After 25 years with the company, Misty Copeland is retiring from American Ballet Theater. While the departure of ballet’s biggest crossover star is certainly a momentous occasion, it’s also not exactly a surprise. The 42-year-old has been away from the Lincoln Center stage for five years, spending that time raising a son with her attorney husband, Olu Evans, and working with her namesake foundation, which aims to bring greater diversity, equity and inclusion to the dance world — at a time when that mission is newly fraught.
Copeland will give a farewell performance with A.B.T. this fall, putting a cap on a career that was both groundbreaking and improbable. She grew up in near poverty in Southern California and was frequently homeless, her mother struggling to make ends meet for Misty and her five siblings. Eventually, she found solace and stability in dance, though she didn’t seriously pursue the art form till she was 13 — late for a budding ballerina. Despite that, and the historical struggles for people of color to break into the often hidebound world of classical dance, she eventually joined A.B.T. in 2001, and after a 15-year climb, she became the first Black woman ever to be named a principal dancer with the company.
Speaking with me last month, Copeland explained that although she was personally at peace with the decision, she also knows that she is stepping away at a difficult cultural moment. The whole idea of D.E.I., the value of which she came to both embody and now works to promote, is under political attack, and arts institutions are being forced to reckon with partisan antagonism. So there was a lot for her to wrestle with as she looked back on the legacy she will leave behind and ahead to the rest of her life.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio App
You’ve been ramping down dancing for a while. Why does now feel like the time to make an official retirement announcement? In all honesty, I’ve wanted to fade away into the background, which is not really possible. The legacy of what I’ve created, the way that I’m carrying so many stories of Black dancers who have come before me — I can’t just disappear. There has to be an official closing to my time at American Ballet Theater, this company that has meant everything to me. It was in 2019 that I was processing that I think this is the end of this chapter, and though I wasn’t saying it out loud to the world, I’ve already moved on to that next place of what I want to be doing.
What was going on in 2019? It was the very first time in my career that I felt fulfillment. I got to a point where it was like, I think I’ve done everything I can on the stage. I remember one of my last performances of “Swan Lake.” It was at Wolf Trap in Virginia, the beautiful outdoor amphitheater. I had gotten to a place of just letting go of what the critics think. Even once I became a principal dancer, I was getting so much criticism about whether or not I should be in the position as a Black woman. Am I technically up for the challenge? “The technicality” — those words are often used with people of color. But that final performance, I let go, and it was an incredible “Swan Lake.”
When you talk about your legacy, do you have a sense of how effective that legacy has been? The way somebody put it to me once was that on the nights when you were dancing, the house was noticeably more diverse than on nights you weren’t. Will that still be the case moving forward? It’s never been about me. It should never have been about me. It should have been about a broader understanding that people from Black and brown communities are interested and want to be in these spaces. They just need to see themselves. They need to feel like it’s something that they’re being invited into. I’ve never felt like I’ve gotten to this place and given this opportunity because I am the best Black dancer to ever exist. I was the first at American Ballet Theater to be given an opportunity.
This is a slightly larger philosophical question: Choreographers might have in mind a certain way for their dancers to look that best brings their ideas to life. We know that race shouldn’t be a criteria for that, but there are criteria, whether it’s height or muscularity or whatever. So how do you think about the question of when it’s OK to be exclusive in pursuit of one’s aesthetic ideals? I think often choreographers don’t even know what their movement might look like on different body types and different types of people. Do you even really know what the possibilities are of seeing your movement that could look even more incredible or bring a new idea out of you and make you go even further? Black people have been told for generations, “You all have flat feet, so you’re not going to be in pointe shoes; your butts are too big, your thighs.” We don’t all look this way, and that’s not all bad anyway. It’s about opening your mind to the possibilities of what can be created when you see something done on a body in a way that you’re not used to.
You’re talking about the benefits of diversity and representation at a time when, certainly in Washington, the whole notion of D.E.I. as something with innate benefits is being denied. Has your thinking about the work that you want to do changed as a result of the world that we’re now living in? I don’t think that my thinking has changed. My whole career is proof that when you have diversity, people come together and want to understand each other and want to be a community together. So many young Black and brown people didn’t even know Lincoln Center was a place they could step foot in. When they see my poster on the front, they feel like it opens their minds up to a whole new world. And it’s not just about coming to see me. It sparks their interest to want to participate and to want to learn more about the art form. Art is the most incredible way to build bridges, no matter what political party you’re in.
