Daniel Ulbricht

On Monday night, "Dance Against Cancer" raised over $25,000 for the American Cancer Society. The event, held at Manhattan Movement & Arts Center, was co-produced by Daniel Ulbricht, whose mother is currently battling uterine cancer. It featured several of Ulbricht’s fellow New York City Ballet dancers, along with "So You Think You Can Dance" star Alex Wong and members of Keigwin + Company, Lar Lubovich Dance Company and more. The evening was driven by a strong sense of purpose: We learned during an introductory film that each participant had been touched by cancer in some way.

Senior editor Jenny Stahl recently called New York City Ballet principal Daniel Ulbricht "Superman," and I can't think of a better way to describe the phenomenally talented dancer and teacher, who seems to be everywhere at once these days. (We recently posted a poll asking who your favorite dancer-teacher was, and Ulbricht cleaned up.)

It's a bird, it's a plane—nope, it's Daniel Ulbricht.

When I was at an ABT summer intensive years ago, one of my teachers told our class that the most thrilling pirouettes aren't the tazmanian devilishly fast spins, but they are the slow, smooth turns that look like they're effortlessly in control. This made a huge impact on me because up until that moment, I had always been trying to speed up my pirouettes to make them look more impressive—and also because immediately after listening to this bit of wisdom I performed my first quadruple pirouette on pointe.