"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...
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.”...
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.”"
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/unlikely-ballerina
I dressed as Misty Copeland for halloween. She's amazing.
What jumps out of me from her story is not just the presence of mentorship, but sponsorship, people who are able to see her promise and make sacrifices for it.
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