There’s a flurry of activity in front of the Joyce Theater on Tuesday evening, which lets you know that it’s opening night. While the marquee of the hip Chelsea theater simply reads “Ballet Festival,” all in attendance know that this is a program with a very particular star power behind it: this year, Misty Copeland steps up as guest curator for the third edition of the festival. The festival takes place less than a year after Copeland's retirement from American Ballet Theatre, where during her twenty-five-year tenure, she made history as the company’s first Black female principal dancer in 2015. Tonight, the performance will be followed by its annual opening Summer Soirée at PHD Rooftop Lounge in the Dream Downtown hotel. For the next two weeks, audiences will enjoy a hand-curated selection of ballets choreographed and performed mainly by Black, brown, and queer dancers. “It's not that we're introducing new voices. It's that we’re giving space to them,” Copeland told Flaunt of her philosophy toward curation. “Because they've always been there.”

On her approach to mentorship, Copeland says, “Ballet is so steeped in the traditions and history, but it's also so much about passing along the knowledge and the experiences. When I think about what mentorship means to me, it's really rooted in how we pass on choreography in the studio. It’s not documented, it's literally just from person to person…
And now I feel like I'm recently reflecting on my own career and looking into the future of what dance should be. And it needs to have all of those bases.”

The first week’s program features a blend of classical, modern, and contemporary ballet pieces, from 1961 to 2026. The classics are very much on the menu: Shota Miyoshi, a dancer from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, performs Bob Fosse’s Percussion IV (1978) with jackknife precision, tautening and liquifying in the blink of an eye. Complexions Contemporary Ballet artists April Watson and Joe González perform Dwight Rhoden’s Ave Maria (1995) with formidable decisiveness and sinew. A special treat is José Limón’s Sonata for Two Cellos (1961) right before intermission, which is accompanied by two live cellists. The rarely-before-seen solo, previously danced only by Limón himself and Desmond Richardson (American Ballet Theatre’s first Black principal dancer and co-founder and co-artistic director of Complexions), is now interpreted by New York City Ballet soloist Victor Abreu, who executes the quintessentially Limón falls, recovery, and swirling, explosive shapes in an act of superior stamina.

Contemporary works are also well-represented. New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Taylor Stanley dances Kyle Abraham’s Show Pony (2018) with unbroken fluidity and a hypnotic finesse. Two recently debuted pas de deux—Ingrid Silva’s Interactions (2025) and Houston Thomas’s Young Lovers (2025), danced respectively by Elias Re and Renan Cerdeiro, and González and Aeron Buchanan—play with mirroring, traction, and compression. The Week 1 program closes with the debut of new work Risings (2026) commissioned specifically for the festival from choreographer and ABT corps de ballet member Aleisha Walker, a spritely quintet with traces of Balanchine configurations and canons. The opportunity to explore different styles for newcomers and established dances alike is part of the draw of the Joyce’s programming, Joyce executive director Linda Shelton explained. “Choreographers who are trying to do something new, rather than what they’re doing, say, in their day jobs… can do it on a smaller scale with us,” Shelton tells Flaunt.

The second week of the program promises more exciting choreography both well-loved and brand-new, including an excerpt of John Taras’s Firebird (1982) by the Dance Theatre of Harlem—which recontextualizes the folk tale and Stravinsky’s score in a Caribbean setting— Andrea Miller’s geometric Middle Length Poem (2017), Alonzo King’s spiritual Deep River (2022), a reprise of Ave Maria, and Stanton Welch’s Clear (2001) featuring costumes by Michael Kors for Celine. There are two 2026 ballets as well: the haunting Mantle by James Whiteside, which was developed last year by the ABT Choreography Incubator, and the festival’s closing act and second original commission Melt: From the Inside Out by Ilo, an Atlanta-based choreographer with a background in house dance.

Joyce Director of Programming Danni Gee, who collaborated closely with Copeland to build the program, told Flaunt that there are many poignant, personal details woven into the repertory: for instance, the original costume and set designer of Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Firebird Geoffrey Holder also designed the archival costume Copeland wore for the Oscars this past year, and Copeland and King previously collaborated on silent dance film short Flower (2023). “There are so many connections to her with each of these ballets,” Gee explains. “Like all roads lead to Rome, all roads lead to Misty with this program.”

After the performance concludes, the audience proceeds en masse a few blocks south to Dream Downtown. The party is a mix of ballet patrons, arts executives, and dancers themselves now dressed in plainclothes but recognizable from their long necks and turned-out stances. Among the crowd is President and CEO of The Music Center Rachel Moore and philanthropist and dance educator Jody Arnhold. After cocktail hour and before the antipasto skewers and cheeseburger sliders start to make the rounds, Copeland delivers welcome remarks from behind the DJ booth, joking that she always wanted to be a DJ. In a toast to the evening and the performances to come, she said to the crowd, “This is to the future of dance, and how I envision it.”

The Joyce Ballet Festival curated by Misty Copeland will run through August 16, 2026 in New York City.