Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina

“I was a nervous child. And my unease, coupled with a perpetual quest for perfection, made my life much harder than it needed to be.

I think I was born worried. […] I was just nervous about life, period. I felt awkward, as if I didn’t fit in anywhere, and I lived in constant fear of letting my mother down, or my teachers, or myself.”

Misty establishes her own character traits as a nervous, people-pleasing child. This is a recurring issue throughout the memoir, as her anxiety and her need to please others conflict with her own desires. Overcoming these issues is a major element of her development as an artist and a well-rounded adult.

“As a professional, you have to endure a tremendous amount of criticism and judgment leading up to a performance. […] But during the actual performance, when the music swells, and the crowd hushes, it’s all up to you—how high you leap, when you breathe. There’s no more time to worry or try to make it better. It either works or it doesn’t. You land with grace or you stumble and fall. That absoluteness, that finality, is freedom. And the stage was the one place where I felt it.”

Misty occasionally steps back from her personal narrative to reflect on her career in ballet and performance more generally, as she does here. The reality of being a performer means facing criticism in person and in the media, but all those voices fade away while on stage in the moment of performing. Misty alludes to the Dedication and Discipline that underlie every great performance.

“Cindy straddled the lines between elegance and eccentricity, self-absorption and altruism. But Cindy would also make me—a girl with knees that curved backward even when I stood straight, my size 7 feet that were still too large for my stick-figure frame—feel like the most beautiful and loved little ballerina in the world. I’d never met anyone like her.”

Misty introduces Cindy, one of the most important mentors and supporters in her life, and depicts the complexities of her personality. Misty acknowledges the vital role she plays in Misty’s life and development as a dancer. It is not an overstatement to say that Misty would not have ended up where she did without Cindy’s influence and support.

“Maybe it was all that rigor and routine, my dance mates and I lined up perfectly at the barre, like minarets. Maybe it was peering into the mirrored walls reeking of Windex and realizing that the ballerina staring back was graceful, was good, was me. What I do remember is that the drill team, the stuff of my elementary-school dreams, faded in importance, and ballet was suddenly thrilling. It was all I wanted—needed—to do.”

Though Misty is at first more concerned with her other interests, this moment is the turning point where ballet becomes her entire life. This singular focus is a common aspect of the lives of many creative types and athletes and is necessary to fuel the Dedication and Discipline that create success in such competitive fields.

“‘The perfect ballerina has a small head, sloping shoulders, long legs, big feet, and a narrow rib cage,’ Cindy said one afternoon, reading George Balanchine’s description of the ideal dancer.

[…]

‘You’re going to dance in front of kings and queens,’ she said. ‘You will have a life most people cannot even imagine.’

I began to believe her.”

George Balanchine’s description of the perfect dancer’s body type is a recurring image in the memoir. Misty represents this ideal as a teenager and then loses that ideal as she reaches adulthood and faces the Intersections of Race, Identity, and Art. More important, however, is Cindy’s assurance that Misty will have a life few can imagine and will dance before royalty, both predictions that come true through Misty’s belief in herself, confidence, and hard work.

“I’m sure Mommy didn’t believe she was being neglectful. After all, we hadn’t always lived that way, with pallets on the floor. We hadn’t always called a motel—with a lobby window to slide our rent check through—home. We didn’t always sleep around the corner from a highway lined with liquor stores and sketchy taco joints.

But that’s how we lived now. That’s what Cindy saw.”

Misty balances the reality of the horrible conditions she and her siblings lived in with the belief that her mother loved them and did not realize how neglectful the conditions were. She also acknowledges that Cindy did not know their family history and could only see the current conditions. This makes Cindy’s desire to take Misty away more understandable.

“Transitions in my life had always been traumatic. […] But not this time, not this move. Cindy and Patrick were so welcoming, so warm, and having Wolfie there reminded me of my younger siblings Cameron and Lindsey, whom I loved so much. I didn’t have to struggle to fit in after all. The Bradleys embraced me just as I was.”

In contrast with the other changes Misty has faced, she recalls her time with Cindy and Patrick’s family with warmth and love. Though they had different backgrounds, Cindy, Patrick, and their four-year-old son, Wolf, welcome Misty with open arms and always treat her like a member of their family. This is one of the few times when Misty experiences a truly stable family life.

“It’s because, while we know we’ll never achieve perfection, we have to keep trying. Dancers have to keep studying, practicing, and striving until the day they retire.

[…]

Human frailty prevents perfection. Your body is forever giving into fatigue or injury. Something is always a little off. And as your body ages, as the sprains and stresses of life become indelible pieces of your being, your dance technique must change as well.”

