‘A Ballerina’s Tale’ Shows Misty Copeland Not as a Parable of Race or Class, But Rather As an Icon

Misty Copeland is the rare ballerina who has become a brand.

She is the first African-American principal ballerina at American Ballet Theater in New York. She has an endorsement deal with Under Armour. She’s been a guest judge on So You Think You Can Dance? She’s been on the cover of Time. She wrote a book. She has become as iconic for ballet as Gary Kasparov and Bobby Fisher were for chess, and there were two of them. And ballet is harder.

In the new documentary film A Ballerina’s Tale, director Nelson George shows her not just breaking through the insular ballet world but doing it as an African-American, as a young woman in New York, and as an artist growing from insecurity to confidence.

We caught up with Nelson to talk about the two years he spent making the film, how he sees Copeland re-energizing the ballet world, and where her career may be headed.

DECIDER: You spent two years working on this film. Did you check in with her when she had big events coming up, or were you able to spend longer stretches with her?

Nelson George: I met her just before she danced The Firebird, so our first formal shooting with her was when she started the comeback from her leg injury. We tried to pick events that were representative of her journey back — her doctor visits to get a sense of exactly what happened to her, her rehab, and her performance at Brooklyn Academy of Music that was her first stage performance about a year after the surgery. We tried to find turning points that reflected the progress she was making.

And we stumbled onto some great things too. We wanted to interview Raven Wilkerson, the great African-American ballerina, and it turned out that she was going to meet with Misty the day after her return performance at BAM.

That is the scene with the two of them dancing side-by-side in the apartment?

Yes.

That’s an amazing scene. You had to be watching as it was happening, thinking, Oh my God, this is the documentary.

Yeah, exactly. The timing of it was perfect — the immediacy of Misty having that meeting the day after her comeback.

You started on this documentary before Copeland became the principal ballerina — the No. 1 featured dancer — at City Ballet.

We felt confident that she would become the prima ballerina, but we didn’t know when it would be and it tuned out to be last year after we finished the film. When she got an opportunity to dance Swan Lake in Australia, that seemed like a great place to finish going from The Firebird to Swan Lake.

Is it a strange feeling as a filmmaker when you’re in a project and something unfortunate happens like Misty’s injury that you realize is probably going to be a great story for your documentary?

When she got injured and was going to have surgery, we realized that as an opportunity. We knew she would be available for interviews and that we could document the next step. The struggle to come back made it more dramatic, but we didn’t know at the time what was going to happen. If she had not been able to come back or come back at the same level, it would have been a very different story. Sometimes something bad can have a good outcome.

The film has an awareness of race and class issues without forcing her to be an avatar for that. How did you approach that?

Everyone seems to have had a daughter or friend who studied ballet, but professional ballet tends to be in an upper-class environment. The audience for classical ballet is higher-income people, so the ideas and prejudices about what is good art are a part of the dialogue. When you have someone like Misty who’s body — much less race — challenges a lot of those expectations, those expectations become a part of the narrative.

She is taller and more muscular than the typical ballet dancer, right?

Right. Race is obviously a part of the story, but Misty’s body type alone is a challenge. When I first went to The Met and saw her dance The Firebird, it was pretty obvious to me that she sounds out. She doesn’t look like everyone else on stage, and that’s not just race. That’s her musculature. She has more of a gymnast’s body than a classical ballet body. When you research the history of ballet, you realize that women who looked like Misty were more typical until the 1950s. The idea of the thin, thin, thin ballerina is a recent phenomenon. In that sense, she’s a throwback to an earlier time in ballet.

She came back from major surgery. What was it like to see that recovery in real time with Misty not knowing whether she would be able to return to professional ballet?

If you look at the x-ray and see what kind of work was done on her, it’s kind of amazing that she can do anything. Her pain threshold is very high, and her willingness to work through that is analogous to a professional athlete. I see Misty as an artist-athlete who has great physical strength and endurance combined with the sensibility of an artist.

I get the impression that coming up through the ballet world, she was facing an institutional sense that things don’t change than facing overt racism. Was that your take?

It’s hard to untangle the two. The people at American Ballet Theater have been very supporting of Misty, but there are no other people like Misty at the major dance companies around the world. Some of the smaller dance companies have black ballerinas working their way up, but that world has just never opened its arms to black talent. There’s definitely not an institutional sense of looking for diversity, and it’s very creditable the support that ABT has given Misty.

Given the time you spent, did you have a lot of footage to work with for the film?

We shot a ton of stuff. We had access to archival family from her original teacher, and we were only able to use a small part of that.

I’m curious whether filmmakers are looking at a phenomenon like Making a Murderer on Netflix and thinking that maybe you don’t have to fit every project into 60 or 90 minutes anymore. Has that made you look differently at length and form for projects you’re thinking about?

To me, it’s all about money. The theatrical version of this film that’s available on DVD and VOD is 90 minutes. The version for PBS is 60 minutes because of their format. Misty could have gone longer. The people who are doing longer form docs are working through a distributor like HBO or Netflix that has the resources for that kind of project.

So you could make a different version of this somewhere down the road.

We could definitely make a longer film about Misty. We have a lot of footage that we didn’t use. She’s only 32, and I feel like the real story is the one that happens now that she’s a prima ballerina. Misty and I have talked about revisiting her story at some point. The story now is what happens now that she has made it to this apex and will get to dance every major role.

 

[You can watch A Ballerina’s Tale on Netflix]

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.