After 25 years with the American Ballet Theater, Misty Copeland laced up her pointe shoes for the last time on October 22nd, transitioning a trailblazing career from dance prodigy to elder stateswoman of ballet mentorship. At just 43 years old, Misty has spent her entire adult life in those ballet studios and when I was watching a little blurb about her retirement on YouTube, I saw a suggestion over in the corner for A Ballerina’s Tale. Back in 2015, Nelson George did a Kickstarter for the funds to produce a documentary about Misty Copeland and the resulting film had a positive reception at Sundance. I watched it earlier today and it might be free on YouTube for you to watch it too. (It won’t embed though because it’s age-restricted for some reason.)
I knew a little bit about Misty Copeland before she joined ABT and before she became a widely recognized public figure because I grew up wanting to write entertainment gossip and I lived on a steady diet of Entertainment Weekly and talk shows. I saw Misty Copeland on the Leeza Gibbons show when I was in middle school because she was the grand prize in a tug of war between her mother and her dance teachers.
Misty was one of six kids and idolized Mariah Carey until she joined her school’s dance team and one of the teachers noticed how graceful she was. They encouraged her to try ballet, and at the ripe old age of thirteen, she took her first class. Within months, she was dancing en pointe, which typically takes years of training. By 15, she was the buzziest young dancer in Southern California and she was living with her dance teacher. On one side, you have a dance teacher with a prodigy on her hands who had convinced the family to sign over 20% of her lifetime earnings and on the other side you had a mother, resentful of her daughter having a stronger female influence than she, trying to wrest back control and keep her out of dance. The dance teacher convinced Misty that she needed to sue for emancipation, but after court, Misty withdrew the filing, claiming she didn’t really know what it meant.
None of that makes it into the documentary. Instead, we learn that Misty was a shy girl and dance became a way for her to express herself and use parts of her mind and body that she had never thought of before. We see her progression from a late-blooming teenager (she, like many ballet dancers, had a delayed puberty, with it finally hitting Misty at 19 when she was sidelined due to injury) to an adult woman whose body does not fit into the neat little (white) boxes built by the ballet establishment. Suddenly she was a double-D with hips and her prodigious talent was clouded by her attempts to hide the new physicality she was learning to navigate.
And here is where I learned the best new piece of information from the documentary. ABT knew they had a rare talent on their hands and they didn’t want her smothered by the insecurity of being a Black woman in this homogenously white arena, so they reached out to Susan Fales-Hill to assist.
Gen X and Elder Millennials may remember that name because it popped up on screen during every episode of The Cosby Show or A Different World where she was a writer. She also serves on the board of the American Ballet Theater, and she took Misty under her wing to introduce her to other Black women who were “the first” or “the only” in their fields.
Veronica Webb was the first Black woman with a major cosmetics contract when she signed with Revlon back in 1992. Diahann Carroll was the first Black woman to win a Tony Award in 1962 when she won for her role in No Strings. Victoria Rowell (also a former ballet dancer at ABT) won 11 NAACP Image Awards for her role as Drucilla on the Young & The Restless, but when she spoke out about the lack of diversity on the show, Les Moonves had her blackballed from the industry (the same thing he did to Janet Jackson) and she was never able to work in soap operas again.
These are the kinds of women Susan Fales-Hill was able to introduce Misty Copeland to for mentorship, and it worked. She started carrying herself differently and thought of herself not just as a Black Dancer but a Dancer who could change the landscape for Black people.
Misty Copeland danced for two and a half decades, but this documentary released in 2015 obviously leaves off just as she was made the first Black principal ballerina at ABT, so the most recent ten years aren’t here. Similarly, we don’t learn a lot about Misty Copeland before she got to NYC or much about her life in the city. A Ballerina’s Tale primarily focuses on the middle few years of her career when she overcame struggles and injuries to become a superstar of the dance world. We see her picked to play a prime Igor Stravinsky role which served as a Venus & Serena moment for ballet, because just as Black women flocked to Arthur Ashe to see the sisters play tennis, so too did they flock to the Met to see a Black ballerina in an historic role. We see her battle her way back from a career-ending injury, relearn how to dance, and then climb higher than she had before.
As a snapshot of a dancer’s turning point, A Ballerina’s Tale is an interesting glimpse into how much work it takes to ascend to the top of the heap in ballet. But, if you’re looking for the Misty Copeland documentary hinted at by the title, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Score: 3.5 / 5
Sidenote: I will say, separate from the documentary, that one of my favorite things about Misty Copeland is her honesty and humility in tandem with her prodigious talent. Simone Biles has a natural advantage because she’s so short and compact. Michael Phelps has a natural advantage because his arms are so long and his lungs are so big. In a clip from back in the day, Misty Copeland points out the fact that she was born with narrow feet that fit comfortably into a pointe shoe, her ligaments are unusually flexible, and she could see a movement and visually replicate it from an early age — she was literally born to dance.
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