American Ballet Theatre doesn’t typically align its seasonal galas with a company member’s farewell, but in the case of Misty Copeland, whose trailblazing career has irrevocably changed the 85-year-old institution, an exception was made. A decade ago, Copeland became the first Black woman to be named a principal at ABT and rocketed to icon status as a result. Her retirement performance at Wednesday evening’s Fall gala, unsurprisingly, drew a crowd of equal stature.

For weeks, tickets were like gold dust. Amy Sherald, Marc Jacobs, and Iman were evidently among those who lucked out. As they filled their seats at the David H. Koch Theater, another group flocked to the nearby Alice Tully Hall for a simulcast made possible by ABT Rise, an in-house initiative focused on inclusion. This was a night for the people’s artist, prompting Oprah herself to answer the call to serve as the honorary grand co-chair. “I never say yes,” she told the audience to laughter. But “once in a generation, someone comes along who doesn’t just master their craft—they shift the very atmosphere around it.”

Copeland’s performance wasn’t only her swan song for ABT, which she joined in 2001. It was also her first in five years: a pause drawn out by the pandemic, the birth of her son, and still-lingering injuries. In recent months she dove back into rigorous training, including a return to pointe shoes, collaborating with the company’s artistic director Susan Jaffe on a program that reflected her stylistic breadth and career-shaping roles.

The swirl of emotions that Wednesday brought was inevitable. “It was a terrible idea to do the step-and-repeat before the show because I cried through every interview,” Copeland told Vogue. “When they asked, ‘What are you wearing?’ I was like, ‘Carolina Herrera!’” she said, mocking a dramatic blubber.

The balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet opened the program, with a luminous Copeland alongside Calvin Royal III. It played out like a tender, long-deferred romance. The two had been set to perform the full-length ballet during the summer 2020 season, before COVID shuttered the city’s theaters; it would have been Royal’s debut in the role and the first time two Black dancers at ABT played the star-crossed Shakespearean lovers. For Copeland’s first moment back onstage to be in the guise of the ingénue, alive with possibility, was a poignant choice for an artist about to begin anew. “I just feel like she’s free,” Royal said after the show, dressed in a minimalist Giorgio Armani suit with a beaded trim. “Maybe it’s motherhood, maybe it’s this whole mammoth [undertaking] of coming back to the stage after five years—it felt very deep and rich. We were just meeting ourselves where we are at this present moment.”

Emotive clips showing snippets of Copeland’s life and career were played between dances. In a nod to her 2015 breakout turn as Odette/Odile, the principals Hee Seo and Cory Stearns performed Swan Lake’s Act II pas deux with crystalline precision. The celebrated choreographer Kyle Abraham also debuted a newly commissioned work titled Wrecka Stow, with Copeland and Royal leading a cast clad in sumptuous bodysuits and sheer skirted costumes by Reid & Harriet. “Back back back at it with my sista from another mista,” Abraham later wrote in an Instagram post acknowledging the reunion.

George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations delivered a dose of pomp (and tutus a’plenty), and a group of ABT Studio Company members and apprentices performed an excerpt of Houston Thomas’s U Don’t Know Me—highlighting the pre-professional track that Copeland took at age 17. To close, Copeland and the gallant Herman Cornejo danced three vignettes from Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra Suite, by turns swank and impetuous and floating on air. A procession of well-wishers followed, with a heap of flowers downstage: colleagues and ballet coaches, Tharp and Abraham, Copeland’s very first ballet teacher from the San Pedro Boys and Girls Club, and her three-year-old son.