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
When Doechii became only the third woman to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album, in February, it felt less like a coronation than a vision coming to pass. The long-awaited full-length mixtape that won, “Alligator Bites Never Heal,” was dynamic and multitudinous, bursting at the seams with an eagerness to be great. In 2022, the Tampa rapper parlayed viral success into record deals with Top Dawg Entertainment and Capitol Records, launching a star turn that felt preordained. Her wordplay is elastic, her flows animated, and she finds just the right balance between classic and modern sensibilities. Doechii seemed to channel all of her zeal into her Grammy performance, which officially marked her transition to the big time.—Sheldon Pearce (The Theatre at MSG; Oct. 20.)
Classical
In 1613, Dutch colonialists and the Haudenosaunee made a peace arrangement, now known as the Two Row Wampum Treaty. The agreement is one of the oldest on record in the long, complex, and cruel history between European interests and Indigenous nations in North America. Language, dates, and names from treaties like this one appear in the composer Jerome Kitzke’s twenty-four-part libretto “I Wonder If This Ground Has Anything to Say (A Treaty Illumination).” The work, presented in its world première by the contemporary music collective thingNY, sheds light on the continuing—and underaddressed—injustices facing Indigenous peoples, and the obligations of the U.S. government to honor its agreements.—Jane Bua (Merkin Hall; Oct. 16.)
Art
Two outstanding shows at Gordon Robichaux have a similar theme: the things left behind and what we do with them. In the artist DW Fitzpatrick’s minimal works, their use of chewed-on pencils and a plastic cast of a thumb evoke absent bodies, but the spirits of the living are powerfully present. Fitzpatrick’s knowing eye informs the witty and wise clock face for the sculpture “Arm Got Lost on Way to Sleeve” (2025). The sixty-one-year-old artist’s colors, when they use them at all, are muted, whereas the wonderful performer and collagist Agosto Machado’s worlds are defined by color and density. In his devastating “Anna May Wong (Altar)” (2025), the great Chinese American star is seen in photographs juxtaposed with a rose-colored shawl and an iron—evoking the stereotypical view of a Chinese woman as a laundress. The brilliant “Untitled (Obituaries)” is a collage of death notices of the artist’s friends, showing how early time ran out for many gay people with the advent of AIDS, and how time continues to run out for us all.—Hilton Als (Through Oct. 26.)
Movies
In the Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s new drama, “It Was Just an Accident,” a political thriller made clandestinely in and near Tehran, a driver called Eghbal brings his car to a garage on a remote country road. There, a workman named Vahid, a former political prisoner, thinks he recognizes Eghbal as an officer who tortured him. After kidnapping Eghbal and while preparing to kill him, Vahid doubts his own memory (he was blindfolded in detention) and, packing the captive into a van, visits other former political prisoners to seek confirmation; they offer a wide range of responses. The story runs on fable-like coincidences and moral abstractions, but they’re outweighed by the overwhelming details of lives shattered and minds shaped by unspeakable horrors.—Richard Brody (Opening Oct. 15.)
Pick Three
Paige Williams on crime narratives that advance the genre without wrecking the soul.
1. Before David Simon created “The Wire,” he took time off from his reporting job at the Baltimore Sun to produce a book, “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets,” one of the more accurate depictions of police work. (Read it for a colorful exposition of the Miranda warning alone.) The 1991 book quickly generated an eponymous NBC show starring the glorious, late Andre Braugher (pictured). All seven seasons are now streaming on Peacock. It’s nice to see Detective Frank Pembleton again.
2. “Spotlight: Snitch City,” a podcast by the Boston Globe’s highly decorated Spotlight investigative team, starts with one cop trying to hold another accountable for troubling activities involving confidential informants in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Herman Melville’s old fishing grounds. The exposé functions, vividly, as a reminder that the country’s well-being hinges on safeguarding journalism’s constitutionally protected authority to scrutinize those in power. At least one commanding officer has resigned.
3. James Graham’s “Punch,” a play that’s running both on Broadway and on London’s West End, tells the true story of British parents who chose to embrace, not hate, a stranger who randomly sucker-punched their son, a paramedic in training, killing him. This type of reconciliation process—facilitating relationships between perpetrators and victims—is called restorative justice, and it’s rarely in the limelight. Graham couldn’t have been more apt when he recently told the Times that “Punch” explores “how you create empathy in a cruel society.”
