Misty Copeland and the White World of Classical Ballet
“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.”- Zora Neal Hurston, 1928[1]
On June 30, 2015, Misty Copeland became the first black principal dancer with American Ballet Theater in its 75-year history. Copeland discovered ballet at the age of thirteen, a passion she claims, that gave her “grace and structure” within a chaotic and violent world.[2]
Copeland immediately emerged as a protégée. At sixteen she joined American Ballet Theater’s Studio Company. At nineteen she entered its corps, at 24 was promoted to soloist, and at 32 was named principal.[3] Copeland has appeared in leading roles in ABT productions including “Firebird,” “Coppélia,” and “Swan Lake,” published a New York Times Best Selling Memoir and children’s book, was featured on the cover of TIME Magazine, and appeared in Prince’s video “Crimson and Clover.”[4]
Copeland’s rise foregrounds the institutional racism deeply imbedded within classical ballet. Value in art is based on each form’s subjective aesthetic criteria.[5] Ballet defines this aesthetic in terms of the white body and characteristics of verticality and ethereality that racial stereotypes have assigned it.[6] Bodies can always be shaped through training. Yet racial stereotypes devoid of relationship to physical reality cast black women outside the ballet ideal and white feminine standards of beauty.[7]
Black bodies are then scripted as better suited for “other” forms of dance, exoticized and denied equal artistic legitimacy.[8] These stereotypes take on a specifically gendered component, excluding black women while allowing exceptions for black men.[9]
Copeland has contended with racism and stereotypes through her career. As a corps member, ABT expected her to paint her skin white. Dancers and donors have suggested that she does not fit in to classical productions such as Swan Lake and taken it upon themselves to point out to her during her years as a soloist that she was the only black woman in the company.[10]
Her status as principal dancer provides physical language to re-imagine who belongs in point shoes. Copeland intentionally sets herself forth as a model for young black and brown girls, for those who have been told that their bodies and abilities are not suited for ballet.[11] Honoring the black ballerinas who came before her, she helps us imagine a more inclusive future.
Yet we must be careful not hyperbolize ballet’s transformation. Critical reviews continue to paint her into tropes of black womanhood that hold her outside of the ballet ideal, claiming Copeland “could be one of those athletic girls at your gym,” and comment on her “un-classical body,” and her “uncommon” athleticism. Copeland embraces her image as athletic, appearing as the spokeswoman for the athletic brand Under Armour, alongside other prominent female athletes. However, even in a tutu, her “uncommon” strength becomes the dominant narrative, inscribing her within traditional racial stereotypes to suggest she does not truly belong.[12]
Critical acclaim further abstracts Copeland to represent black bodies in the plural. Emphasis on Copeland’s achievements specifically as a black ballerina tokenizes her as an exception. By choosing only to see her strength or skin color, dance critics erase her individual artistry and technical mastery in the erasure of black women that is American tradition.[13]
The singular attention Copeland has drawn reflects white hegemony within the dance canon by labeling ballet as supreme, assuming that membership in classical ballet is the highest achievement within dance. This labeling discredits other movement practices and enforces racial hierarchies in the medium. As Toni Morrison claims, judging works in terms of Eurocentric criteria infantilizes the serious work of other artists.[14] Accepting Copeland halfway into the dance cannon does not revolutionize power structures within movement practices as we continue to overlook the work of other black female dancers and choreographers, and as ballet continues to shut other black women, particularly those with skin darker than Copeland’s, out of its ranks. If we are to take the freedom of black women seriously, we must not only reformulate ballet’s internal ideals, but also what forms of dance we deem high art. We must cease to demand that black dancers, and black women generally, be legible within a white context, thrown against a white background, but rather celebrate them in their own right.
[1] Zora Neal Hurston, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me,” 1928, in Greg Ligon, “Untitled: Four Etchings,” 1992, shown in Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric, (MN: Greywolf Press, 2014), 51–2.
[2] Misty Copeland with Charisse Jones, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 9.
[3] Ibid., 33, 143–5.
[4] Rivka Galchen, “An Unlikely Ballerina: The Rise of Misty Copeland,” The New Yorker, September 22, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/unlikely-ballerina; Diane Haithman, “Prince and Point Shoes: A Soloist Dishes About Video,” Los Angeles Times, May 2, 2009, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/05/princes-crimson-clover-video-features-abt-dancer.html.
[5] Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon to Cool, (London: Pelgrave Macmillan, 2005), 103.
[6] Steven Van Wyk, “Ballet Blanc to Ballet Black: Performing Whiteness in Post-Apartheid South African Dance,” in Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies Many Voices Many Stories, Sharon Friedman, (ed.) (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 37; Carrie Gaiser, “Caught Dancing: Hybridity, Stability, and Subversion in Dance Theater of Harlem’s Creole Giselle,” Theatre Journal, vol 58, no. 2, (2006): 272.
[7] Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon to Cool, 27, 61–2, 134; Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 24.
[8] [8] Jane C. Desmond, “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies,” Cultural Critique, (Winter 1993–4): 42; Alison D. Goeller, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, and Dorota Janowska, “Introduction. Black bodies in American Dance: Reflections on Aesthetics, Representations, and the Public Performance,” in Fisher-Hornung and Goeller (eds), EmBODYing Liberation (New York: LitVerlag, 2001), 17.
[8] Raquel L. Monroe, “I Don’t Want to do African… What About My Technique?:” Transforming Dancing Places into Spaces in the Academy,” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 4, no. 6 (September, 2001): 44.
[9] Copeland, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, 181.
[10] Copeland, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, 109, 173–4.
[11] Ibid., 2, 5, 7, 245.
[12] bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, (New York: Routledge, 2015), 83.
[13] Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon to Cool, 68; [13] Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in The Black Feminist Reader, Joy James, T. Denean Sharpley- Whiting (eds.), (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc.), 85.
[14] Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” in The Black Feminist Reader, James and Denean Sharpley-Whiting, 32–33.
