On a recent August afternoon, near Nineteenth Street, two young girls with blond hair pulled back in ponytails ran past me, one of them calling out, “Daddy, Daddy, I just saw Misty Copeland!” The tone of voice might as well have been used to announce a sighting of Katy Perry, or Snow White. A few steps later, I entered the tiny lobby of a building on Broadway, where an old electric fan was not quite keeping the doorman cool. A caged elevator took me up to the third floor, where I passed through a low-ceilinged hallway crowded with unlabelled posters of ballet greats, until I reached an expansive fluorescent-lit room with two walls of slightly warped mirrors and air-conditioning units sealed into the windows with black electrical tape. The American Ballet Theatre soloists Misty Copeland and Alexandre Hammoudi were rehearsing the pas de deux from Act II of “Swan Lake,” the scene in which we first meet Odette; an evil sorcerer’s spell has left her a swan by day and a human by night. Prince Siegfried is poised to kill the swan, but then witnesses its transformation into a beautiful young woman. “It’s not that you turn her,” Kevin McKenzie, A.B.T.’s artistic director since 1992 and a former principal dancer, told Hammoudi. “It’s that she’s startled, so she turns to you.” In the movement they were practicing, Odette is downstage left and Prince Siegfried walks up behind her. Odette is naïve, uncannily beautiful, and destined to die, but she is also, in each production, a very particular dancer. McKenzie continued, “And then you’re near this creature, and you’re both surprised by your proximity.”
Although ballet fans never lack for darlings, rarely does a dancer become an old-fashioned star, one recognized outside the realm of people with nuanced opinions about the alternative endings to “Swan Lake.” But Misty Copeland, who is thirty-two, has not only performed some of the most coveted and challenging roles in classical ballet; she has also danced atop a grand piano during Prince’s 2010 Welcome 2 America tour and starred in a Diet Dr Pepper commercial, and, a few days before the “Swan Lake” rehearsal, was featured in a commercial for Under Armour that within a week of its release had more than four million views on YouTube. In the ad, a voice-over reads a rejection letter detailing why “the candidate” is not a good fit for ballet—the letter is a fiction, albeit one not unrelated to Copeland’s career—while Copeland, who is wearing a sports bra and underwear, slowly rises onto pointe. In chiaroscuro lighting that is usually reserved for boxers’ bodies, the camera focusses on Copeland’s substantial, sinewy musculature. “I Will What I Want” is the tagline; a billboard in SoHo features a similar muscles-and-determination image. While it is disheartening to be reminded that product endorsement is the strongest measure of mainstream success, it feels good to see a woman who is doing more than being pretty become the kind of idol commonly associated with the stars of ESPN. Most ballerinas don’t have pensions, they rarely dance past the age of forty (injuries often end their careers earlier than that), and a soloist at A.B.T. earns between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand dollars a year. The great Anna Pavlova endorsed Pond’s Vanishing Cream.
American Ballet Theatre is typically considered the best company for classical ballet in the nation. For it, Copeland has played the Firebird, in “Firebird” (think wild jumps); Swanilda, in “Coppélia” (dirndls and dolls); Gamzatti, in “La Bayadère” (fury and theophany); and Lescaut’s mistress, in “Manon” (blond wig and longing). This month, she played the lead in “Swan Lake,” the ballet equivalent of playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company; in the course of two hours, the ballerina must become the supremely innocent Odette and the masterfully manipulative Odile, who is pretending to be Odette; of course, she must also be a swan. Copeland has danced with A.B.T. since 2001, and performed as a soloist since 2007, but until recently her important solo roles have largely been in relatively modern pieces; all her major roles in full-length ballets have been performed in the past two years. Following one after the other, her recent roles create the illusion of Copeland’s proceeding along a kind of inevitable music-box destiny, but her path to becoming a star ballerina has been as dramatic, unlikely, and hinged on coincidence as the plots of most ballets—the ones that have plots, anyway, like the classical ones she prefers, which require tremendous endurance and technical expertise to produce spectacles we associate with spun sugar.