On and Off the Avenue
Rachel Syme on cowgirl couture.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up, cowboy boots are arguably as ubiquitous as tennis shoes. Boot-cut jeans were never a passing trend in the desert Southwest; they are considered timeless, the ideal marriage of fashion and utility. For many of my classmates, the zeal for riding gear seemed to be less about raw functionality and more about flair; there was a deep yearning to be part of a dusty tradition, even if you spent more time ambling through the mall than tending to the stables. It was a teen-age rite of passage to visit Dan’s Boots & Saddles, a Western-wear emporium that has been serving the Albuquerque area since 1953, where hundreds of boot varietals, from snakeskin to ostrich leather, line the walls. I had a pair of silver calf-height boots (known in the business as “roper boots,” for their shorter length) that I paired with every outfit, from denim shorts to sundresses. I wore them until I wore them out.
I recently thought about those boots again, when I walked into the massive new New York flagship store for Tecovas, a fast-growing brand hailing from Austin, Texas, that is attempting to own the nouveau Western-wear craze in the United States. In many ways, Tecovas is the exact opposite of Dan’s Boots & Saddles—it was never meant to be a down-home mom-and-pop business. It was founded, in 2015, by Paul Hedrick, a Dallas-born entrepreneur who left Texas for Harvard and then went on to work at a private-equity firm in Greenwich, Connecticut. Hedrick, who was on the hunt for a fresh brand idea, discovered that the American market for Western boots alone was worth more than three billion dollars at the time, and Hedrick emptied out his 401(k) to make a go of it. According to Texas Monthly, Hedrick then travelled to León, Mexico, where many of the most popular boots in the world (including Lucchese) are made, and contracted artisans who also make high-end brands to work on his idea. Within five years, he’d opened a giant headquarters in Austin and raised almost thirty million dollars from investors who’d also backed Warby Parker and Bonobos. (Hedrick stepped aside as C.E.O. in 2022, but remains chairman.)
What Tecovas is selling is not local charm but streamlined ease; it offers simple styles in accessible colors at a mid-level price point (its best-selling knee-high women’s boot, the Annie, costs three hundred and forty-five dollars). Western wear has surged in recent years—the market is expected to reach a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars by 2030—and Tecovas has rushed in to fill the demand with a range of classic cowboy-chic staples; it now operates fifty stores across the country and counting. The New York outpost, in SoHo, is, at forty-five hundred square feet, the brand’s largest yet—and the one with the most bells and whistles. It features a boot-shining station, a bourbon bar, and stretching and embossing services. Yee-haw.
This Week with: Jennifer Wilson
Our writers on their current obsessions.
This week, I loved the movie “Love,” though not as much as I enjoyed “Sex.” But my favorite of the three loosely connected films that make up the Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s “Oslo Trilogy” is the final installment, “Dreams,” which just ended its run at Film Forum but can be streamed on Mubi. I would describe the films as experimental Nordic mumblecore: a set of slightly surreal meditations on how enlivening a new erotic connection can be, even as, or perhaps especially when, it wrecks your life beyond recognition.
This week, I’m consuming the book “Night People” by the d.j. turned mega-producer Mark Ronson. It’s not exactly a memoir; it’s more of a set list of some of the wildest nights Ronson spent working the turntables in the nineties, from Puff Daddy’s infamous twenty-ninth birthday party at Cipriani’s to the release party for D’Angelo’s iconic album “Voodoo.” It’s a fun snapshot of the era’s night-life culture, and Ronson’s not afraid to bite the hands that once fed him, critiquing the arrival of bottle service, a cash grab that cut into the dance floor, literally and spiritually.
This week, I’m stuck on an electrifying play from my cherished Philadelphia Eagles’ Week Four win against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The tight end Cameron Latu blocked a punt return from Tampa Bay’s Riley Dixon, upon which our safety, Sydney Brown, recovered the ball and ran it in for a touchdown. “We’re like a ‘Space Jam’ team!” I texted my mom, the Eagles’ most devoted and loyal fan.
This week, I cringed at Rolling Stone’s five-star review of the divisive new Taylor Swift album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” The flat writing, coupled with the magazine’s orange-and-teal “homepage takeover,” made the whole thing feel like sponcon and of a piece with a broader culture of genuflecting to billionaires. I don’t have strong feelings about this album, but I chuckled at a line from Pitchfork’s blistering review, which described “Wood,” a single about Travis Kelce’s manhood, as having “the spiritual energy of bachelorette-party penis décor.” What can I say—I like music criticism with B.D.E.
Next week, I’m looking forward to the exhibition “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island,” the first U.S. survey of the Cuban American artist Coco Fusco, at El Museo del Barrio. I saw this show in 2023, in Berlin, when it was at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and I’m looking forward to seeing how certain parts of the exhibit—such as Fusco’s mixed-media exploration of photography and its role in the F.B.I. manhunt of Angela Davis—might get recontextualized for an American audience in 2025, when we’ve all been watching ICE raids on our phones.
P.S. Good stuff on the internet:
Don’t crash out
Molly Young’s spiritual practice
Happy birthday, Thelonious Monk