Cassandra Trenary debuted as the lead in Sir Kenneth MacMillan's Manon with the Vienna State Ballet in May, capping a first season that has already ranged from Alexei Ratmansky's Kallirhoe to Balanchine's "Rubies" to Justin Peck's Heatscape. This summer she returns to the dance she calls transformative: Molissa Fenley's solo State of Darkness, set to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, which she first performed in 2020.

Trenary will dance the punishing, transcendent work in a one-night-only engagement at New York's Joyce Theater on July 19, before appearing at the Venice Biennale July 31–August 1.

The move to Vienna came last spring, when Trenary announced she would leave American Ballet Theatre, where she had danced since 2011 and risen to principal. She had expressed a desire to be onstage more than the limited number of performances coming her way. Her arrival in the fall of 2025 coincided with the inauguration of a new director at Vienna State Ballet: the ballerina Alessandra Ferri, with whom Trenary has worked closely on several roles.

Working with Ferri in the studio has brought what Trenary describes as "great comfort." Ferri, she says, wants her "to dive further into what I've already been exploring with the full-length classics: finding humanity, finding truth, finding a reason for every single step, rather than just have things be perfectly executed, perfectly defined."

The increased stage time has had a technical effect as well. "I'm onstage so much; there's something about that familiarity," Trenary says. "It reminds me of when I was in the corps de ballet and a soloist at ABT, and I was on the Met stage for eight weeks. I haven't felt this comfy onstage since those early ABT days." Even exhaustion, she says, no longer gets in the way: "my body is able to execute everything and carry me through."

Life in Vienna has required adjustment. "Vienna is a very quiet city, and I do think I thrive in hustle and bustle," she says with a laugh about local orderliness. "I mean, no one jaywalks here! Everybody literally waits until the light turns green, even if there are no cars!" She has reframed the geography: "I've told myself that I'm not just living in Vienna, I'm living in Europe." Her apartment sits 15 minutes from the opera house, and she recently flew to Paris for a weekend to see two exhibitions.

Solitude has proved productive. "I have the time to dream," she says. "Sometimes I can get a little bit sad, but it's interesting to feel that sadness. I've been reading so much, writing so much. I've been taking long walks, and taking lots of photographs."

The company itself is international — "There are Italians and Brazilians and Portuguese and Ukrainians and Russians," she says — with one difference from ABT: fewer Americans. "It's kind of cool to be in the minority."

State of Darkness, which Trenary dances for the fifth time this July, carries deep personal weight. "When it came into my life, I was going through a lot personally, and it became this vessel for me to tuck myself into and physically work through some things that I needed to process in my body," she says. "The piece is so long and so intense, it puts you in a really vulnerable and raw state. You're in front of an audience, but it feels private at the same time."

Each return reveals more. Watching footage of her 2020 premiere, she sees "a young woman trying to step into a new version of who she is. And every time I come back to it, it feels that way." The repeated encounters with Stravinsky's score keep yielding detail: "I hear so much more in the score each time. And I feel I can bring so much more to it. There are details I never would have been able to explore if I hadn't performed it all those times before."

With Ferri newly at the helm and Trenary dancing a broader repertory than her final ABT seasons allowed, the Vienna chapter has given the ballerina what she left New York to find — and the Joyce and Venice engagements will show what five years of living inside Fenley's solo has taught her.