Copeland grew up in Los Angeles, as one of six children. Her memoir, “Life in Motion,” written with Charisse Jones, portrays her childhood as having been in some ways idyllic: swimming at the beach, a circle of loving and talented siblings, a charismatic and beautiful mother, and a gift for responsibility and leadership. But another version of Copeland’s childhood, which also comes through in her memoir, is the hardship tale: not knowing her real father, a succession of differently difficult stepfathers, and uncertainty about whether there would be dinner on any given night.
As a young girl, Copeland loved dancing to Mariah Carey videos, rewatching a movie about the gymnast Nadia Comaneci, and being very prepared for school, where she was a hall monitor and the class treasurer. She usually showed up an hour early. Until the age of thirteen, she took no gymnastics or dance classes, though she did take and love a woodworking class at the local Boys & Girls Club.
Copeland is considered an unlikely ballerina: she is curvy and she is black, neither of which is a common attribute in the field. But it is her very late beginning and rapid attainment of virtuosity that are arguably without precedent for a female ballerina. (Rudolf Nureyev had a famously late and chaotic start, his early training having been limited by the vagaries of the post-Second World War Soviet Union.) Many professional ballet dancers begin their training around the age of three. Every dancer is a synthesis of givens—height, limb length, natural turnout—and intense effort, but Copeland’s late start can exaggerate the tendency we might have to regard a ballerina as simply touched by something divine.
When she was thirteen, and very shy, Copeland followed the lead of her older sister Erica and tried out for the middle-school drill team. She choreographed her own piece, set to George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex.” The closing move was a split, head held high. The evening after the audition, she received a call saying that she had been named captain of the squad of sixty.
The team’s coach, Elizabeth Cantine, was new, and Erica, who had been a drill-team star, told Misty that this was unfortunate; the old coach had led the team to wins all over the state, while Cantine was an unknown, just someone who’d been hired to teach history and English. But Cantine had a background in classical dance, and, after working with Misty for a short time she suggested that she try the ballet class at the Boys & Girls Club. “I wasn’t excited by the idea of being with people I didn’t know, and though I loved movement, I had no particular feelings about ballet,” Copeland said. “But I didn’t want to displease Liz.”
Cindy Bradley, who taught the class, told me, “I remember putting my hand on her foot, putting it into a tendu pointe, and she was definitely able to go into that position—she was able to go into all the positions that I put her into that day—but it wasn’t about that.” Bradley said she had a kind of vision, “right then, that first day, of this little girl becoming amazing.”
Copeland recalls her first class differently: “I was so embarrassed. I didn’t know anything that the other girls in the class knew; I thought I was doing everything wrong.”
But she kept attending the class. Copeland had an unusual body: her shoulders were sloped, her legs were long, her knees were hyperextended, and she was effortlessly flexible and strong even as she was very slight. She was in the habit of entertaining her siblings (and slightly weirding them out) by linking her hands together, putting them over her head behind her ears, and then getting her elbows to bend in the wrong direction. She also had a natural ability to quickly memorize and mimic any movement she saw. She began attending ballet classes five days a week, at Bradley’s studio in San Pedro. “One day, it just clicked,” Copeland told me. “I began to understand what it was.”
According to Copeland, the beginning of her ballet career overlapped with her family’s abrupt move out of her second stepfather’s spacious home and into a single room of the Sunset Inn, near a highway and liquor stores, in Gardena. The move left her with a long commute to school and then home from ballet practice. Her brother Douglas recalls them missing their bus one afternoon, and walking the thirteen miles home. Seeing an exhausted Copeland one evening, her mother, Sylvia DeLaCerna, told her that she had to give up ballet. Copeland didn’t protest; that wasn’t what she was like.
