‘Ballet was definitely my escape,” says Misty Copeland. “It was the first thing I’d ever experienced in my life that was mine – only mine, not my five other siblings’. It gave me a voice, made me feel powerful.”
When Copeland discovered ballet she was 13, living with her mother and siblings in a motel in California. She was a shy, slight child who rarely spoke and tried not to be noticed. Twenty-three years later, hers is the kind of transformation story even ballet might think far-fetched. In 2015, she became the first black female principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre – and with that a spokesperson, poster girl, and bona fide star. Barack Obama sought her out as an adviser, Prince invited her on tour, Spike Lee wants her in his films, and people queue up to meet her at the stage door of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
And now the latest chapter in her real-life fairytale has begun to unfold. Copeland is dancing in Disney’s The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, a cinema revamp of the Christmas favourite starring Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman.
Like all ballet dancers, Copeland is petite and perfectly put together, beaming with unerring positivity and a ready giggle as she sits in this London hotel room with a camel mac draped over her knees to keep warm.
This is a woman who’s had a tough life but seems to have come out of it with no hard edges. In ballet, where many things on stage look much as they did a century ago, there are few women of colour in major companies, and Copeland remembers the moment when she knew she had to take on the mantle of role model. She was watching a documentary about the Ballets Russes that featured pioneering black ballerina Raven Wilkinson. “I had this awakening,” she says. “I didn’t even know she existed. I saw her and it was this unexpected reaction. I was crying. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I have this bigger purpose that I never even realised.’”
Copeland has actively sought out opportunities to bring ballet to new audiences and to change its image, from speaking engagements to endorsements and book deals. When millions of viewers see her in an Under Armour commercial, she says, “they will see a brown ballerina and think, ‘Oh, that’s what a ballerina looks like.’ When you can imagine yourself on the stage, especially as a young person, it allows you to dream of doing anything.”
When she was a child, Copeland had no dreams of ballet. The family moved a lot as her mother married and divorced several times, there was little money and Copeland kept her head down. But, in fact, she was always a ballerina – she just didn’t know it. She loved grossing out her brothers with what her hyper flexible joints could do, but she had no idea she might have the perfect physique for a particular type of dance. She hated her skinny, long legs, big hands and “pinhead”.
Luckily, one of her teachers noticed. Copeland took her first ballet class on a basketball court at the local Boys and Girls Club, but it wasn’t until she stepped inside a studio, donned tights and leotard and looked at herself in the mirror that this homeless teen realised she had finally found home.
Copeland was 13, a very late age to start dancing for a professional, but she progressed fast with teacher Cindy Bradley. When her mother could no longer take her across town to classes, Copeland moved in with Bradley (which led to a difficult, highly publicised custody battle, a low point in Copeland’s life). At 18, she joined American Ballet Theatre’s studio company, then its corps de ballet. But a serious stress fracture, followed by sudden weight gain after the delayed onset of puberty, led to her confidence crashing.
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