Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina

by Misty Copeland

  Knowing that, I think we all felt a peace we had never before known. Lindsey and I shared a bedroom, and for the first time in years I could walk to school.

  Dance was still the center of my life, but I attended classes only in the afternoons now that I was no longer being homeschooled. Still, I felt the rigor of the instruction and the prowess of some of my fellow students made up for the shorter period of time I was spending in the studio. One of Mommy’s gifts to me was a life-size cardboard cutout of Mariah Carey. I pinned it to my wall, right next to a poster of Paloma Herrera.

  I began to appreciate Mommy again, how she had made sure to find a new dance home for me with Liz Cantine’s help. How she had been able to get back on her feet—buying a car, getting her own apartment. She was finally taking care of our family. I just wondered why it hadn’t happened sooner.

  There was a photograph on the living room mantel of Gloria Allred holding my hand up in triumph outside the court building in Torrance. By then, the tug of war raged mostly in the recesses of my mind.

  And I now had a little perspective, allowing me to unspool the reel of the previous three years.

  When Mommy and my brothers and sisters said I had been brainwashed by Cindy and Patrick, I ignored them, or fought them fiercely. Now I was no longer so sure.

  I came to believe that while Cindy and Patrick had meant no harm, I had been brainwashed, if only a little bit. I grew to believe that I deserved more and that Mommy was not willing or able to provide it. But just maybe, I’d been wrong.

  It was a revelation. One day, near the end of that transitional year in my life, I sat down beside Mommy on the couch in our living room. I thanked her for fighting for me, for never giving up on me or on herself. And I apologized for what she must have gone through.

  Now that I’m grown, my perspective has changed yet again, to one that is more balanced and completely my own. What I know for sure is that Mommy loved me fiercely, and that the Bradleys had loved me, too. That I wouldn’t be where I am without their dedication, their willingness to sacrifice and take me into their family. Without them, I would not have learned to voice my opinion, to feel confident that I had opinions worth listening to. All that, and more, the Bradleys gave to me.

  LESS THAN A YEAR after the battle over my emancipation, I would go away to New York for the first time, to participate in ABT’s summer intensive program. Jessica would go with me, just as we’d planned the previous year at San Francisco Ballet.

  I’d auditioned for the program a few months before. The drill for all the summer intensives’ admissions was basically the same. Budding ballerinas would look in the back of Dance Magazine to find the schedule of observation classes being held at studios across the country by each major ballet company. The classes were the way potential students auditioned for the companies’ summer instruction.

  The tryouts usually took place over the course of a single month. Each school required its own particular uniform—black leotard, pink tights, no distracting colors! You’d show up at your allotted time, pay a small fee, and be given a big number to wear over your chest. Then you and fifty or sixty other dancers would go through the moves of a typical ballet class, at the barre, in the center, while a school representative stood to the side or behind a table, watching closely.

  I was invited to audition for ABT’s summer intensive by Rebecca Wright, who was the program’s then director. She’d also been one of the judges when I’d won the Spotlight Awards more than a year before. Liz and Dick Cantine took me to the studio, paid the required fee, then waited in the hallway outside with the parents of all the other dancers.

  A couple of weeks later I received a letter in the mail telling me that I had been accepted on full scholarship. In June, I headed to New York.

  Chapter 7

  THE FIRST TIME ANYONE from American Ballet Theatre had seen me, I was fifteen years old and was competing in the L.A. Spotlight Awards.

  From the time I sat in front of the television at the Bradleys, transfixed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gelsey Kirkland, and the other stars of ABT, I had dreamed that I would one day be a part of that company. I had to walk where Paloma Herrera walked, dance where Paloma Herrera danced.

  ABT had been one of the five companies that offered me a scholarship to attend its summer intensive program. But New York had felt too far away at age fifteen, so I headed up the California coast instead. Now, a year later, I was ready to take the Big Apple by storm.