But the next evening DeLaCerna and Bradley spoke, and they decided that Misty would spend the weekdays at the Bradley home and weekends with her family. “I hadn’t been married that long,” Bradley explained, “and we had a two-year-old son, but I just walked into our home that night and called out to my husband, ‘I have Misty here with me, and she’s going to be staying with us.’ ”
Bradley waived Copeland’s ballet-school fees, and other community members contributed to the cost of her leotards and pointe shoes. “When I was dancing, I felt in control, and happy,” Copeland said. “I’m a Virgo, so I really like to be in control.” For most of the next three years, she lived with the Bradleys. Fairly predictable tensions arose between the two families. “I felt very loved and accepted by the Bradleys—I felt like a member of the family,” Copeland told me. “I’m not sure my attitude was so great when I would go home and complain about canned string beans, and say that I preferred shrimp scampi. My mom was working all day, and she had six children.” Copeland shared a room with the Bradleys’ young son, Wolf, attended synagogue with Bradley’s parents, and at the dinner table all attention was centered on her and her goals. Bradley’s husband, a modern-dance teacher, was Copeland’s pas-de-deux instructor and partner. “I loved the attention,” Copeland told me.
At fifteen, Copeland attended the San Francisco Ballet summer intensive program on a full scholarship; at the end of it she was invited to study with the school. (She turned the invitation down, planning to try out for her dream company, A.B.T.) Copeland believes, in retrospect, that her mother saw her summer success as evidence that she no longer needed the Bradleys—she could now move back in with her family and attend a ballet school nearby. At the time, however, both Copeland and the Bradleys felt that this would damage Copeland’s career. Everyone panicked. In her memoir, Copeland relates that the Bradleys introduced her to a lawyer, and she filed for emancipation. DeLaCerna filed restraining orders against the Bradleys, claiming that they had brainwashed her daughter. Copeland was too young, by a few weeks, to take action anyway. At one point, police officers picked Copeland up, so that she could be reunited with her mother, and for the next decade she saw little of the Bradleys.
“It was a nightmare,” Copeland told me. Her story was covered extensively in newspapers and on television. “I had no places left for privacy, where I could feel safe. Everyone had an opinion about what happened.” Eventually, all sides withdrew their claims. A while later, Copeland went with Elizabeth Cantine to try out for A.B.T.’s summer intensive session; she was accepted, and at the end of the program she was invited to join the studio company. Her mother expressed reservations, but ultimately said that the choice was Copeland’s. After spending another year at home, Copeland moved to New York.
“None of this is a fairy tale,” Craig Salstein, an A.B.T. soloist who has danced with Copeland since her earliest days in the company, told me. He was talking about ballet in general, but it applies equally to Copeland’s career path. Only a few months after she became a member of A.B.T.’s corps de ballet, at the age of eighteen, she found out that she had a lower-vertebral fracture. She had to wear a brace twenty-three hours of the day, and for a year she was unable to dance at all. A doctor, learning that she had not yet menstruated, told her that this was likely contributing to weakness in her bones. He recommended that Copeland begin taking birth-control pills to induce puberty. Within ten days, she began menstruating, and in a short time her figure changed from ballet-tiny to Marilyn Monroe. Her body, which at the start of her career had been considered perfect for ballet—she was said to have the “Balanchine body”—was suddenly no longer the ideal. “I was scheduled to do Clara, in ‘The Nutcracker,’ before that injury,” Copeland said. More than a decade passed before she was offered the role again.
Copeland says that eating disorders are not as pervasive among ballerinas as people think. Nearly every woman has at times felt that the shape of her body has determined an overwhelming proportion of someone’s response to her; ballet dancers, so much more intimately aware of their bodies’ appearance and ability both, might—through professionalism, through necessity—have a healthier way of relating to their bodies than the rest of us. Then again, the stakes are higher. Copeland had never given much thought to her diet, but when it was suggested to her that she needed to “lengthen”—balletspeak for losing weight—she rebelled. This was pretty much the first time in her life that she had done so, and, in the way of a young person, she mostly damaged herself.
“I didn’t want to be seen ordering huge amounts of food, but the local Krispy Kreme would do deliveries if the order was large enough,” Copeland said. “After practice, I would order two dozen doughnuts and then, alone in my apartment, eat most of them.” She felt that her ballet career was getting away from her, that she was far from family, that she was alone. “I was barely over a hundred pounds, but I felt so fat, and even a stranger at a club, when I told him I was a ballerina, said, ‘No way,’ ” Copeland recalled. “It took me about five years to figure out how my body worked, and to understand how to make my muscles more lean.”
