Tara Keating and Philip Colucci

Juilliard alumni reunions can come in many forms. For Tara Keating (BFA ’95, dance) and Philip Colucci (BFA ’99, dance), one such reunion was bedside at New York City’s Hospital for Special Surgery—one of them was wearing a hospital gown and the other a lab coat.

Not having overlapped at school, Keating and Colucci met while dancing with Pennsylvania Ballet, where they bonded over shared Juilliard experiences and, over the next few years, became close friends. He coined her nickname, TK, and they were cast as partners, most notably in a steamy duet in Trey McIntyre’s Blue Until June.

At Juilliard Keating kept up her pointe work enough to look for a place in a ballet company after she graduated. First came American Repertory Ballet, then Tharp!, and then Pennsylvania Ballet as a soloist. Finally she became a founding member of Philadelphia’s BalletX, where she is now associate artistic director. Throughout her dancing career, Keating maintained top physical form with cross training, cardio, and weights. “Dancers are like Olympic athletes, and how you take care of your body has to be the number-one priority,” she said in a recent interview.

Still when Keating retired from the stage, at age 39, the years of hard dancing had taken a toll. She had a tear in her labrum (the ring of cartilage that follows the outside rim of the hip socket) that led to severe osteoarthritis, and her doctor initially suggested a total hip replacement. Her physical therapist, however, told her about a procedure called hip resurfacing, which brought her to Dr. Edwin Su in New York. Though the procedure is not often performed on women, Keating’s body type and strong bones made her an ideal candidate.

In 2013 she was scheduled for her first hip resurfacing at the Hospital for Special Surgery. And that’s when she and Colucci reconnected.

When Philip Colucci had received his acceptance letter from Juilliard in 1995, it was a dream come true, and he accepted the offer assuming that a career in dance would mean that he couldn’t pursue other dreams. After Pennsylvania Ballet, where he worked his way up from apprentice to soloist, came stints with Ballet X and Hubbard Street Dance. Along the way a herniated disk in 2002 and eventual spine surgery didn’t stop him from dancing until his worsening pain finally became intolerable.

While undergoing physical therapy over the years, Colucci discovered his passion for medicine that was in part fueled by his experiences in Irene Dowd’s anatomy class and Laura Glenn’s in-class imagery of three-dimensional space, which helped inspire his interest in imagining the body and movement in three dimensions. Conversations with William Morrison, his radiologist and a dance enthusiast, had helped Colucci realize that a career transition to medicine—radiology in particular—was a possibility.

Studying pre-med at the University of Pennsylvania and getting his M.D. at Weill Medical College at Cornell University were other dreams come true, as was the opportunity to do his residency in radiology at New-York Presbyterian Hospital and marrying and starting a family. Though completing a medical residency as the parent of a toddler was particularly challenging, Colucci doesn’t regret the timing of his unusual dance-to-doctor path. And while he’s 10 years older than the majority of his peers, there are other artists and older doctors in the program.

Which brings us back to the Hospital for Special Surgery, where Keating was nervously awaiting her first hip resurfacing.

It was a short-call day for Philip, then doing his third-year rotations, so he was able to make it to the Post-Anesthesia Care Unit right after Keating woke up. Though he was not her doctor, he stayed with her for hours, catching up. “I’m sure our friendship would have been strong either way, but I think the common experiences and philosophies from our time at Juilliard definitely deepened our professional and personal connection,” Colucci says.

Sarah Adriance (BFA ’95, dance), formerly the administrative director of the Dance Division, is the director of the Juilliard Summer Dance Intensive