Misty Copeland’s Ballet Send-Off

Sometimes a return is also a farewell. Misty Copeland, the first Black female principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, may be the most famous American ballerina of her generation, but she hasn’t actually performed a ballet in five years, since before the pandemic. In the interim, she has not been idle: she published several books, had a child, and established a foundation that provides mentoring—and ballet training—to kids in under-resourced areas. Her career, and her advocacy for Black dancers, have had a measurable effect in reversing attitudes within the field. But something was still missing: the classic ballet farewell. The tinsel, the mountains of flowers, the tears. So she’s coming back for one final performance, on Oct. 22, as part of A.B.T.’s fall season at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theatre (Oct. 15-Nov. 1).

It’s hard to overstate the effort and the will power it must have taken Copeland to get back on pointe after such a hiatus. At her farewell, she will perform a rapturous pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo and Juliet” and an excerpt from Twyla Tharp’s sultry “Sinatra Suite.” And Kyle Abraham, a choreographer who has lately infused ballet with his seductive, sinuous style, has been brought in to compose a valedictory piece for Copeland and her longtime colleague Calvin Royal III. (Royal followed in Copeland’s footsteps, rising to the top of the ballet hierarchy at A.B.T.)

The rest of A.B.T.’s three-week season is a hodgepodge of old and new. One program offers three ballets from the company’s earliest years, including Antony Tudor’s 1938 “Gala Performance,” a spoof of ballet mannerisms and ballerina airs. Another looks back at Twyla Tharp’s long association with the company, which began in 1976 with “Push Comes to Shove,” a tour de force of vaudevillian humor and bravura that she created for the recently arrived Mikhail Baryshnikov. (It will be danced by two of the company’s current crop of virtuosos, Isaac Hernandez and Jake Roxander.) Yet another program combines a new work by the Brazilian-born Juliano Nunes with one of the most powerful works created for the company in the past decade, Alexei Ratmansky’s “Serenade After Plato’s Symposium.”—Marina Harss

About Town

Indie Rock

The Burlington indie rocker Greg Freeman quietly released his 2022 début, “I Looked Out,” a masterwork of doomy Americana, sans label or marketing campaign. Influenced by the blue-collar poetry of alt-folksters such as Jason Molina and Jay Farrar, Freeman chronicled union strife, transatlantic drives, communions with nature; his harsh, boyish melancholy garnered cult attention. “Burnover,” his latest—on which he plays ten instruments, including glockenspiel, violin, and concertina—is more boisterous, siphoning gritty exuberance from his live show, where he and his band have caught the attention of the nineties synth-rock legends Grandaddy, who are taking them on tour this fall. Freeman awes crowds with a squealing drawl that threatens to break but never quite does.—Holden Seidlitz (Brooklyn Steel; Oct. 15.)

Off Broadway

In the exhilarating, bilingual two-man musical “Mexodus,” directed by David Mendizábal, Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson—virtuosic composer-performers—tell the story of Henry (Robinson), an enslaved man who flees Texas for Mexico, which is fully emancipated by 1829. Carlos (Quijada), the Mexican ex-medic who rescues Henry from the Rio Grande, teaches him the phrase “Todos estamos juntos en esto,” and musically, too, the pair emphasizes solidarity, using live-looping technology so the two men can sound like a thousand. In their hands, everything is border music: ranchera, rap, classical piano, heavy-bottomed funk. In one stunning, fine-picked duet, their guitars communicate with deft sweetness where the not-yet-friends still fumble.—Helen Shaw (Minetta Lane; through Nov. 1.)

Hip-Hop

Photograph by C Prinz