Even though Copeland now has a more elongated—more classical—physique, and no longer has a double-D chest, she remains more buxom than most ballet dancers, and also more visibly athletic. A significant part of what distinguishes her is her un-classical body. Marie Taglioni, the nineteenth-century ballerina, is thought to have had special appeal because her proportions didn’t conform to the ideal; her rounded back made her lean forward a tiny bit, so that she seemed on the verge of losing her balance; her physical limitations ended up shaping what became her definitive style. And it was arguably with Taglioni that ballet—a man’s game until a hundred years before, with men “en travesti” even playing the roles of women in most serious productions—began to be about ballerinas.
In a recent production of “La Bayadère,” at the Metropolitan Opera House, Copeland played Gamzatti, a raja’s daughter who has been promised the warrior Solor as a husband, even as Solor has declared his love for a temple dancer, Nikiya. Copeland’s scene with Alina Cojocaru’s Nikiya was tense and complicatedly erotic—a highlight of the ballet. But it was the scene that followed, in which Gamzatti mostly sits at the side of the stage, that stayed with me. While Nikiya dances for Gamzatti’s betrothal, Gamzatti has to put on a game face about the love triangle. Copeland’s commitment to the minimal movement required by her role—to the expressiveness of her neck and her long-fingered hands—means that emotion must be compressed into the smallest gestures. Even her simple walk was mesmerizing, her stiff yellow tutu moving as softly as a sea anemone. (Ballet costuming often seems ridiculous at first glance, but usually reveals its own special mechanics.) When I went backstage after the show to meet Copeland, a very slight, smiling woman came out, wearing a black sports bra and overalls that left her narrow back exposed. The formidable Gamzatti was gone. The actors Nicole Ari Parker and Boris Kodjoe had brought their two young children to meet Copeland, and when she posed for a photo with them she might have been the third child. People often find that ballerinas seem smaller offstage, an effect attributable, in part, to the elongation of their legs in pointe shoes, but also to charisma.
Those of us who are outside the world of ballet tend to think of it as a very old art form: Louis XIII wrote ballets, and Louis XIV danced in forty productions. But ballet, like so many venerable and beautiful things, has been too easily co-opted into the fallacy of our assumption that its worth today is best measured by fidelity to its original form. In the ballet of the French aristocracy, different body types were assigned to different character types—tall people played nobles, shorter people played comic roles—and, in a dance, the choreography emphasized the king’s literal superiority over the court. After the French Revolution, those norms changed, and the ballet we now think of as classical is, in large part, derived from a radical reaction against original ideals.
The story of ballet in America also began as a devotion to ballet as it once was; it was seen as something from across the ocean. In the nineteen-forties, Ballet Theatre, the precursor to A.B.T., an American company, was billed as “The Greatest in Russian Ballet.” As the historian and former dancer Jennifer Homans details, in “Apollo’s Angels,” it was not until after the Second World War that a distinctively American ballet began to form. (This followed some tender failings with ballet scenarios about Billy the Kid and Pocahontas.) The United States government, which took a Cold War interest in developing an American ballet—and culture—that could rival the Russians’, began to fund émigré dancers and choreographers who had fled to New York. When the dance companies toured abroad, they travelled in Army buses and slept at Air Force bases. “I could represent America . . . better than ice boxes and electric bathtubs can,” George Balanchine said. Russian dancers who came to America were treated like trophies: Rudolf Nureyev was flown on a private plane to have tea at the White House with Jacqueline Kennedy.
Ballet, and ballerinas, have been deployed to extoll the king, and then the Politburo, and then the President—but the art often exceeded what was asked of it. With the mixed blessing of generous funding, choreographers like Balanchine, Antony Tudor, and Arthur Mitchell created a ballet scene in America that was like nowhere else in the world—radical, classical, old, new, constrained, and wild. Perhaps it’s not surprising that some of the ballets most beloved in the U.S. are about captive birds and mistresses treated other than ideally yet remaining devoted.
