The Ballerina and Her Prince: An Upper West Side Love Story

By Andrea Sachs

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

That question was easily answered: they came from a festive tenant. But the bigger question was how Flynn was going to get a proper introduction to Lovette. With a neighbor’s help, he cooked up a scheme to rendezvous with Lovette at nearby VSV Wine Bar. It worked perfectly, Lovette says. “We’ve been together ever since.”

Lovette had a story, though, that Daniel initially knew nothing about, a background so fabulous that an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter would have been told that the whole tale was too improbable to include in a script. Lovette, 32, had a star career as a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet before leaving the stage for 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 my favorite things about Daniel, and there’s a million 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. Says Lovette, “To me, that was very refreshing!” Though he says it’s been “a steep learning curve,” Flynn has made up for lost time. His diligence has paid off. In June, he asked Lovette to marry him, to which she happily replied yes.

When I visited the couple on the UWS last week, Lovette was preparing to leave the next day on a two-month trip to Leipzig, Germany, where she will be choreographing her first full-length work, Romeo and Juliet, for a Germany company. The two-hour ballet will be premiering on October 26. “It will be hard to be away from each other,” Lovette says. “But it’s the biggest thing I’ve done in my career to date.” Flynn plans to visit twice and be present for the premiere.

Lovettte started dancing at age 10 as a homeschooled child in Thousand Oaks, California, when the director of a local dance studio astutely saw her potential and invited her to take her first ballet class. “We did a performance of Cinderella, and we all got to be Cinderella,” says Lovette of her first recital. “I wore this thrift-store dress that my mom bought me. Even though I was in the very back, I felt like it was my moment.” The die was cast. 

By age 14, Lovette was living in a dorm at Lincoln Center and attending the prestigious School of American Ballet, the feeder school for the NYC Ballet. She spent four years at the school, following a rigorous schedule of classes in the morning and early afternoon, and then rehearsals in the evening. On top of that, in order to afford New York, Lovette worked at 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. Since her arrival in Manhattan 18 years ago, the UWS has been Lovette’s home.

Lovette’s ascent in the dance world was swift. In 2009, artistic director Peter Martins made her an apprentice with the New York City Ballet. Within a year, Dance Style magazine was raving: “It’s hard to describe star quality. Eighteen-year-old Lauren Lovette has luxuriously archy feet, elegant lines and an animated, pretty face–but that doesn’t quite explain the New York City Ballet apprentice’s unique magnetism. ‘I don’t know what it is, but she’s got it,’ says NYCB ballet master Kathleen Tracey.”

Lovette soon was living out the dream of every little girl who had ever tried a plié. She was invited to join the corps de ballet in 2010, became a soloist in 2013 and a principal dancer in 2015. For years, she dazzled audiences with her grace and talent. And yet, she admits frankly that as much as she loves ballet, she often did not enjoy performing: “I love creating new works. I love the rehearsal process, and all the different people I get to meet. I even love attending the events and meeting supporters of the arts and doing raising money for the arts. But getting out on stage under the lights with the tutu on, and now it’s your time to dance for all the people, that was always very difficult for me.” 

Her passion, she found, was choreography, and in 2016, she started trying her hand at that. On October 21, 2021, without another job in hand, 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 her own, and she is busy dancing, teaching and choreographing independently. She and Flynn just returned from the Vail Dance Festival, where she has danced and choreographed for 13 years.

The couple live together now in the same building where they met. Since they’re true Type-A Upper West Siders (Daniel is a financial manager for Accomplished, a luxury travel company, and also owns a brewery consulting business), it’s not easy to set a date for the wedding; it’s looking like a year from December. Meanwhile, there’s always running in Central Park and visiting favorite UWS food spots such as Jacob’s Pickles, Nina’s Great Burrito Bar, and PopUp Bagels 

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

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