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Misty Copeland

Helene

By Helene
in Dancers

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Natalia

Natalia

Posted
Posted

I'm not sure if this was mentioned elsewhere but Misty will be appearing at the premiere of the documentary on her life, A BALLERINA's TALE, this coming Sunday, April 19 @ 6pm, the BMCC TriBeCa Perf Arts Center. It's being billed as a Special Screening within the Tribeca Film Festival.

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Dale

Dale

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From ABT:

MISTY COPELAND NAMED TO

TIME MAGAZINE’S ANNUAL TIME 100 LIST

American Ballet Theatre Soloist Misty Copeland has been named by TIME Magazine to the 2015 TIME 100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The full list and related tributes appear in the April 27 issue of TIME.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri and raised in San Pedro, California, Misty Copeland began her ballet studies at the age of 13 at the San Pedro City Ballet. She joined ABT’s Studio Company in September 2000, then joined American Ballet Theatre as a member of the corps de ballet in April 2001 and was appointed a Soloist in August 2007. With ABT, she has danced such leading roles as Swanilda in Coppélia, Clara, The Princess in

The Nutcracker, the title role in Firebird, the Cowgirl in Rodeo and Odette-Odile in Swan Lake. Copeland received the 2008 Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Arts and was named National Youth of the Year Ambassador for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America in 2013. In 2014, President Obama appointed Copeland to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition. She is the recipient of a 2014 Dance Magazine Award and the author of the best-selling memoir, Life in Motion and the children’s book Firebird.

The TIME 100, now in its twelfth year, recognizes the activism, innovation and achievement of the world’s most influential individuals. As TIME Editor Nancy Gibbs has said of the list in the past, “The TIME 100 is a list of the world's most influential men and women, not its most powerful, though those are not mutually exclusive terms …. While power is certain, influence is subtle…. As much as this exercise chronicles the achievements of the past year, we also focus on figures whose influence is likely to grow, so we can look around the corner to see what is coming."

For more information on American Ballet Theatre, please visit www.abt.org. Follow @TIME for updates about the list on Twitter and at Facebook.com/TIME and #TIME100

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Kathleen O'Connell

Kathleen O'Connell

Posted
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Misty Copeland just made the cover of TIME magazine!

Fonteyn...Kirkland...now Copeland! Any other ballerinas ever made the TIME cover?

Interestingly enough, I found out about this via Twitter - not from ABT's official feed (@ABTBallet), however, but rather, through Jonathan Capehart's (@CapehartJ) retweet of this tweet from Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox).

I think this speaks volumes about 1) the kind of reach and resonance Copeland's story has and 2) ABT's grasp (or lack thereof) of social media.

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Natalia

Natalia

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I think her promotion to principal is now assured. There is no way McKenzie will fail to promote her in light of this development.

I sure you're right, abatt. I would bet the farm on Misty making it, before any other current ABT female soloist. I have dreams of Kevin McKenzie stepping up to Misty during bows of her upcoming Juliet and making her Etoile, even though that's a POB title. :)

Maybe this will spur PBS and ABT to feature live ABT performances on PBS? So many people would tune into PBS and make donations if Misty would be the star of a telecast ballet. A Makarova for the 21st century.

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Kathleen O'Connell

Kathleen O'Connell

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I'm sure it will be up on the ABT site in due course.

Well, they did manage to get an announcement up on Facebook about 5 minutes ago.

I don't know what ABT's media and communications policy is, but I would have expected a FB post and a tweet to hit their feeds at the same time that the press release went out.

(I can't find the press release, so many thanks to Dale for posting.)

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Helene

Helene

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ABT's website is horrific. If you didn't know anything about ballet, you might conclude that it's a third-rank regional company that performed four weekends a year from their website. It's also confusing to be partially represented on the Met website, which is decent as these things go for opera, but not so much for everything else. The Kennedy Center's website is equal-opportunity bad for everything but their listings.

The news has been retweeted many times on my feed, from individuals, companies, and organizations, and I'm connected to a very small number of them.