When I visited Copeland backstage after “La Bayadère,” I met a friend of hers, eighty-year-old Raven Wilkinson, an elegant older woman who wore her hair twisted into a topknot. Wilkinson was born in Harlem, and in 1955 joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo for its American tours. “I had been told not to try out, that they wouldn’t take me, because they toured through cities in the South,” Wilkinson said to me, when we met for lunch a while later. She has African, Native American, and European ancestors; she is pale, and onstage she wore powder. “But I thought, Well, if I don’t even try out I know I’ll never have what I want.”
Wilkinson toured with the Ballet Russe for two years, dancing the Chinese solo in “The Nutcracker,” a solo in the famous waltz of “Les Sylphides,” and in the pas de trois in “Raymonda.” Then, in 1957, at a hotel for whites in Atlanta, Wilkinson noticed the hotel manager talking to the director of the ballet. The manager walked over to the elevator operator, who was black, and asked her to point out who among the dancers might be “colored”; she pointed to Wilkinson. The manager called a cab for her—one that served colored people—and she spent the night at a colored hotel. After that, booking agents in the South were aware of the colored ballerina; Wilkinson would sometimes skip the company’s Southern engagements and, instead, rejoin the company when it reached Baltimore.
Eventually, Wilkinson left the U.S. to dance with the Dutch National Ballet, encouraged by the black American dancer Sylvester Campbell, who had joined the company. “I swear, he was better even than Nureyev—I used to think his joints were ball bearings,” Wilkinson told me. Europe had a reputation for being more open to dancers of color, and the Dutch treat their dancers very well; they receive pensions, and after retirement they are offered training for other work. “But I felt I was American,” Wilkinson said. “And, when I was done dancing, I wanted to come home.” For many years, she played small roles with the New York City Opera.
The original dream of a uniquely American ballet was of a company that mixed whites and “Negroes”—the term used by George Balanchine, one of the co-founders of New York City Ballet. Balanchine had been influenced by working with Josephine Baker, the black American dancer who became a celebrity in France during the twenties. His vision was only occasionally realized: in his famous “Agon,” he choreographed a pas de deux for Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell, a white woman and a black man. “Agon” was performed in 1957, to critical celebration, even though it could not be shown on television until 1968. Balanchine also made Maria Tallchief, who was of Osage heritage, an early star of the New York City Ballet. (For a time, he also made her his wife.)
Many black ballet dancers, including Wilkinson, were encouraged to concentrate on “African dance,” or maybe modern dance or musical theatre—even if they had spent years training in classical ballet. Virginia Johnson, long a lead ballerina and now the artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, a predominantly African-American ballet company, once said she had been told by someone with good intentions that she could never be a ballerina because there aren’t any black ballerinas.
That is not quite true today, but it’s in the neighborhood of true. “Let’s be honest,” Susan Fales-Hill, a writer and a philanthropist who served on the board of A.B.T., says. “Most ballet companies look like an Alabama country club in 1952.” There is a small number of Asian-American ballerinas, and a small number of black ones. The reasons usually cited include the holdover of antiquated ideas of beauty, the lack of role models, the preference for a uniform look among the corps dancers in a company, and the high cost of years of training. (Pointe shoes, for example, are around seventy dollars a pair, and a serious dancer can easily go through a pair a week.) Lauren Anderson, a longtime principal dancer with the Houston Ballet, was the first African-American woman to reach the rank of principal ballerina with a major American company other than D.T.H. (Principal is the highest rank for a dancer, above soloist.) She played Odette/Odile a number of times before she retired, in 2006. “When we think of ballerinas, we think of pink and pale and fluffy,” she told me. “We’re not accustomed to thinking of black women’s bodies in that context. We’re accustomed to thinking of black women as athletic and strong. But all ballerinas are athletic, all ballerinas are strong.”
