On a quiet June afternoon at the School of American Ballet, two New York City Ballet principals — Chun Wai Chan and Mira Nadon — are the only dancers in the empty studios, rehearsing Chan's own choreography, Butterfly Lovers.

The pas de deux anchors a career milestone. On July 15, Chan launches New York Stars: A Night of Ballet, his first self-produced tour of China — his first major performance in his home country since making NYCB history in 2022 as the company's first Chinese principal, and his first time assembling and producing his own troupe of dancers.

"I usually don't get nervous to perform," Chan told Pointe before the rehearsal, "but when you perform your own choreography, that's a different feeling."

The tour runs six shows in four cities, with a program of excerpts that feel quintessentially NYCB: works by George Balanchine, Christopher Wheeldon, Justin Peck, Tiler Peck and William Forsythe, alongside Chan's own piece. Ten of NYCB's biggest headliners join him, including principals Tiler Peck and Sara Mearns and rising stars Kloe Walker and David Gabriel.

Chan moved to the U.S. in 2010 to train at the Houston Ballet Academy, joining its affiliated company in 2012. "I've been wanting to do this tour for forever," he says. "I have been performing outside of China for a long time, and sometimes my friends or my family are like, 'How come you don't perform near us? So many of us want to see you.' So I think that voice has been in my head."

He originally assumed the goal was five years or more away. But last summer, after a brand that had approached him about touring backed out for financial reasons, Chan decided to organize it himself.

That decision means wearing many hats during his off-hours at NYCB: dancer, choreographer, producer, manager, artistic director. His small team at Chunner Studio, his teaching and coaching business, handles logistics and planning. Still, Chan describes a learning curve. Producing a tour halfway around the world means organizing visas for nearly a dozen dancers and communicating with theater contacts over a 12-hour time difference. Even social media content — something Chan creates expertly for his robust fanbase — has had to be rethought as marketing material rather than pure entertainment.

"It's very different than when I just need to dance," Chan says. "As an artistic director, there's so many things out of your control, but I learned just to manage it one thing at a time."

The June rehearsal suggests he has a knack for the job. It is Nadon's first full run-through of the six-minute piece, and Chan — who premiered it with American Ballet Theatre's Zhong-Jing Fang for Lincoln Center's Mid-Autumn Festival in 2022 — proves as generous a coach as he is a partner. The pair work through the choreography's intricate lifts and ethereal arm movements with a friendly ease that never sacrifices efficiency.

"He's a really good coach, actually, which is something that I feel even in our rehearsals," Nadon says. "So I feel like it's very natural for him to be in front of the room and be directing."

The piece also serves another of Chan's tour roles: cultural ambassador. The pas de deux draws on the Chinese folktale Butterfly Lovers — a forbidden love often likened to Romeo and Juliet — and Chan calls it a "perfect culture-exchange piece," combining a traditional Chinese story with the language of Western classical ballet. Western companies routinely restage Greek legends like Apollo, Spanish classics like Don Quixote, and Russian dramas like Onegin. A Chinese tale, Chan's argument goes, belongs on the same menu.

"I want them to see that nowadays, in New York City Ballet, one of the best companies in the world, we [are] also able to adapt and express and use collaboration with the Chinese art form to present art," Chan says. "Not only Apollo, the Greek story, but also the Chinese story could be part of the menu."

The mood is not all business. Chan describes the energy as closer to a road trip than a tour, and he is eager to show his NYCB colleagues a good time. Nadon and many of the dancers have visited China before — NYCB toured there in 2018 — but nothing compares to being shown around by a local. Chan is particularly excited to bring the group to Huizhou, his hometown and the tour's third stop, and to introduce them to family and friends, including his grandmother.

"If I don't go back to perform, she would never see it, because she's not able to travel long-distance," Chan says of why the hometown stop was a must. "As for my parents, they are already packed to follow me for the whole tour in China!"

If the tour succeeds, it will show that a dancer-producer can carry an entire NYCB-caliber program across the Pacific — and that a Chinese story can sit alongside Balanchine on the same bill.