Misty Copeland’s star continues to rise, reports Dance Australia’s New York correspondent Susan Reiter.
It's been quite a year for American Ballet Theatre's Misty Copeland, who performed her first Odette/Odile with the company during its Brisbane season last September. She’s been in the media spotlight as her career has moved into high gear – and she also announced that she's engaged.
In April, she was named to Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and appeared on one of several different covers of that week's issue of the magazine.
On June 30, ABT announced that Copeland (as well as fellow soloist Stella Abrera) was being promoted to the rank of principal dancer, effective August 1. This came at the end of ABT's eight-week New York season during which she performed Odette-Odile in New York for the first time, as well as her first Juliet in Macmillan's Romeo and Juliet. Her other notable roles during the season included the Cowgirl in Agnes DeMille's Rodeo, Gamzatti in La Bayadere, and the Bluebird Pas de Deux in Alexei Ratmansky's new production of The Sleeping Beauty.
Copeland's promotion garnered a tremendous amount of media attention, locally and nationally.
The news of her becoming ABT's first African-American principal dancer attracted extensive TV coverage. She was being interviewed everywhere, it seemed.
Once ABT was off for several weeks in the summer, Copeland performed several pas de deux at the Vail International Dance Festival, a high-profile two-week event in Colorado. She then garnered a huge amount of additional attention when she stepped into the role of Ivy Smith in the Broadway revival of On the Town. The role was tailored for a ballerina, with several extensive dance sequences, but also required Copeland to speak and sing on stage for the first time. She fit right into the dance-heavy musical, with choreography by Joshua Bergasse, as can be seen in this rehearsal for one of her major numbers.
The New York Times reported that On the Town's box office income went up significantly when Copeland went into it. Her appearance had always been scheduled to last for just two weeks, and the producers decided to close the show – which received glowing reviews but struggled to fill one of Broadway's largest theaters – on 6 September, the date of Copeland's final performance.
During ABT's upcoming fall season (12 Oct – 1 Nov), Copeland is scheduled to dance the lead, opposite James Whiteside, in AfterEffect, fellow principal dancer Marcelo Gomes' s new ballet, as well as new roles in a major revival of The Brahms-Haydn Variations by Twyla Tharp, and the company premiere of Balanchine's Valse Fantasie.
- Susan Reiter
Above: Misty Copeland as Juliet in Kenneth Macmillan's Romeo and Juliet.
Photo: Rosalie O'Connor.
Above: Misty Copeland as Odette in Swan Lake.
Photo: Queensland Performing Arts Centre/Darren Thomas.