In 2004, when D.T.H. went dormant for nine years, because of financial difficulties, only one of its dancers was offered a job with a major American ballet company. “For many people, even if the physical things are there, this one physical factor—skin color—makes it hard to see the others,” Johnson told the critic Marina Harss, in an extended interview that appeared in DanceTabs. Johnson has said that she regularly gets calls from ballet companies saying that they are looking for more dancers of color, but the problem goes beyond casting. D.T.H. hosts a summer session for kids from around the country, and “for so many of them this is the first time they’re in a classroom that really welcomes them,” she said. “But I look at these dancers and I see that they’re not being corrected. There are some very basic things going on that reveal that they’re being ignored.”
Copeland told me, “People will say, ‘Isn’t it really about class, not race?’ ” She explained that she sometimes felt a more natural connection to some of the A.B.T. dancers who grew up abroad; in Russia and Cuba, for example, ballet is more a part of popular culture, and dancers come from all social classes. “But I think there is more to it than that. I can see now how I was so well supported, even in my low times, but I don’t know if I ever felt like I belonged.”
“You can’t imagine how much it means to people, to see themselves onstage,” Fales-Hill said. At a crowded luncheon held in Copeland’s honor by the New York alumnae chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority (founded at Howard University, in 1913), Copeland answered questions about her life and her career, but she also simply listened, as one woman after another—engineers, lawyers, journalists—stood up to praise and bless her. One woman asked her what her goals were, now that she had achieved so much, and Copeland said, right off, like a mantra, “My goal is to become the first African-American principal dancer with A.B.T.” After a pause, she added, “And, you know, of course, to get married and have kids.” (Copeland lives with her boyfriend, Olu Evans, a lawyer.)
Copeland acts as a mentor to aspiring dancers, including Makeda Roney, a young woman who wrote Copeland a letter while she was in tenth grade, after seeing her perform. Roney, who was recently accepted into a yearlong program with the Joffrey Ballet, in Chicago, says that she calls or writes to Copeland whenever she feels anxious or discouraged. “She’s like a sister to me,” Roney said. Copeland has also been a public face for A.B.T.’s recent Project Plié initiative, which provides training and scholarships for kids who live in communities where there is little exposure to ballet.
Copeland’s artistic and commercial successes make us all feel good—about ballet, about America—and yet that feeling is somewhat tendentious. It is impossible to distill the current role of race in ballet (or in any field) from one woman’s career. Copeland’s race makes her immediately distinctive in the ballet world, and this has undoubtedly helped her commercial career, but murmurings, on some online dance-discussion threads, that she has been excessively promoted within A.B.T. because of her race overlook not just her virtuosity but also the many years in which she wasn’t a soloist, or even a lead dancer.
The immensely talented young ballet dancer Michaela DePrince, an orphan from Sierra Leone who was adopted at the age of four by a New Jersey family, danced for a short time with D.T.H., but said that she yearned for “the frills, flounce, and romance of classical ballet” that connected her to her childhood love of fairy tales. (D.T.H. is a classical ballet company, but its repertoire largely consists of shorter pieces, rather than long crowd-pleasers like “Romeo and Juliet.”) Raven Wilkinson said to me, toward the end of our lunch, “I don’t want to sound bitter—I’ve never been a protester—but when I saw that Michaela DePrince had left for the Dutch National Ballet, as I had, I felt like nothing had changed.” She continued, “I asked Michaela, ‘What about American companies?’ She said she was told she didn’t have the right body type.”
In April, 2012, Copeland danced her first full lead role in an A.B.T. production, as the Firebird in the Stravinsky ballet. Alexei Ratmansky, the former artistic director of the Bolshoi, modelled the choreography, in part, on Copeland’s body, as well as on those of the two other lead dancers playing the role. In “Firebird,” an enchanted bird is caught by a prince who will not free her unless she promises to exercise her powers on his behalf; eventually, she does so, and, along the way, she helps free some enchanted maidens and reunite the prince with his beloved. The Los Angeles Times praised Copeland’s Firebird as “abandoned” and “creaturely,” and, in this magazine, Joan Acocella wrote that her performance showed that her artistry merited promotion to principal dancer. Days after Copeland’s first Metropolitan Opera House performance in New York, she discovered that she had six stress fractures in her left tibia; she had surgery to insert a titanium plate in her shin. The hyperextended knees that are part of what makes Copeland’s lines so lovely also make her more vulnerable to certain kinds of injury, just as the pointe shoes that foster the illusion of a ballerina’s length also damage her feet. Already, Copeland was approaching an age when dancers don’t have many years left, and now she wasn’t sure how long she would be sidelined.