  A friend of Mommy’s met me at LaGuardia Airport, and we took a cab to where I’d be living, a convent on West Fourteenth Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village, with the Carmelite Sisters Teresas of San Joseph.

  Some people may have found it stifling, strange, to be a teenager living in a nunnery, the Mariah Carey poster I’d brought with me taking its place on my wall among the rosaries.

  But I found it comforting. The structure and order of the nuns’ world put me at peace.

  The theatrics that had brought such a turbulent end to my San Francisco summer were long over. I felt I could walk anonymously through the canyons of Manhattan, preparing for my next adventure.

  The primary dramas in my life now were the ones that I wanted—fitting in with the occasional ballet diva, winning the approval of the ballet mistress, hoisting myself to the next rung on the ladder that would hopefully lead me to a permanent spot within my dream company, ABT.

  But one day, I was walking down the street, earbuds in my ears, bopping to a long-forgotten beat, when I caught a man looking at me strangely.

  “Hey,” he said. “Are you that little girl everyone was fighting over in California?”

  New York was a new start for me. No one knew me, I was at ABT, and I could finally start the life I dreamed of. But hearing this man’s words made me feel otherwise.

  OUTSIDE THE CONVENT’S DOORS was New York City, with its dirty streets and omnipresent cacophony that sounded like an orchestra endlessly tuning its instruments. It crackled with the aggressive energy of people rushing everywhere and nowhere, and the humid air reeked of garbage, urine, and meat frying on food carts. It was my first time visiting a city this big. I had never experienced anything like it.

  But behind the convent’s pink walls, the nuns were kindly and motherly. They spoke no English, only Spanish, and most of the time I had no idea what they were saying. Each small room had an intercom, and every morning at seven a.m. it would buzz to wake us from our dreams.

  BZZZ.

  “El desayuno esta listo,” a Sister would call. “Breakfast is ready.”

  We hated that early-morning salute. We wanted to sleep longer. But we loved the breakfasts and dinners that the Sisters prepared for us girls every day.

  The dorm, with two narrow beds to a room, didn’t just house dancers studying with ABT. There were students from other summer intensives as well. At first I bunked with Margeaux, a girl whom I danced with at the Lauridsen Centre back home. She was attending the Joffrey Ballet’s summer program. But halfway through, I began to share a room with my good friend Kaylen, also from my school in California and dancing with the Joffrey that summer.

  Then, of course, Ashley Ellis was there, too, dancing alongside me at ABT. It was like musical chairs, with Ashley sometimes staying with Margeaux while I was in Kaylen’s room, and then switching back again.

  I remember how our legs would ache after dancing all day, and we had to hike up flight after flight of stairs because the convent didn’t have an elevator. In the evening, all of us girls would gather—whether training with the Joffrey, New York City Ballet, or ABT—to eat dinner in the basement, where all our meals were served. Then we’d watch movies. Mommy sent videos of ’NSYNC in Concert, and we all drooled over Justin Timberlake.

  The first day of the program I was called into the artistic office where John Meehan and Kirk Peterson were waiting for me. Kirk had been a principal dancer with both ABT and San Francisco Ballet and served as the program’s resident choreographer and ballet master. John
was a former principal dancer with the company and the artistic director for ABT’s Studio Company, where junior dancers performed before moving up to the main company.

  Kirk spoke first.

  “We’ve heard your story, Misty,” he said, “and we want to know more.”

  I told them about the Boys and Girls Club, how I was hesitant at first but then fell madly in love with ballet. I told them about the thrill of winning the Spotlight Awards, how much I loved playing Clara in The Nutcracker and Kitri in Don Quixote, how ABT had always been my dream company.

  I left out the battle that had gone on between Mommy and Cindy. But they didn’t forget. They asked me a little bit about it. I kept it short and sweet, though this was a bit disheartening. People had often known things about me that I didn’t share or want them to know. I thought New York wouldn’t be this way, but even here I was exposed, vulnerable to being labeled “different.”

