Melanie Hamrick Is Still On Pointe
Melanie Hamrick, a former member of American Ballet Theatre’s corps de ballet, was leaping down a dingy stairwell in the company’s lower-Broadway rehearsal building recently. It was habit. “When you only have a five-minute break from class, you learn to take the stairs and not wait for the elevator,” she said. She had just finished rehearsing two A.B.T. principal dancers in “Rainbow,” a pas de deux that she choreographed to a 1967 Rolling Stones song written by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, who has been her romantic partner since 2014.
An AMC multiplex has been next door since Hamrick moved to the city, from Virginia, more than twenty years ago, as a seventeen-year-old, to join A.B.T.’s junior company. Looking up at the cinema now, she thought of Timothée Chalamet’s notorious quip that nobody cares about ballet or opera. “That comment gave ballet a lot of publicity,” she said. Hamrick, who was wearing a pair of mannish trousers with a vest and has a mild millennial vocal fry, left A.B.T. in 2019, three years after having a son with Jagger. The two met while touring in Japan. “We’re both performers, so we understood each other’s lives,” she said. A few years ago, they got engaged.
Since retiring from the stage, Hamrick has been busy. She works as a choreographer, runs a ballet-event production company, has published two steamy ballet romance novels, and is executive-producing a film adaptation of one. “It can be overwhelming when you finish, and a lot of dancers lose themselves,” she said, weaving through sidewalk crowds and holding a coffee. “I went to the Philharmonic and opera a lot.” She also had a son to raise and an image to manage. “I have to keep a social-media presence, but I don’t want to put too much of us in,” she said, referring to her family. Her Instagram shows mostly Hamrick herself, with an occasional shot of her eighty-two-year-old baby daddy and their towheaded nine-year-old, whose set of lips resembles his father’s.
“As a kid, I knew ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ ” Hamrick said. But she mostly listened to classical music, “and maybe a little Eminem and Papa Roach.” Her parents, an engineer and a health-care worker, often took her to the Kennedy Center. She met Jagger backstage at a Rolling Stones show. “It was the first rock concert I ever attended,” she said. To bone up, she’d listened to his songs on Apple Music and found them “interesting.” She initially choreographed “Rainbow” as part of a longer work set to Stones songs—the band’s catalogue is valued at half a billion dollars—for a 2019 première at the Mariinsky Theatre, in Russia. Jagger helped edit the music.
When “Rainbow” was performed at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theatre the following night, it went off well, danced by A.B.T.’s Calvin Royal III and Christine Shevchenko, who used to share a dressing room with Hamrick. The occasion was Youth America Grand Prix’s Stars of Today Meet the Stars of Tomorrow Gala, and Hamrick was one of the evening’s honorees. The organization, which is known as the “American Idol” of ballet, distributes scholarships and jobs to worthy students.
“I see a lot of people here tonight that look like they care about ballet—right, Mr. Chalamet?” the dancer Misty Copeland said from the podium, as she gave some introductory remarks. During the dinner that followed, out in the theatre’s sparkling lobby, Hamrick made a thank-you speech from the second-ring balcony, Eva Perón style. Wearing a plunging black gown with peekaboo cutouts that she said was not by Tom Ford (though it looked like it was), she extolled the organization and its founder, Larissa Saveliev, who defected from the Bolshoi in 1993. Hamrick’s fiancé, who had seen the ballet already, wasn’t in attendance, but his son (and seventh child) Lucas Jagger, who is twenty-seven, was at her side. He wore silver nail polish, fingerless black gloves, and red glasses, and his hair was as unruly as Hamrick’s was sleek. He noted that it was a good night for ballet, and when the Chalamet remark was mentioned he rolled his eyes: “It would be like me saying nobody cares about rock and roll anymore.” ♦