Meanwhile, my body was giving me signals that it was being pushed past its limits.
Stress fractures are a slow injury—subtle, creeping—until they become a force that can’t be ignored.
I had suffered my first serious injury my first year in the corps, when I sustained a stress fracture in my lower lumbar. At that time, I caught the hurt early. This time, I would not be so prescient.
I began to feel pain in my left shin, the leg I turn on, about six months before I made my Firebird debut at the Met. I had hurt myself during the relentless rehearsal process, and continued to put strain on my leg with the touring shows we were doing before debuting in New York.
The two times I performed as the Firebird in Orange County, there were moments when the pain was so strong, it seized my breath.
I tried to reason it away.
You’re working out hard, practicing all day, I told myself. Of course your leg is hurting.
I had stopped jumping in class because I knew it would cause more damage. I saved my grands jetés and petits allegros for rehearsals and the actual shows.
But I didn’t say a word about what I was feeling. In addition to my role as the Firebird, I also had the secondary lead of Gamzatti in La Bayadère. I feared that if I mentioned that I was in pain, I might lose one or both roles. And I wouldn’t risk them, couldn’t lose them.
This is for the little brown girls.
At the same time that I was working out to the point of exhaustion and trying to push fears about my weakening leg to the back of my mind, I was also having a difficult time with the ballet mistress helping me to prepare for La Bayadère.
Natalia Makarova was a legendary dancer who was a prima ballerina with the Kirov Ballet before she defected from Russia, later becoming a principal with ABT. I was pushed through a process that wasn’t normal for ABT. I was put in a position to compete for a role with another dancer. It was clear Kevin wanted me to have the role of Gamzatti, but he told me that I would be seen by Natalia over the course of a week and it was unlikely I would get the part because she was leaning toward another dancer.
The process was intense and grueling. I knew that Natalia had issues with my body—my breasts, my weight—and did not want me featured in a ballet she was setting. I was constantly on the verge of tears but would hold them back until I was alone in the dressing room.
I knew I had to focus, to stay en pointe both mentally and physically. I kept working.
This is for the little brown girls.
I got the chance to perform the part of Gamzatti in one show before my premiere as the Firebird. By then, somehow, I had been able to reach a point mentally that was so strong that I was able to do things physically that I couldn’t get my body to do in rehearsals. And I was able to block out Natalia’s disapproval, her criticism that I wasn’t ready.
Then, it was time for me to take the Metropolitan Opera’s stage as the Firebird.
The day of our New York debut, the company had a dress rehearsal. Afterward, I walked out the front doors of the Met, planning to get a quick haircut since I would be attending the post premiere gala later that night.
After being inside the theater, the bright sun felt good on my face. I breathed in New York—the cabs snaking down the avenue, the crowds of tourists and art lovers ambling by. I took comfort in my city, always there to greet me, cocooning me in its embrace.
I turned around and looked up.
It was me, in full blazing color. There was my face, head thrown back in joy, and my body exuding power and feminity as I stood en pointe on a twenty-four-foot advertisement, waving from the front of the Metropolitan Opera. Misty Copeland. The Firebird. The banner had been there a month, since the start of the season. But still, it moved me. My eyes filled with tears. In all my years of living in New York City, I had never seen a black woman on the facade of the Met.
A FEW HOURS LATER, I was in my brilliant costume of red and gold, sitting in the dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera House.
But I no longer believed that I could pull it off. I was in pain. An incredible, searing amount of pain.
How can I dance, I thought, staring in the mirror, if I can barely walk?
I knew that after tonight, I wouldn’t be able to dance again for a long while.
Tonight, knowing that so many people had come out to support me, knowing my struggles and the significance of this moment, would have to be enough. No matter what happened on the stage, I reminded myself that there was a bigger purpose than my personal achievement.
It was time. I rose and walked toward the stage.
I was so far away from San Pedro, so different from the nineteen-year-old girl who first timidly stepped onto the Metropolitan Opera House stage, awestruck and uncertain.
Now I was a soloist, about to play a principal role in an iconic ballet for one of the most respected classical dance companies in the world. People who had nurtured me, supported me, were here, as well as others who had never before seen a professional ballet but were drawn by my presence. They were all waiting expectantly in the darkness.
My lower leg throbbed, but not as hard as my heart. I ignored both. This is what I had spent years longing for. It was time to push through. I paused in the wings before my first entrance.
The chandeliers rose, the orchestra began to play, and the lights shone down.
I was transformed. For the next ninety minutes, I fluttered and darted. I was the Firebird. There were jetés, and piqués, and fouettés.
And I felt no pain. All the training, all the practicing, all the nurturing had come together for this climactic moment.
“This is a brisé.” I heard Lola de Ávila whispering in my ear.
“You are God’s child.” I remembered, hearing Cindy.
“You were meant to be on the stage, Misty,” Mommy said in my memory of my first performance, singing “Mr. Postman” behind my brother Chris.
They were all there with me. And so many more.
This is for the little brown girls.
