Ballet superstar Misty Copeland, the first black woman to be named principal dancer by the American Ballet Theatre, will make her Harris Theater debut when that company returns to Chicago in February.
American Ballet Theatre will appear as part of the Harris Theater’s gala on February 21, featuring Jessica Lang’s Her Notes (with Copeland), set to Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr, Christopher Wheeldon’s Thirteen Diversions, performed to Benjamin Britten’s Diversions for Piano (Left Hand) and Orchestra and a third piece to be announced. The company will perform two distinct programs through the rest of the week at the Harris: Program A, on February 22 and 24, will include Wheeldon’s Diversions, Alexei Ratmansky’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium and Antony Tudor’s 1975 piece The Leaves are Fading. Program B, on February 23 and 25, will feature Lang’s Her Notes, a new work by Ratmansky due to premiere this fall and additional pieces to be announced.
Other entries in the Harris Theater Presents 2017–18 season, announced on Tuesday, include a 450th birthday celebration for composer Claudio Monteverdi and an engagement by the Mark Morris Dance Group.
Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists are undertaking an international tour of all three of Monteverdi’s surviving operas—L’Orfeo, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria and L’Incoronazione di Poppea—in concert performances for the 450th anniversary of the Italian composer’s birth and the Harris will present the tour’s U.S. premiere October 12–15.
Mark Morris Dance Group will present the evening-length concert piece Layla and Majnun, adapted from the tragic love story by 10th-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi. First performed in Berkeley, California last fall, the new work features mugham vocalists Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova along with musicians of the Silk Road Ensemble. It will play three performances at the Harris on March 16 and 17, 2018.
Incidentally, Misty Copeland will appear in Chicago next week on a book tour for her new volume Ballerina Body, in a conversation with the Joffrey Ballet’s Erica Edwards at the Union League Club and in a Chicago Humanities Festival event with journalist Robin Robinson. Both March 23 events are sold out.
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