It's not easy watching your body change over the years, but professional ballerina Misty Copeland says: "I love a challenge."
"It's a beautiful thing, to be able to see your body change, to acknowledge that it's changed and that it is different, and that you value movement in a different way," Copeland explains. Practicing classical ballet technique after having her son in 2022, she says: "It's as if I've been reborn and I have a new body to try it through."
Copeland took her final bow with American Ballet Theatre in October, after spending years away from performance.
In 2015, Copeland made history as the first Black woman to become a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre. It was the culmination of a journey that began, not in a traditional ballet academy, but in a Boys & Girls Club gym in Los Angeles, where a shy teenager first discovered what her body could say through movement.
"Being onstage was the first time that I felt safe in my young life," Copeland says. "I've always felt very protected when I was onstage."
But ballet can be brutal on a dancer's body. Copeland says she reached a "breaking point" at the beginning of 2020, which caused her to step away. "I just felt like I needed to pause and really figure out what was going to make me feel fulfilled and good about using all that I've built, my voice and my platform and my reach," she says.
In 2022, she founded The Misty Copeland Foundation, which aims to build pathways for children who've never seen themselves reflected on the ballet stage. That same year, she also became a mother. She says giving birth without pain medication was easier than some of her dance performances.
"I just kind of locked in and it was like, 'Oh, I know this feeling of preparation, of mental preparation and preparing yourself for the pain and breathing through the pain,'" she says. "I still don't think that anything compares to Swan Lake."
Copeland began preparing for her farewell performance with ABT a year ago. It was a way to get her body back in shape, but, more than that, it was a way to give back to a community that has given her so much.
"The reason I agreed to having the farewell performance was because I wanted to say thank you ... [to] the dance community, the Black community, all the people that have spent their hard-earned money and flown from their hometowns and come to support me," Copeland says. "What I represented is something far bigger than me, and I've always known that."
Interview highlights
On her relationship to pain
I think that's something I learned as a child. So many things in my childhood, whether they're good or bad, they prepared me to be in this position. I think about always feeling uncomfortable, whether it was in the living circumstances that we were in, in my own skin, feeling so much shame around not often having a home or food on the table, and so I didn't keep friends close. Like I just felt like I was never comfortable and was always kind of dealing with that, navigating, but like keeping a happy face on the outside. I think anyone who knew me would say: She was very quiet but she was always very happy. And you know, I had severe migraines growing up and I remember I would have to leave school early sometimes like to the point of vomiting and it was just like all this stress that I held inside, but somehow was able to still remain very pleasant on the outside. ...
I think [pain] is just a part of what we are used to dealing with as performers and as dancers. And so it just kind of comes with the territory. ... Even in my last performance with ABT, I was barely walking before and somehow, you know, muster up the strength. … I found out in preparation for the performance that I have bone spurs in my left hip and a labral tear and loss of cartilage. And my doctors, they were just like, "I don't think this is a good idea for you to push for this performance." And I said, well, "I've already agreed to it."
On painting her own pointe shoes to match her skin early in her career
The first time I ever did it, I must have been 14, performing with Debbie Allen ... a mentor of mine, in her version of The Nutcracker, which at the time she was calling the "Chocolate Nutcracker." And that was the very first time that I was understanding what the ballet shoe even represents and what the tights mean and it's an extension of yourself and your skin and it should be the same color. I was wearing brown tights then and painting my shoes. But I would continue to do that throughout the course of my career at ABT. And I would just go to the drug store and get ... the cheapest liquid foundation and put it on my shoes. It's not meant to be danced in and it doesn't have the right ingredients and consistency, it can be very slippery. But it's the first thing that a young dancer receives is their leotard, their ballet slippers and their tights And that's just right there saying for a Black or brown dancer, "This isn't for you. You don't belong."
On why she dances without pads in her pointe shoes
When I started dancing, I wore lambswool or whatever kind of padding is what you put in your shoes. That was with my first ballet teacher. When I moved to my second ballet school where I was training, I think I was about 15 when I moved that school, she didn't allow for us to wear anything in her shoes. She said she could see the loss of the articulation in the toes, like when you have something between your foot and the shoe that you don't have as much control. I remember just being so terrified of her because she could tell if I snuck a little bit of tissue or anything in my shoe, I would go up on point and she would say, "Misty, there's something in your shoe." I'm like, "How does she know? She must be a witch."
I agree wholeheartedly at this point, but preparing for this performance after having five years off and losing all of my calluses, I had to put something over my toes. It wasn't a pad, I was wearing a thin paper towel because I didn't have enough time to really build up all of the calluses that I had lost over a lifetime of training by not being in pointe shoes, but it definitely makes a difference.
On collaborating with Prince
He was my biggest supporter. He showed me what it was to be one of a kind, to be unique, to be proud to stand in his uniqueness, and to use that as a power. Whereas before I felt isolated and alone ... he really saw it as the opposite. He's like, "You have such an advantage." He's like, "You're the only brown girl out there. Everyone's gonna look at you. Now what are you gonna do?" And then just exploring my artistry by working with him, I think made me grow in leaps and bounds as a dancer.
On her body changing after pregnancy and birth
I can focus on different things because my body can't do the things that it once did. It's like learning it again. It's like learn to dance again. It's learning the ballet technique again, and it keeps things fresh and exciting and it's challenging.
Monique Nazareth and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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