There were times during my performance that the applause was so loud I could barely hear the music. Then it was over.
The cast carried me, the Firebird, so that she could float away. The audience was on its feet. Shouts of “Bravo” rained down. I couldn’t see their tears, but I heard that many in the audience cried tears of joy, as they danced along with me on that stage.
I accepted my bouquet of flowers, let the applause wash over me. Then I turned and left the stage numb to the pain that would come back with a flood of debilitating force two days later, when the last of my adrenaline wore off.
AFTER THE PERFORMANCE, THERE was a party on the stage to celebrate Kevin McKenzie’s twentieth anniversary as ABT’s director. I was joined there by many friends and supporters.
We took photographs, and for days after, the congratulatory e-mails and notes poured in.
“You have made it. You are officially a ballerina! You have proven yourself in such extreme roles as Gamzatti, then Firebird. I’m so proud of you. You have more than I ever did but I can still see when someone is the real deal. You are the epitome of all a ballerina is.” So read a note from my mentor and idol, Raven Wilkinson.
“There are but so many special moments in our lives and last night was indeed one of them. . . . What joy to watch Misty on that stage!! What pride to share in her amazing accomplishment and historic performance.” So wrote the president of Black Entertainment Television, Debra Lee.
“Tonight, it was as if you handed each of us—young girls and big girls—a set of wings,” said the writer Veronica Chambers.
I had also received kind words about my performance as Gamzatti. My ballet mistress, Makarova, so hard on me during rehearsals, was effusive with her praise.
“Hearing the applause when the veil is removed from my head, I felt confident and in control,” I wrote in my journal. “Kevin was pleased, Makarova was ecstatic. [She] said I rose to the occasion and did everything she has been asking for.
Firebird was an incredible success. The night was huge and beyond me.”
I was overwhelmed by the love and support I felt from the black community and also from so many of the ABT staffers, my peers, and the critics.
The New Yorker’s Joan Acocella wrote an amazing review:
A Firebird has to be like a bird, but to move us she also has to be like a human being. That didn’t happen until the second night, when the role passed from Osipova to Misty Copeland, an A.B.T. soloist. Copeland is the only highly placed African American woman in ballet in the city. Now they should promote her for artistic reasons as well as political ones. She deserves it.
For such a highly regarded publication to say I had proven myself artistically and shown all that I was and could be was lovely affirmation. I was blown away.
I was also nearly overwhelmed a few days after my performance as the Firebird when I sat at dinner with friends and giants from the ballet world. At the table were Arthur Mitchell, former dancer Lorraine Graves, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s resident choreographer, Robert Garland, and my friend Vernon, who works with ABT.
At that dinner, Arthur, who had called me on the phone to tell me how proud he was after seeing my performance in La Bayadère as well as in The Firebird, said that I had arrived. That I was a queen. That I was a ballerina.
He went on and on, about how I had a fire inside of me that he had not known I contained, and how I had the ability, the talent, to soar beyond anyone dancing beside me in ABT.
“You are beautiful,” he said. “You have the lines, the technique, the body. You are classy and smart. You have the total package, which few have. You can have any role you desire. You have no limits.”
I sat there, humbled and grateful. I thought about how I needed to recognize how special these moments were and how fortunate I was, instead of constantly worrying about what hurdle might come next. I thought about how my hard work was paying off in such sweet ways.
Still, it was difficult for me simply to bask in it all. In a way, in my mind, I was ever the latecomer, ever the student, ever the shy little girl just trying to please.
That’s why it was so easy for me, standing on the crest, achieving ballon from the words and passion that followed my performances in The Firebird and La Bayadère, to be deflated by a few words of negativity.
And to come crashing down.
After that wonderful dinner with Arthur, Lorraine, and so many others, I went home, turned on my computer, and read a blogger’s review, which criticized my Gamzatti.
Even worse, it went on to say that I didn’t deserve to be a principal and it would be wrong for ABT to give me such a promotion merely to appear more racially diverse and inclusive.
It was awful. Sitting there, I couldn’t believe, after all my hard work and my much praised performances, that I still had to fight this battle. And I knew that this writer was expressing what some in the audience were also, very likely, thinking.
Then I got angry. And with my anger came determination. I realized that it might take more than one stellar season, but deep down I knew that I would continue to grow, learn, and explore opportunities for more classical leading roles. Yes, I was black. And yes, I also deserved to be promoted, to stand center stage.
I had briefly allowed a negative, close-minded few to drown out all the support and love that was lifting me up. But I recovered. I had to face the truth that there were some whom I would never win over. And if I were ever promoted to principal, the negativity would likely only increase. I had to hang on to my special moments and keep fighting.
Little did I know that I was about to wage a battle on an entirely different front.
“SO WHERE DO I begin.”
It was June 22, 2012, a Friday, when I sat down to my journal. Five days earlier, I had pulled out of the entire Met season.
That glorious night was the one and only time that I would be the Firebird in New York. It was only a week before that I’d taken the stage, but it felt like a lifetime.