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Kathleen O'Connell

Kathleen O'Connell

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Ugh. That website. I do give ABT props for posting their IRS 990 on the "Financial" page. So few arts organizations are that transparent about their finances even though they actively solicit donations from the public. It almost makes up for how much clicking around it takes to find The Ballet Dictionary and Repertory Archive. ABT's repertory archive doesn't look as slick as NYCB's but it's actually much more useful, since one can sort it by title, choreographer, and composer.

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sandik

sandik

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Oh, I remember that cover!

Re ABT's web presence. I think they got started early (I remember them having a much wider variety of content than other companies) but didn't stay on top of the technology. And there's nothing more stale than a just-barely-dated website.

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Kathleen O'Connell

Kathleen O'Connell

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Re ABT's web presence. I think they got started early (I remember them having a much wider variety of content than other companies) but didn't stay on top of the technology. And there's nothing more stale than a just-barely-dated website.

I'd laud them for having a smartphone app, except that it costs $1.99. Whatever are they thinking? Hello?!? It's marketing, not a valuable public service! (NYCB's mobile app is free.) Now if they were to package their video dictionary up into a nice little app, that I might pay for.

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Natalia

Natalia

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.

Trinette Singleton of the Joffrey way back in 1968. http://joffrey.com/blog_photos/2-27-08-singleton/time-1968.jpg

.

Thanks. I remembered Trinette but the piece was modern...no toe shoes. Misty and the others wore pointes but, as much as I like Misty, I don't care much for the selected photo. Masculine look, ugly pose and (sigh) no tights. It just doesn't convey classical ballet. Had Time shown Misty in full Odette costume, it would have pulled a greater punch and been a more beautiful look.

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kfw

kfw

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I don't care much for the selected photo. Masculine look, ugly pose and (sigh) no tights. It just doesn't convey classical ballet. Had Time shown Misty in full Odette costume, it would have pulled a greater punch and been a more beautiful look.

I agree. Posing her in Swan Lake dress would have highlighted her greatest achievement, which is not to have become a well-known dance athlete, so to speak, but to have earned leading roles in the classical (heretofore almost exclusively white) repertoire.

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abatt

abatt

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I also thought it was interesting that the tribute to Misty in Time was written by a gymnast, Nadia Comaneci, rather than a dancer. Actually, having her pose without tights with bulging leg muscles exposed sort of fits in her case. She has repeatedly stated that her mission, in part, was to fight against the typical ballet body and the assumption that only women with certain types of bodies can be successful ballet dancers. The Time photo is an extension of that sentiment.

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kfw

kfw

Posted
Posted

I also thought it was interesting that the tribute to Misty in Time was written by a gymnast, Nadia Comaneci, rather than a dancer. Actually, having her pose without tights with bulging leg muscles exposed sort of fits in her case. She has repeatedly stated that her mission, in part, was to fight against the typical ballet body and the assumption that only women with certain types of bodies can be successful ballet dancers. The Time photo is an extension of that sentiment.

Good point.

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choriamb

choriamb

Posted
Posted

I also thought it was interesting that the tribute to Misty in Time was written by a gymnast, Nadia Comaneci, rather than a dancer. Actually, having her pose without tights with bulging leg muscles exposed sort of fits in her case. She has repeatedly stated that her mission, in part, was to fight against the typical ballet body and the assumption that only women with certain types of bodies can be successful ballet dancers. The Time photo is an extension of that sentiment.

FWIW, a video of Comaneci is mentioned in Copeland's bio as one of the first ways she discovered the visual power of movement as a child.

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choriamb

choriamb

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Posted

Ugh. That website. I do give ABT props for posting their IRS 990 on the "Financial" page. So few arts organizations are that transparent about their finances even though they actively solicit donations from the public. It almost makes up for how much clicking around it takes to find The Ballet Dictionary and Repertory Archive. ABT's repertory archive doesn't look as slick as NYCB's but it's actually much more useful, since one can sort it by title, choreographer, and composer.

Props for their calendar function, too: the full-month view is far more useful than NYCB's. (Although every time I click on the "Buy Tickets" link for a single performance and DON'T land on the individual page for that performance...)

But on the off-chance that this thread has struck a chord with anyone from 890 Broadway and they're looking for a lightly-used UI/UX designer/programmer with a mess of e-commerce and subscription funnel experience...

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