  Still, all that didn’t stop them from telling me why they had called me into the office. They told me that I was an extraordinary talent, and John said that he was already planning to invite me to join the Studio Company sometime soon.

  I was overwhelmed.

  THIS WAS ALSO THE summer that I met Paloma Herrera. I have to say that, at first, I was a bit disappointed.

  It must have been lunchtime. We summer students weren’t really allowed to wander around ABT’s studios, a warren of run-down rooms. The company occupied two floors of a building downtown, at 890 Broadway. There were five studios where we rehearsed. Each of them had two walls covered floor to ceiling with mirrors, and barres were attached to all the walls but one; more barres were stacked like firewood in the back, to be moved when we needed them to the floor’s center. A piano was invariably tucked in the corner, and each studio had a television and sound system in the front so we could watch videos to help us with our choreography, as well as old-fashioned wall phones, where we’d line up to order lunch to be delivered from Andy’s Deli on our breaks.

  The studios that make up the company’s rehearsal spaces look like sets taken straight from one of the 1980’s dance movies I’d watch with Cindy and Patrick in California. It’s one of the few dance buildings that hasn’t become super-high-tech and sleek—a total contrast to San Francisco Ballet, for example. It’s typical New York, I guess, to have the office building of America’s National Ballet Company be as quirky as an East Village apartment building. Like in so many of the aging buildings that crowd New York City, the perimeter of ABT’s practice rooms were lined with ancient radiators to keep them warm. They clinked and clanged so loudly in the winter that it was sometimes hard to hear the playing of the piano. And in studio five, one of our two large rehearsal spaces, the windows got so fogged up from the sizzling steam and dancers’ body heat that you couldn’t see out to Nineteenth Street.

  The studios were sweltering in the summer as well. There were air conditioners installed in the windows, but we dancers didn’t want them turned on for fear our muscles would get cold and stiff.

  There were also two large dressing rooms, one for women and one for men. They were filled with benches and creaky lockers that dancers claimed their first days with the main company and held on to for the duration of their careers there. Our physical therapy room was filled with all you’d find in a high-priced gym, from cardio and weight machines to Pilates reformers. There was also a small massage room, where the company’s therapist would rub and knead our tired, sore muscles.

  Upstairs, on the third floor, there were two more studios and the company offices housing the artistic staff, stage managers, and company management, as well as the fund-raising, publicity, and education departments, and our executive director.

  At lunchtime, I would usually take a walk down the street, pick up soup or a sandwich at a local salad bar, and then come back to the studio, where I’d eat and relax with other dancers before heading back to class.

  But one day, for some reason, I felt like exploring. The hallways smelled of sweat and age. I wandered into one of the larger studios, and there was Paloma Herrera, talking on the studio phone.

  I expected her to be so much taller, but she was only a few inches ahead of me in height. Her jet-black hair was pulled into a loose bun. And she had one of her legs planted on a chair by a wall, stretching.

  Always the ballerina, I thought, awestruck, even when chatting quickly with a friend.

  She looked just like the diva I expected my idol to be, flexing nonchalantly, pushing her body in a way mere mortals couldn’t imagine, as effortlessly as flipping aside her hair.

  What do you do when you come face-to-face with your dream? Someone whose picture hangs on your bedroom wall, whose footsteps you’ve followed, whose performance as Kitri in a ballet you saw long ago inspired you to be here today, three thousand miles from home, in the company where Mikhail Baryshnikov reigned and Gelsey Kirkland danced?

  You approach her stealthily, quietly.

  “Hello,” I finally said, with a voice that fell somewhere between a squeak and a whisper.

  No response.

  I can’t remember if Paloma was still on the phone or had just hung up. What I do recall is feeling a cold vibe from her. I thought that she was just a little bit mean.

  They say that it’s not a good idea to meet your idols because you find out that they are as human, as moody, as imperfect as you.