Misty reflects on her ballet career, explaining why Dedication and Discipline are always necessary no matter how talented or successful a dancer becomes. Dancers strive for perfection, but the knowledge that they can never reach it because of the fact of human frailty is part of what makes dance so compelling. Dancers need to remember that frailty and failure are part of the point, and that is why they must keep learning and working.

“That taught me something. When I’m on stage, I always want to appear clean, and strong, never out of control. That is what it means to be a professional. And that day, at the Spotlight Awards, I learned you should always have a backup plan, so you can always deliver a performance that is sharp and refined. Even if your body fails, your performance never will.

There are dancers who believe that you won’t try as hard if you know there’s a safety net. But I don’t agree.”

As with most sports and artistic endeavors, there are different philosophies and strategies about how one should learn and work. While some dancers believe that having a backup plan makes one complacent, Misty argues that planning for problems helps her to perform in the moment, even when things go wrong. She believes that this is a powerful lesson she learned during her first major competition.

“My reputation as a prodigy had preceded me. But despite my gifts, the reality was that there were huge holes in my knowledge of ballet. I had started so late, and was so green, that there were many terms, steps, and even productions that I had never heard of.”

Misty discovers that her prodigious talent, real though it is, will not be enough by itself. Her lack of experience and time to learn the terminology, history, and nuance of ballet becomes apparent when she moves beyond Cindy’s classes to more advanced settings. This is also true later when she joins the Lauridsen Dance Center. Her Dedication and Discipline help her overcome these challenges.

“I knew Mommy felt that I was starting to put on airs when I came home, not wanting the food that she bought, turning up my nose at the crowded motel room where we lived. I think she was telling my brothers and sisters that Cindy was trying to make me feel that I was better than them.

My brothers and sisters and I were still extremely close and fiercely protective of one another. […] But their resentment of Cindy was building.”

Sylvia and Misty’s siblings feel resentment toward Misty’s relationship with Cindy because Cindy can provide a much more stable and affluent lifestyle than the Copeland family is accustomed to. This resentment eventually boils over into a legal battle that proves to be both formative and traumatic for Misty.

“Now that I’m grown, my perspective has changed yet again, to one that is more balanced and completely my own. What I know for sure is that Mommy loved me fiercely, and that the Bradleys loved me, too. That I wouldn’t be where I am without their dedication, their willingness to sacrifice and take me into their family. Without them, I would not have learned to voice my opinion, to feel confident that I had opinions worth listening to. All that, and more, the Bradleys gave to me.”

When she moves back home as a teenager, Misty begins to believe her mother’s claims that Cindy brainwashed her to take her away from her family. As an adult, however, she develops a more nuanced understanding of the situation, now believing that Cindy was not trying to brainwash her but merely loved her and wanted to nurture her sense of self. Though neither Cindy nor the situation was perfect, Misty discovered The Power of Mentorship through her time with the Bradleys.

“Ballet has long been the province of the white and wealthy. Our daily, toe-crushing exercises make pointe shoes as disposable as tissues, and they can cost as much as eighty dollars a pair. I came from a family that didn’t always have enough food to eat, and I was nearly fourteen years old when I saw my first ballet. Most of my peers had grown up immersed in the arts, putting on their first tutus not long after they learned to talk. […] But I also stood out in another, even more profound way. I was a little brown-skinned girl in a sea of whiteness.”

Misty compares the ways she fits into the ballet world, articulating the Intersections of Race, Identity, and Art. Misty, coming from a lower-class family background and being African American, does not look like the typical ballerina. Her lack of affluence proves less of a hurdle than her race, with her skin color setting her apart from her peers in a “more profound way.”

“A dancer’s body is the instrument with which she makes music, the loom with which she weaves magic. But we take our bodies to places they would naturally never go. We make them fly, dance on tiptoe, whirl like a dervish. We subject ourselves to unbelievable strain. And sometimes we stumble. Or break.”

Misty describes the body as an instrument in a beautiful descriptive passage. However, she also points out that to create the art and “magic” of dance, ballerinas force their bodies to do things they do not do naturally, which can lead to serious physical damage. This is a risk that all dancers take.

“It’s so important for people to understand that just because it’s 2014, racism is still real in the world—and in classical ballet. I was so protected as a young girl, but I was one of the lucky ones. It’s one of the things that has saved me and gotten me as far as I’ve come. My confidence was really born out of a naivete about the prejudices that colored the world of ballet. As an adult, I recognize this as such a blessing, albeit a bittersweet one.”

Though Misty was protected from the inherent racism in the ballet world as a child and teenager, she must confront the often painful Intersections of Race, Identity, and Art as an adult. Ballet dancers and ballet audiences need to acknowledge the racism that still exists rather than pretend it has disappeared merely because of the passage of time.

