Nine days before her final performance with the American Ballet Theatre, Gillian Murphy is struck by a realization.
“I’ve never done retirement bows before,” she says to Amanda McKerrow, the company’s director of repertoire and a former principal dancer, after a rehearsal.
Until last Friday, Murphy, 46, was ABT’s longest-standing member. In her 29 years at the company—23 of them as a principal dancer—she conquered every leading lady one can imagine: Kitri, Giselle, Aurora, Juliet, Swanilda, the Sugar Plum Fairy. But Murphy is most famous for her dual role as the gentle Odette and beguiling Odile in Swan Lake, the work that she chose to end her career with. Far from an easy victory lap, the ballet is notorious for its demanding choreography, including a series of 32 rapid-fire fouetté turns in the Black Swan’s grand pas de deux. When Murphy performed them on Friday, the crowd at the Metropolitan Opera House let out a roar, leaping to their feet.
Murphy was a 12-year-old living in South Carolina when she performed the Black Swan pas de deux for the first time (something she acknowledges was “a very strange choice for a young child”). “I didn’t really know about turnout, I didn’t know about port de bras, I wasn’t fully aware of whether I was pointing my feet or not,” she recalls. Still, she had never felt so invigorated. “I was just living my best life, feeling so exhilarated to be onstage and doing this thing that I absolutely loved. I remember feeling like it couldn’t get better than that.” Not long after, she was off to high school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts; then along came ABT, where she joined the corps de ballet at the age of 17.
Murphy made her debut as Odette-Odile with the company 24 years ago, before being tapped to dance the part in a PBS telecast in 2005. “It’s one of several reasons why I chose to finish my career with this ballet,” she says. “The messages that I’ve gotten, the cards that have been written to me…. I still get DMs on a regular basis about what that film meant to people, which is so beautiful.”
When I first meet Murphy in the tunnels beneath the Met Opera, her telltale red hair is pinned up in a bun and she is wearing a stormy blue-gray leotard with an airy aqua skirt printed with white swans. “I thought this was kinda cheesy,” she says, gesturing to her on-theme attire. “But, you know what? I’m leaning in!”
While many members of the company are performing a matinee of Sylvia, Murphy is on her way to a one-on-one Swan Lake rehearsal with McKerrow. “I’ve been working on this for 24 years, but it can’t hurt to fine-tune it,” she tells me over her shoulder on the way to the studio.
I assume she is joking; in fact, she is not. Murphy pores over every movement, finding otherwise imperceptible flaws in her form. When she nails an extension out of an attitude, balancing on her supporting foot for longer than what seems physically possible, she looks as overjoyed as a dancer doing it for the first time.
Murphy credits much of her success to her growth mindset. “Even going into the last show, I feel like I’m still learning something new every day,” she tells me later in her dressing room, a cozy space tucked just offstage. “For me, it is a constant discovery of how to express more, to be more authentic in each of those characters, and to really iron out any of the technical elements in the studio as much as possible so that when I’m onstage, I can really play and be present.”
Rehearsal manages to feel like a therapy session and a textual analysis all at once. McKerrow advises Murphy to “choose her moments”: accents in the choreography that underscore her character’s motivations. A little more than a week before her swan song, the dancer still isn’t quite sure how it’s all going to play out. “Regardless of what happens—if maybe everything doesn’t go exactly according to the ideal—I truly feel exhilarated to be out there and sharing the space with my colleagues, who are absolutely phenomenal,” she says. “And to feel that energy from the audience is really special.”
While Murphy is renowned for her technical prowess, it is her emotional intelligence that drew her to dance as a child. “Some people have a different approach, a more academic approach to the steps, and I think [McKerrow] and I are aligned in that the musicality and storytelling are the driving forces of choreography,” she says.
Recalling her first time dancing Swan Lake, Murphy adds, “I wasn’t sure if I even knew what I was doing, but I felt like I was going to go with my intuition and just feel the music and story as much as possible. It was just all this raw energy and not as much awareness of some of the technical and artistic choices that could be made.”
Her understanding of a character deepens with every performance. “I love that feeling of transformation when I go out onstage,” she says. “There’s so much of me that’s obviously in it, but I really step into their world. That feeling of being in that zone, bringing their internal world to life, is special and something that I’ll really miss.”
While the small “lasts,” from her final Giselle to her last class in the company’s primary rehearsal space at 890 Broadway, have helped her to prepare for her retirement, Murphy admits that the entire season has been more emotional than she expected. “How supported I felt by my colleagues and the audience really does feel celebratory and also bittersweet,” she says. “It was my own choice to retire, and it feels like the right time, so I feel really good about it, but at the same time, I’ve always loved to dance, since I was really little. I always dreamed of being a ballerina. It’s not easy to walk away from that.”
She also realizes there are things she hasn’t thought about yet, like that looming farewell bow. “It is weird when you get those moments,” she says. The spotlight can feel awkward: “You feel like everyone’s singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to you.”
Back in the studio, Murphy tries out a few swanlike curtsies for McKerrow. “At a certain point, you’re going to want to not be a swan anymore,” McKerrow tells her. “Be you. Be Gillian.”
The standing ovation on Friday went on for nearly 20 minutes. At first, Murphy stayed tethered to her characters, her arms extending behind her like a swan’s wings. But as shimmering gold confetti rained down on her, Gillian emerged—breaking into an ear-to-ear grin.