“I went to the J.C.C. near my house, because I knew I would want to swim as part of my recovery,” Copeland told me. “I just took the Pilates class, on a whim. After class, in the locker room, I had showered—I didn’t even have clothes on—and this tiny little woman, smaller than me, she comes up to me while I’m naked, saying, ‘You look like that ballerina Misty Copeland. You look too small to be her—not tall enough—but those look like her legs,’ ” Copeland recounted. “I thought, Great, here’s a crazy person.” It was Marjorie Liebert, a former dancer, now in her sixties, who taught a class in her apartment, in something that Copeland had never heard of: barre-à-terre, a method of doing ballet while, basically, lying on the floor.
“My résumé says I’m five feet tall, but I’m not,” Liebert told me. “I’m four foot eleven. It didn’t help my ballet career: many people wouldn’t even let me try out.” After an accident and a subsequent surgery, in the nineteen-seventies, Liebert went to Paris, intending to dance. She had heard of a healing class taught by a man named Boris Kniaseff, who had a devoted following. “I went, and first I thought, This is interesting. I went again, and I thought, This is important. In a month, I grew an inch and a half. I know that sounds unbelievable, but it’s true.” Kniaseff supposedly developed barre-à-terre after seeing circus performers begin their exercises while lying on the floor. Liebert became a disciple of sorts, and when Kniaseff died she began to teach his technique; eventually, she moved back to New York, bringing it with her.
For seven months, Copeland worked with Liebert nearly every day. “I absolutely wouldn’t be the dancer that I am now without her,” Copeland told me more than once. Liebert explained to me that many people are unable to stick with a barre-à-terre class. Transitioning between positions while lying on the floor requires using muscles in a different way than people are accustomed to. “Lying on the floor, you have a different perspective. You really have to find your center to make yourself better, to hold yourself up.”
Copeland hesitated to admit that her injury, which healed slowly, had been a difficult time for her. She joked, “There were a couple days when Marjorie was sick, and that was very hard for me, it’s true. My boyfriend said to me, ‘That’s what happens when your closest friend is in her sixties.’ ”
In May, 2013, Copeland was back onstage. Her first performance, as Queen of the Dryads, in “Don Quixote,” disappointed her. But a week later she felt that she was performing at a new level. When I asked Kevin McKenzie, A.B.T.’s artistic director, why he has had the confidence to cast Misty in so many lead roles in the past two years, he said, “She learned so much from her periods off.” He continued, “Even though she had this late start and meteoric rise, in the end her training was as long as anyone’s. She had gone through puberty and had a different body, and then she excelled again. She had a heinous injury; she came back better—more mature, more analytical. Because she had to be, because she knew she couldn’t take her body for granted. I’m a firm believer that, no matter how talented you are when you’re young, there’s a certain amount of life experience you can’t accelerate. Misty could have done these same roles—technically—ten years ago, but she wouldn’t have been ready.”
Lauren Anderson told me that she had played the Sugar Plum Fairy for twenty-five years, and that the role kept evolving as she herself changed. “You’re playing someone else, but you’re also yourself—you have to be in order to be believable,” she said. When Anderson premièred the Odette/Odile role, she was coming out of a divorce. “I took all the tragedy and heartbreak and just brought it out onstage with me. When I was onstage, I was free from the problems of my life. I was someone else.”
Liebert said simply, “We dance who we are.”
