The New Yorker - AN UNLIKELY BALLERINA The rise of Misty Copeland. lyrics

Even though Copeland now has a more elongated—more cla**ical—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-cla**ical 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 a**umption that its worth today is best measured by fidelity to its original form. In the ballet of the French aristocracy, different body types were a**igned 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 cla**ical 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, cla**ical, 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 cla**ical 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 cla**room 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 cla**, 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 cla**es. “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.