this secondhand dress that my mom bought me. Even though I was sitting in the back, I felt like this was my big moment.” The die was cast.

At 14, Lovette was living in a dorm at Lincoln Center and attending the prestigious School of American Ballet, the sister school of NYC Ballet. She spent four years at the school, following a rigorous schedule of morning and early afternoon classes and evening rehearsals. To afford New York, Lovette also worked various jobs around the school. She quickly learned that the UWS was known as the “Dance Belt” because of the high concentration of dancers in the neighborhood. The UWS has been Lovette’s home since she arrived in Manhattan 18 years ago.

Lovette’s rise in the dance world was rapid. In 2009, artistic director Peter Martins made her an apprentice at the New York City Ballet. Within a year Dance style The magazine raved: “It’s hard to describe star quality. 18-year-old Lauren Lovette has gorgeously curved feet, elegant lines and a lively, pretty face – but that doesn’t quite explain the New York City Ballet apprentice’s unique appeal. ‘I don’t know what it is, but she’s got it,’ says NYCB ballet mistress Kathleen Tracey.”

Lovette soon found herself living out the dream of every little girl who has ever tried a plié. She was invited to join the corps de ballet in 2010, became a principal dancer in 2013 and a principal dancer in 2015. For years she wowed audiences with her grace and talent. And yet, as much as she loves ballet, she freely admits that she often didn’t enjoy the performances: “I love creating new works. I love the rehearsal process and all the different people I meet. I even love participating in the events, meeting arts supporters and raising money for the arts. But going on stage with the tutu under the spotlights and now it’s time to dance for all the people, that was always very difficult for me.”

Her passion, she found, was choreography, and in 2016 she began trying her hand at it. On October 21, 2021, with no other job lined up, she danced her last performance with the NYC Ballet. The following March, she was named resident choreographer of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, the position she currently holds. Every year she works on the company’s big premiere at Lincoln Center; the rest of the time is hers, and she is busy dancing, aand choreograph independently of each other. She and Flynn have just returned from Vail Dance Festivalwhere she has been dancing and choreographing for 13 years.

The couple now live together in the same building where they met. Since they’re true Upper West Sider types (Daniel is a finance manager at Accomplished, a luxury travel company, and also owns a brewery consulting business), setting a date for the wedding isn’t easy; it looks like it’ll be a year away in December. In the meantime, there’s still running in Central Park and visits to popular UWS restaurants like Jacob’s Pickles, Nina’s Great Burrito Bar and PopUp Bagels

What is the biggest misconception people have about ballet dancers? “Personally, I would say it’s probably because they assume I don’t eat,” says Lovette. “I eat more than most people I know!”

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