Ten years ago, Misty Copeland was appointed The first black black dancer of the American Ballet Theater. She was 32, which, for a ballet dancer, is not exactly young. But she took the flame and ran with it. As if it was a sprint.
Soon she will stop. Copeland announced in a Interview with New York Times magazine May she retire from the theater ballet after a last performance in the fall.
She waited for a long time to make history. But once she claimed the mantle, she has not lost time – not only as a dancer but also as an ambassador of diversity in the dance and the advancement of black ballet artists. He was someone who was admired from afar (the Fandom went deep) but who also listened.
She had a cause and a platform. And it was immediately obvious that she had a gift to talk about serious subjects to the general public. She had shot. The devotees attended his mass performance. Suddenly, the Metropolitan Opera, where the theater ballet has a season each year, was full of enthusiastic black and brown families.
I only hope that the company promoted Copeland earlier so that it could have had more time to develop its artistic talent. At that time, she had been with Ballet Theater for a long time – since 2001 – and has been a soloist since 2007. Her body, during her first years, was subject to injuries. And then the pandemic occurred. All the ballet dancers face the inevitable end, but it was really in a race against time. The stakes were higher for her as a black ballet woman, a field that was slow to solve her racial iniquity problems, in particular with regard to women.
Copeland pushed himself to do more, whether it is speeches, with grace or appearing on programs like “Late evening with Jimmy Kimmel”, “ Where she directed the host and her acolyte, Guillermo, through the ballet. They wore tutus; She didn’t do it. His exasperation with them is funny, land-to-terre and frank-and, therefore, if Copeland. “Today,” she said in a dead end, the ballet “is dead”.
