Many people can identify with being young and unable to find community in the world. For James Kopecky, ballet became a passion back in high school, when a mentor noted his dance skills.
“When I was younger, I couldn’t do a lot of outdoor sports because I had asthma,” Kopecky recalls. “Some of my teachers in high school told me that this was something I could pursue as a professional dancer. I had a lot of encouraging mentors along the way.”
That doesn’t mean the road is always smooth. Ballet is “not like professional sports. It doesn’t pay a lot, it’s weird hours, and it’s all up in the air,” says Kopecky.
But he kept on moving forward, applying for colleges because it allowed him to get a dance scholarship. Eventually, he outgrew his asthma as an older kid but the strong connection to dance remained.
“There isn’t something that allows you to explore your physicality as much as dance does,” Kopecky says. “You go to baseball practice and do the drills. But with dance, it was fun to understand how I liked to move. Just the culture of dance let me understand what it meant to have a community.”
In 2010, Kopecky came to the Bay Area right out of college to seize his first job opportunity.
“I graduated from Butler University in Indianapolis, then worked at Ballet San Jose for five years. This was my time on my own with no safety net, no university with friends. Being in a ballet company is a very interesting experience because you are on contract…usually around a nine-month contract like college semesters.”
Eventually his journey in ballet took him to North Carolina, where he works as a freelance choreographer. Local audiences can see one of his pieces in New Ballet’s upcoming Fast Forward dance concert, with two evenings of contemporary ballet featuring world premieres by seven choreographers.
“I’ve dabbled with choreography for my entire career, especially when I was in San Jose. When you’re four years into dancing, that’s all you want to be doing. Then you realize your dance career will end due to wear and tear of the body,” Kopecky says. Quoting a phrase often attributed to Martha Graham, Kopecky says that “every dancer dies twice”—the first of which is when you realize you will have to give up the stage.
Kopecky talks about the joys of working as a choreographer.
“Self-discovery in an environment that’s creative and spontaneous, finally being at an age where I had the tools to work in the industry,” he says.
“Most of the time, the standard way of becoming a choreographer is to dance, following other people’s leads on how to move. Then usually on your own time, there are a lot of companies that allow dancers to do their own choreographed dances on their own. Small glimpses of dance allow them to figure out how they get to tell stories.”
For his choreography, Kopecky says he approaches it like he’s writing a thesis paper. “I pick out parts of my psyche, like the current ballet I’ve finished, Pivot, as it’s about someone who is pushing pavement. Then through a daydream, she fantasizes about how life could be. A lot of us have dreams, but many of us don’t pursue them.
“However, your life is still lingering and you aren’t dead,” he says. “If you don’t take the initiative to do what you want, it will never happen.”
“I have a Pinterest board, a Spotify playlist, and setbacks in the current news and politics help create a drive,” Kopecky says. Although he draws from his own experiences, he sees something every now and then in the news that inspires him to respond.
Kopecky says that it was cathartic coming back to the Bay Area after nine years, as there were a lot of new things in places such as Los Gatos, where he met his wife.
“It was interesting to be a different person now walking around in familiar places. The experience of seeing these things inspired some movement. It made me reminisce on certain things, like when I did performances at the Performing Arts Center in San Jose. Old choreography and movements started coming back into my mind as I walked the streets of where I once lived.”
You can catch New Ballet’s “Fast Forward” March 21 at 7pm and Mar 22 at 2pm at the Hammer Theatre Center in San Jose.