Do you feel embattled or discouraged that institutions that explicitly support D.E.I. risk losing funding? Or that federal funding for the arts in general seems under attack? We’re just keeping our heads down and staying the course. I don’t think it’s about creating this big hoopla in public. It’s about continuing to be intentional about the real work, and I think that’s being done through Lincoln Center. I don’t think we have to scream it from the rooftops.
A couple of years ago, there was a guest essay in The Times by Gabe Stone Shayer. He was a dancer at A.B.T., and he said, yes, there were performers of color, but they were being cast either in comic or sinister roles. It wasn’t exactly colorblind casting. Was that your experience? And do you feel as if there’s still a gap in that regard? Yes, it was my experience a lot when I first joined: being the earthy character. I fought so hard to be given opportunities in classical works because often the Black and brown dancers were told that we’re using you for the more contemporary works. But I’ve seen a big change at American Ballet Theater in terms of the way they view casting. I’ve definitely been a voice in having these tough conversations. I remember being in my early 20s and going into the office and speaking to my artistic director and being terrified and not knowing how to really articulate myself but being intentional about how I approached the conversations.
To ask for different roles? To ask for different roles. To express, I’m a Black woman, I’m the only one here, and I want to be given opportunity, and I think I’m not because I’m a Black woman, and to go in there and be clear and intentional but also have grace, instead of going in ready to fight. Though I think I was fighting in my own way.
A well-known fact about you is that you grew up in rough circumstances. There was a lot of instability, and the lifeline for you was ballet, which is the opposite of instability. It’s about discipline and rigor and repetition and structure. As a young person, to go from one extreme to the other, did you have the quiet time when you just figured out who you are as a person? Ballet was this perfect missing piece in my life. It was almost the antithesis of what most people experience when they’re in dance. A lot of people lose themselves and their sense of identity and don’t mature and are socially underdeveloped. The opposite thing happened for me. It opened me up and helped me to understand myself more. I was craving consistency. I was craving discipline. I would go from day to day, night to night not knowing where we were sleeping, not knowing if we were going to have food, not knowing how I was going to get to school, if I was going to school. So to be able to go into a studio every day at 3 p.m. and know I was going to do pliés and tendus and dégagés and ronds de jambe — as a child to know what’s coming, that safety is so important.
In your 2014 memoir, you write a lot about your relationship with your mother, and in the book you say you were still struggling to understand her. What were the things that you struggled to understand, and do you feel, 10 years later, that you understand your mother more clearly? Through my 8-year-old eyes, I’m like, Why don’t we have a home? It seemed so simple and clear, and I think with age, as a wife and as a mom, I definitely have a different understanding of the choices that she made and why. I have more of an understanding that she never really got to grow up or have a real childhood. She became a mom at a young age and being adopted and an only child and wanting to create her own family but not really being prepared to do so. I just have a lot more empathy and understanding of why certain things happened the way they did.
Thinking about where you’ve come from and what you’ve achieved — the elements of that, in a way, are very digestible. We can put your story in a clean box. There’s a rags-to-riches element and also a racial groundbreaking element. But I wonder if there are aspects of your story that make you think, The way people understand me, I get it, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Absolutely. I think there’s been a narrative that’s been created and just kind of carried on throughout my career. The narrative is that I don’t have the body, I’m too big, I’m too this. But it’s so complex. At 13 years old, the reason that things happened so quickly for me was because I was so natural. I had all the right body proportions they look for: a small head and long legs and long arms and long feet. And I was flexible, and I was strong. Then I became a professional dancer, and all of a sudden I no longer had the right body type. I went from being a prodigy to all of a sudden being, like, “You’re wrong for dance.” It was shocking to me. It’s wild. We have to use our own eyes and thinking and not be told what’s in front of us.
You’re now a few months into preparing to dance again at your final performance. How has it been physically to try to get back into the swing of things? It is a nightmare. [Laughs.] I’m dealing with a lot right now. I have a labral tear that happened during my training recently. Then I found out that I have all these old injuries that I never acknowledged and danced through. My doctor was like, “I think you should stop dancing.” I’m like, “I’m trying!” So it’s very humbling, but it’s also comforting. The reason that I’ve fallen in love with dance is this consistency of being in a studio and feeling this sense of protection without the outside noise, and that’s been missing from my life these last five years. So it’s nice to be back in this protective bubble, where you’re just listening to music and you’re moving your body. That feels so necessary to have that in my life.