Near my apartment, there’s a dance school on the second floor of a nondescript building, and sometimes, looking up from the dollar-a-slice pizza place across the street, you can see the students going through their exercises again and again and again. You couldn’t choreograph as ideal a work as that. A smart and witty ballet dancer once told me that he thought truly pure ballet would eliminate performances—that the essence of ballet is the practice of it. Copeland said to me, with obvious frustration, “In social situations, people so often ask me, ‘So what do you do when you’re not performing—what is your job?’ I’m, like, ‘I have a job, I work every day, I’m in a union, we get overtime.’ ”
In addition to its practice space on Broadway, A.B.T. has a rehearsal space several floors below the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. One afternoon, I went to see Copeland rehearse a pas de deux with Herman Cornejo for a production of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet “Manon,” which they were to perform for the first time the next day. To get to the practice space, I tunnelled through one red-velvet-and-gold-detailed hall after another, until I found a service elevator. Though it was summer, a woman was wearing red snow booties and a fading purple jumper with a long-sleeved polka-dot shirt underneath. Standing in natural turnout, she got off the elevator in front of me, with that walk that unites ballerinas and cowboys. Many dancers in the hallways were wearing similar booties, and the majority of the women had hair that seemed to come from a Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting. Basement Floor C resembled a boiler room, yet I felt that I had entered a commune of unicorns.
In the high-ceilinged practice space, Copeland and Cornejo lay on the floor, whispering and laughing as they stretched. “For your next career, as a stripper, you need to work on your split,” Copeland said to Cornejo. They were waiting for Keith Roberts, a former principal dancer and now a ballet master, who would be running the session. He had been delayed upstairs by a dress rehearsal with the corps de ballet, so Copeland asked Cornejo for help working on her entrance.
“There’s never enough time to tell anyone anything,” Roberts said, when he rushed in. The conductor, Ormsby Wilkins, sat at the piano with Daniel Waite, the pianist. They began practicing. Cornejo played the charming cad Lescaut; Copeland was his young lover, probably one of many. In the scene they were rehearsing, Lescaut is drunk, and spins his mistress off balance while she’s on pointe; although he has knocked her over, he continues spinning an invisible ballerina. Much of the movement was tilted in this way.
I never used to be easily drawn in by the long storybook standards of classical ballet; it was as if the salmon sandwiches and the bubbly rosés served during intermission got in the way. It was easier to access the more immediately legible expressiveness of abstract, modern pieces. But many dancers have told me that they revere the long classical pieces. When I asked why, they talked about how freeing the strict constraints of classical ballet are, from its most basic positions to its thirty-two-fouetté extremes; from other forms of dance, one couldn’t transition to classical ballet, but from classical ballet one could do anything.
Dance is not like the other arts. The words in a book stay in place, paintings barely fade, musical performances can be recorded. But watching a recording of dance is about as close to the real thing as reading “Eugene Onegin” in Google Translate. Dancers often restrain themselves, necessarily, during practice, but Cornejo and Copeland seemed to be leaping higher, and moving more articulately, than they did onstage. I had just seen three grand ballet performances in a row, but this harshly lit, uncostumed, and repeatedly interrupted performance was my favorite. It wasn’t simply the proximity, the sound of the shoes, the soothingly minor comments—“Your back arm tends to get behind you”; “A little more shoulder at the beginning, so it’s not so flat”—it was more the juxtaposition of the mundane and the magnificent: “Be careful when you do the relevé; don’t crank her leg too much”; “The second pirouette—did you just do left?”
“People are surprised to hear that I still go to class,” Copeland told me. “But that’s what dancers do.” In a studio class one Thursday morning, there were dancers from all ranks of A.B.T., as well as dancers not yet in the company, stretching, chatting. One dancer asked for a recommendation for a travel agent. Another replied that no one has used travel agents since the eighties. Copeland sat on the floor beside them, in a purple leotard, applying glue to the inside of her pointe shoes. The director of A.B.T.’s studio company, a former dancer named Kate Lydon, called the class to attention: “We’ll start with sixteen swings, port de bras forward.” The pianist accompanying the class played some Dvořák, then some Bach, then “The Girl from Ipanema.” After the barre exercises, there were floor exercises, then jumps, then more exercises moving across the room. ♦