  But Paloma’s aloofness somehow made her even more intriguing, made me even more obsessed. I turned and walked out of the room.

  Of course she’s a little bit full of herself, I quickly concluded. She’s Paloma Herrera!

  However inauspicious that meeting in a forbidden studio, my momentary encounter with Paloma was just the beginning of our relationship. I feel now that it took a decade to get to know her. But now, having had my own turn in the spotlight, having felt the adulation and also the isolation that comes with being the “only one,” I understand why she seemed to have erected a wall around herself.

  The spotlight has often been focused on me because I was a late bloomer who turned out to be a prodigy, and perhaps, more than that, because I am a black woman excelling in a white world. Paloma also stood out for being exceptional, a teenage soloist and then principal who went head-to-head with older dancers.

  I can only imagine what it was like for her to join ABT at the tender age of fifteen and to have so much expectation heaped upon her shoulders. I can imagine the snubs and slights she must have endured from those other ballerinas as they watched this ingenue move so swiftly up through their ranks.

  I can imagine it quite clearly, actually, because I experienced some of what she went through.

  Years later, when Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director of ABT, promoted me to soloist at the age of twenty-four, I became the first African American woman to hold that position in twenty years. I made the cover of Dance Magazine, the same publication I used to buy and carry in my backpack so that I could read about Paloma Herrera. I spoke to the writer about both Paloma and Gelsey Kirkland: how when I thought of a ballerina, I saw their fluid movements in my head. I told the writer that from the time I discovered ballet at the age of thirteen, Paloma and Gelsey were all that I wanted to be.

  After that cover story appeared, it was Paloma’s turn to quietly approach me.

  “I read the story about you in Dance,” she murmured, walking up to me one day as I stretched in the studio between rehearsals. “Thank you for saying so many great things about me in the article.”

  It’s funny. In an interview, you talk and talk and talk, somehow not fully realizing that people, including those you are speaking about, will actually read what you said. For a moment I was surprised, even a little embarrassed, that Paloma had read my gushing comments.

  But I was also happy that my onetime idol had been flattered that I had appreciated her, that even though I was now a soloist, dancing beside her, I was not too proud to tell the world that I was also a fan and how Paloma Herrera had inspired me.

&n
bsp; We smiled at each other, peers. And I can say that we are also very good friends.

  WITH ALL THE GIRLS, fun, and friendship, ABT’s program was in some ways like summer camp in pointe shoes. But we worked incredibly hard, rehearsing arabesques and pliés seven hours a day.

  Together, Ashley and I would trek the fifteen minutes to ABT’s studios on Broadway each morning. Among the 149 young people in the school, she and I were placed in the same levels, and soon after we arrived, we learned the parts we would play in the end-of-summer recital.

  Ashley would have a solo. And Kirk Peterson decided that I would perform a pas de deux he had choreographed to a Philip Glass composition, as well as a principal variation in Paquita, the story of a gypsy girl who saves the life of a soldier and then discovers that she was born to nobility. It wasn’t hard for me to switch styles from Kirk’s contemporary choreography to the classical ballet to follow. I know now that ABT has always appreciated my ability to make that transition between diverse styles of dance. Though my primary love has always been for the classic ballet stories I would watch and rewatch with Cindy, my athletic body is just as comfortable with modern movement. This was my first time experiencing anything other than classical ballet, besides my performance in The Chocolate Nutcracker, but I loved it.

  The other students were supportive and admiring. They believed Ashley and I both had perfect technique, and they called Ashley “the white Misty” because we had similar bodies and dancing technique, having come from the same school.

  We were pretty much the stars of the program that summer. The night of the recital, after we’d taken our bows, I was autographing a few pairs of my tattered pointe shoes for some of the other dancers and taking pictures with my friends when I was told that Kevin McKenzie and John Meehan wanted to see me.

  I hurried to the stage, where they waited for me.

  “You were wonderful tonight, Misty,” John said. True to his word, he invited me to join the Studio Company.