A couple days after that performance, I was in so much pain that I finally had to admit that something was terribly wrong. Since my first serious injury a decade before, I had suffered stress fractures on several occasions. I was prone to them because my knees—those knees that bent backward—were hyperextended. That meant that when I was en pointe, I was putting more pressure on the front of my shin than was normal.
When I first went to the Lauridsen Ballet Centre, Diane would have me repeat the most basic of positions and moves over and over again to make sure I articulated them perfectly. At times I hated her for it, feeling as though there was no way of achieving the perfection she clearly expected. I came to understand that the constant repetition was her way of saving me. I was so flexible, I was more prone to injury, and she wanted me to do everything correctly so that I didn’t hurt myself.
I’d had injuries over the years and had always healed.
But this time was more serious. I had six stress fractures in my tibia, the larger bone below the knee. I had been in pain the entire six months I had prepared for The Firebird and La Bayadère, unknowingly building fracture upon fracture.
I was devastated. I had dealt with so much emotional and psychological pressure during my career, struggling to maintain courage and confidence despite the criticism of some who did not feel a girl with my skin color or body type could ever truly belong, a life of highs closely followed by the deepest of lows.
I had started the season by seeing my face on a banner, rustling in the breeze as it hung in front of the Met. For a moment, I, a black woman, was the face of ABT. Then during my premiere performances in New York, the audience was filled with luminaries, the legends of black ballet, who deserved the applause that I received on their behalf. It was amazing.
Now this.
Having to sit out the season, the season in which I had been the Firebird and Gamzatti, was too much to bear. I felt as if everything that truly mattered to me in my life was gone.
My doctor said that I would need major surgery. And when the casting continued to be posted for the remainder of the spring season, it was as if I’d never existed. One minute you are the star, and then you are hurt. Someone moves into your light, and you disappear so completely, you cannot even find your shadow.
I put my heartache to paper.
“I just don’t know how much stronger I can be and for how much longer,” I confessed in my diary. I’d worked with integrity, pushing myself at a pace that sometimes felt impossible to maintain, and finally gotten a break. “I’m grateful for what I do have, but sad that it’s not enough,” I wrote in my journal. “God, when will it ever be easy?”
OF COURSE, IT WILL never be easy.
In life, like in ballet, you have to find your balance. To push yourself as far as you can go, but know when to pull back from the brink—of injury, of despair. I wanted to run away, but where would I go? How could I go?
I wanted to be an inspiration, but I also wanted so much more. I wanted to be a prima ballerina.
I knew that I just didn’t have it in me to give up, even if I sometimes felt like a fool for continuing to believe.
Chapter 14
MY SURGERY TOOK PLACE on October 10, 2012. Seven months later, I returned to the stage.
During the time that I was rehabilitating, I started taking private floor barre classes, healing with what is known as the barre à terre technique created by Boris Kniaseff. I had befriended Marjorie Liebert, the instructor, after I pulled out of the spring season. Marjorie was my savior. She kept my mind and spirit positive, while I looked toward healing. In those darkest of moments, I felt lost and without purpose. I stopped appreciating my body. Without ballet, who was I? But during rehabilitation, Marjorie convinced me to do everything I could to learn about and from my injury. That process helped me to hold on to the hopes of returning to the stage better than before—even though I still couldn’t walk.
Marjorie would come to my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan
and I would roll out of bed and onto the floor. I had just had my cast removed and I couldn’t walk, so I would do a ballet barre lying on my stomach, back, and side. She kept me focused on the things I could control. I worked on my port de bras, to continue to challenge myself and refine the small nuances that make a ballerina a ballerina, the fine and effortless way she carries her arms.
A month after my operation, I put my pointe shoes back on for the first time, to keep all the tiny muscles in my feet articulate, even though I wasn’t yet able to stand on my toes.
I remembered the first time I’d put them on, how exhilarated I had been, and how Cindy had marveled that I could stand en pointe mere months after I’d discovered ballet.
Unable to do now what I had so quickly been able to do then was devastating, and having injury impact my life so late into my professional career was the most frustrating part. But Marjorie reminded me that my injury was temporary. She told me I had so much more dancing to do and not to give up my goals or my dreams. Her words were a balm in themselves, and they motivated me to reassess and adjust my technique so that I could work my flexible body more efficiently, and hopefully prevent another serious injury in the future.
I have been a dancer now for seventeen years, but I don’t think I have ever focused as much on my body and my craft as I did during the months I spent healing from my latest injury.
From the moment I woke up to the moment I laid my head down at night, my everything was given to healing and strengthening.
I reported to my surgeon every three weeks to get X-rays taken. I was seeing my masseuse and acupuncturist once a week to have my muscles kneaded and bolstered. I started private gyrotonics classes that allowed me to regain strength in my legs using machines. I could emulate jumping while lying on my back, without the stress of my body weight.
Five months after undergoing major surgery on my shin, I was back rehearsing with ABT. Two months after that, I was back onstage in the ballet Don Quixote, premiering the principal role of the Dryad Queen.
Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina Page 21