Are there any ways in which getting older and having a different relationship with your body has benefited your dancing? Yes. That’s the thing every ballerina experiences: The older you get, the less you can do physically, but the more life experiences you have to pull from. There’s something so beautiful about ballerinas as they age. I get into the studio, and I’m like, I don’t care how high my leg is, I don’t care how high I’m jumping. I just have a different purpose. It’s a beautiful thing to be at this point in my career and to be able to have control over what I’m performing. That feels good.
I watched a video of you giving a tour of your lockers at A.B.T., and I noticed a sticker on one that said, “Eat right, exercise, die anyway.” Was that sticker meant sarcastically? Fatalistically? It seems to suggest a skepticism about the dancer’s life that Misty Copeland doesn’t usually convey. There were other stickers in my locker that were probably worse than that one. I’ve been at that same locker since I was 17 years old. Those were during very rebellious times, when I felt like I was working uphill. There was a lot of that in the beginning, especially internally. I’ve always been very introverted, so I was expressing myself on the inside of my locker.
What were some of the other stickers? Oh, God, this is so inappropriate: “My boss is like a diaper, full of [expletive] and always on my ass.”
Who among us cannot relate? [Laughs.] I mean, I was young.
There’s an emotional contradiction that I’m hoping you can tease out for me. You’ve expressed your gratitude toward A.B.T., and at the same time you talk about feeling stifled or thwarted there. Whenever you’re approaching a situation where things have been done a certain way for forever and change needs to happen, there are going to be difficult and uncomfortable times. That was 15 years of my career. I felt like I needed to fully be who I am and not bend to fit what I thought they wanted or what I’m seeing in front of me, which I will never be able to be because I’m not a white woman. So my relationship with the company, with my artistic director, with the dancers in the company has evolved through that time. It took a lot of patience.
Earlier, in reference to attacks on D.E.I., you said that you just want to put your head down and do the work, and that you don’t need to be out there shouting from the rooftops. I wonder if you could explain that approach a bit more. Because, well, if there were a time to shout from the rooftops, it seems like this is one of those times. I go with my instinct a lot, and during the pandemic, George Floyd, it felt like the time to speak up. I think we’re in a place now where it’s so muddy. I don’t want to say that we’re trying to stay away from backlash, but you lose focus on what the work really is when there’s all this outside noise. I’m in these communities, and I’m having these conversations, and I am creating programs that will go beyond this administration. That to me is what’s important: that we keep doing the work in a way that is not going to, I guess, ruffle any feathers and have focus on us to the point that there’s funding taken away. It’s really complicated.
When you’re in communities talking with people and educating about dance, are the conversations and concerns you’re hearing different than they were 10 years ago? Yes. We’re in the Bronx and Harlem, and a lot of people, postpandemic, pulled their children out of school for fear of not having citizenship or fear of ICE. This is like the one community social outlet that they have. So it is different in that we’re having those real conversations: Am I safe to come in and take this class? But this is all I have, and this is a lifeline. It’s also a beautiful escape, and it’s healing, and it is so important for our communities.
Tens of millions of people love to see viral TikTok dances. Who knows how many people every Friday and Saturday night are going out dancing. At the same time, we don’t really think of dance as central to the culture in the way that music or film is. Do you have any thoughts about why? It is so frustrating. I’m constantly having these conversations with my producing partner. We’re constantly trying to prove that dance is such an integral part of every culture. For some reason, it’s not valued in the same way that music or fashion or food is. I could stand in a room and ask how many of you have danced in your life? Everyone’s gonna raise their hand. For some reason, we don’t allow ourselves to embody that idea. So I don’t know that I have an answer for that, or why we try to resist. To me, it’s mind-blowing. I sit on call after call and pitch after pitch trying to prove to people that everyone dances and wants to see dance.
When you go onstage for your last performance in the fall, what do you hope you’ll feel in that moment? I don’t have hopes and dreams for what’s going to happen that night. I think that I’m going to go out there feeling in control of the decision that I’ve made, the pieces that I am choosing to dance, the shape I’m going to be in. I only have control over so much. So I want to allow myself the freedom to do what feels right and feels good, because I want to enjoy myself in this final bow with American Ballet Theater.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
Video by Tre Cassetta and Leslye Davis
David Marchese is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a regular series featuring influential people across culture, politics, business, sports and beyond.
The post Misty Copeland Changed Ballet. Now She’s Ready to Move On. appeared first on New York Times.