“Finally, the ABT staff called me in to tell me that I needed to lose weight, though those were not the words they used. Telling already thin women to slim down might have caused legal problems. Instead, the more polite word, ubiquitous in ballet, was lengthening.”

Misty deals with body image issues due in part to facing rapid, forced puberty and in part due to being a Black woman. The ballet company worsens these body image issues by expecting Misty to lose weight to fit in. Importantly, however, Misty points out that “weigh-ins” and eating disorders are less common in the ballet world than popular media leads the public to believe.

“Raven Wilkinson, a mentor of mine whom I revere, became the first black American to be a full-time member of a large ballet company when she joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1950s. Often when she performed, she would literally have to paint her face white. Half a century later, I have often had to do something similar.”

Misty discusses the racism of the past in the ballet world while also highlighting the fact that it still exists in the present. Some white audiences would like to believe that anti-Black racism disappeared in the 1960s with the civil rights movement. However, the fact that Misty must sometimes make herself look white in the 2000s just as a dancer did in the 1950s proves otherwise.

“By then, I had been in ABT’s corps for six years. That article was the first thing I’d ever read that reflected the heartbreak and loneliness I felt inside. I’d never before read such a perfect articulation of what I was experiencing: that there were many people who seemed not to want to see black ballerinas, who thought that our very presence made ballet less authentic, less romantic, less true.”

Misty sees a reflection of herself and her own experiences for the first time when she reads the article about Black ballet dancers in The New York Times. When she tries to discuss the article with white colleagues in the company, they do not understand and claim not to see skin color, thus dismissing her struggles and proving that they are blind to racism in the ballet world. This anecdote illustrates that the challenges of the Intersections of Race, Identity, and Art go beyond overtly racist attitudes to the ignorance and dismissiveness of those inside the ballet world.

“‘He reminded me of how special it is to be an African American ballerina. [He] said ‘don’t let them take you over. Walk into the room knowing you are the best. Shoulders back, chin up. Their attitudes will totally change.’

That is something I will always remember: ‘Walk into a room, knowing you are somebody, somebody special. Don’t ever let them smash that or pull you down.’”

Arthur Mitchell, the co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, gives Misty important advice about how to survive the ballet world as a Black woman. He reminds her of her own worth and re-sparks her self-confidence, leading her to persist at ABT and demand that Kevin McKenzie take notice.

“It was also true that he had watched me grow up, and with that our relationship evolved. I saw him at first as an authority figure, for whom I had tremendous respect and who I desperately wanted to please. He then became a mentor offering guidance and encouragement. And now, more than a decade later, I view him as a colleague to whom I can speak, grown-up to grown-up, dancer to dancer.”

Speaking of Kevin, Misty realizes that though she initially saw him as an intimidating authority figure she needed to impress, he was actually a mentor who gave her many opportunities to grow and always supported her. Later, she learns to see him as an equal and develops a relationship with him built on trust and respect.

“Working with Prince—experiencing his brilliance, his attention to detail, but also his belief in me—boosted my confidence immeasurably. Executing something that was his vision but based largely on my own, without the incremental coaching of my ballet mistresses, made me feel independent, as if I was truly a professional at last.”

Misty enjoys an inspiring and confidence-boosting collaborative relationship with the pop singer Prince. While collaborating with him, she watches his professionalism and learns to see herself as a professional because he trusts her judgment and takes her seriously as an artist.

“I choose to define myself. I am a black woman, and my identity is not a card to play, or a label that I begrudgingly accept because it’s been assigned to me. It’s the African American culture that has raised me, that has shaped my body and my worldview. Admittedly, I don’t always handle my hurt and outrage at prejudice I see so often very well, but I have agency in being able to speak my mind.”

Misty defies the critics who accuse her of “play[ing] the race card” and takes control of her own identity and sense of self (235). She embraces her identity as a Black woman, pointing out the ways that her culture has made her who she is and is instrumental to her success. This quote exemplifies the way Misty has integrated her racial and artistic identities.

“It was me, in full blazing color. There was my face, head thrown back in joy, and my body exuding power and femininity as I stood en pointe on a twenty-four-foot advertisement, waving from the front of the Metropolitan Opera. Misty Copeland. The Firebird. […] In all my years living in New York City, I had never seen a black woman on the facade of the Met.”

Misty returns to the moments that opened the memoir in the Prologue, when she is about to premiere as the Firebird. The instant she sees her own face on the banner is emotional and impactful, not only because she has never seen a Black woman on the front of the building before but also because it signifies a culmination of her Dedication and Discipline and a sign of her success.