By Bonnie Eissner
On Thursday, in a fitting prelude to Father’s Day, Upper West Sider Charles Barker watched and applauded from his orchestra section seat in the Metropolitan Opera House as his son Max made his debut in a soloist role in an American Ballet Theatre company production, performing the “Neapolitan Dance” in “Swan Lake.”
But when Max returns to the stage later this summer season, Charles Barker’s parental pride will take on a new dimension. He’ll be watching Max not from an audience seat, but from the orchestra pit, as he wields the baton to lead ABT’s orchestra. That’s because Charles Barker serves as principal conductor of ABT, a role he has held since Mikhail Baryshnikov hired him in 1987.
Father and son will perform together at the Met during Max’s first summer as a company member sometime in July. It’s an experience that both Barkers have imagined for years — and one that both say was far from inevitable.
“I know how hard it is to be a conductor for a company like this,” Charles said. “To be a dancer is impossible, totally impossible. And so, that he is a dancer — to me, it’s amazing. My mind is blown.”
Both Barkers remember the night Max first articulated his dream of dancing. He was 7 and had just performed as a changeling — a non-dancing role — in ABT’s “The Dream,” with principal dancer Herman Cornejo as William Shakespeare’s impish sprite Puck.
As Cornejo leapt and twirled with the fairies on stage, young Max, curled up on a rock on that stage, watched, enchanted. “I want to be just like him,” Max remembers telling his dad on the walk home from Lincoln Center. “That is exactly what I want to do.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Charles recalls thinking, knowing how few dancers make it into the prestigious ABT corps. “This is the top of the top,” he said. (Only a small handful of dancers are invited to join the company each season; Max was one of eight to make the cut last year, when he joined as an apprentice.)
Dance and music run thick in the Barker family. Max’s mom, Miranda Coney, was a principal dancer with The Australian Ballet. His older brother, Riley, is a pianist.
Max was 5 when he began taking classes at ABT’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in 2009. By 2017, he rose into its preprofessional division. His parents negotiated for his classes at the Professional Performing Arts High School to end in time for Max to start his dance training by 11 a.m.
“Ballet is so subjective,” Max said. “It’s not like a sport where you can put in three hours of hard work a day, and that’s it. You need to live in it and assume the life of a dancer until you really understand what that means.”
In early 2020, he performed in Switzerland at the Prix de Lausanne, an international ballet competition for preprofessional dancers. As a Christmas present, Charles had arranged for Max to receive coaching from Mikhail Baryshnikov on the solo he was performing.
“One thing I could give him was this opportunity,” Charles said with evident pride. “That was like, you scored, Dad; that was good!”
Max was the only American male finalist in the competition.
The next year, as COVID stalled live performance, Max began to train privately with his coach Fabrice Herrault. Soon after, he and Herrault decided Max would try out for The Royal Ballet School in London. He was accepted and, in one year, trained and completed a B.A. in dance performance.
“I love London,” Max said, and being away from home allowed him to prove that he could make it as a dancer, apart from his artistic family.
Accomplishing that on his own was important, Max said. As a child, he’d enjoyed walking to dance class with his dad. But his feelings had changed in adolescence.
“It was a little challenging,” he said, “because you sometimes feel like you want to do something totally on your own. There was a bit of difficulty with that, even though my dad never made me feel that way.”
But in London, Max also missed the Upper West Side.
“There’s something about New York that you only find in New York,” he said. “Everyone’s so focused and working so hard to achieve something, and that really pushed me as a dancer.”
Back home, the need to prove himself apart from his family “went out the window, and I was like, all right, Dad, let’s do it together.”
“He has done all of this work,” Charles said after listening to Max tell this story. “That is where I place the reason for him being a dancer.”
He added, “We provided the opportunity. We said, ‘OK. Here’s your bus pass, son. Have a great day.’ We admired. We listened to what he had to say.” But, Charles noted, “I just couldn’t say, ‘Max is going to dance.’ That just didn’t happen.”
Max joined the ABT Studio Company, the top level of the organization’s training program, in 2023. For two years, he danced principal roles on stages in New York and abroad. He even returned to London’s Royal Opera House, where he had the chance to recognize his former teachers and to observe, he said, how much he had grown.
“I gained confidence on stage, I gained a sense of self-assurance,” Max said about his time as a Studio Company dancer. And while his father has conducted during some of his performances since 2023, they were not at the Met.
Asked why that matters, Charles explained, “Well, the Met is the Met.” Most performances, he said, sell out, meaning for every show there’s a huge audience. “It is a very special place to perform, even for those of us who have been performing there for 40 years,” he said.
Max is the first person to progress through every level of ABT’s training program to the professional corps. And in September, he will transition from apprentice to member of the corps de ballet.
“This is where the work starts,” Max said. “You can’t say, ‘OK, I’ve made it, and this is great, and this is what I aspire to,’ because it is all those things, but it’s also just the tip of the iceberg. I want to be a principal at ABT. I want to be at the Met all the time. I want to be at Lincoln Center dancing in a lead role.”
And: “I want my dad to be conducting.”
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