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Misty Copeland: A Story Of An Talented Dancer

Decent Essays

“I had waited for six long years, and now I was ready, not just to show the world that I was a gifted dancer but that I was a true artist as well” (231).

The story of Misty Copeland, a young African American girl, does not begin with her as a talented young dancer; in fact, she didn’t begin ballet until she was thirteen years old. However, she had always loved performing, acting, and dancing, especially when she could achieve her mother’s praise by performing well. When she was finally introduced to ballet, she hated it in the beginning. Her teacher, Cindy Bradley, saw much potential in her though, and so Misty continued to dance. She became known as a prodigy, with her long, slender, hyperextended legs that could bend this way and that, …show more content…

In the outside world, she was on the low end of being of a normal weight, but ABT didn’t see it this way. They told her that she would “need to lengthen” (166) and that her “line [was] not as lean and classical as it was before” (169). The company was obviously not happy with her new body, which caused her to start overeating dramatically. It made my heart almost break when I read about her troubles with her eating, and about her fight against the racist people that she has had to deal with, such as “someone who commented that [she] didn’t fit in with [her] brown skin, especially in a ballet like Swan Lake” (174). This shows me that people will not only judge talent and dedication, or even the shape and size of your body, but that they will go even further and come to conclusions based on skin color and ethnicity. Misty often had to paint her “skin a completely different color” (175) so that it would appear that her skin was as white as the other dancers in the corps. Even as I read this, I knew that it wasn’t right for the company to make her do this, and though it made me feel awful, it also gives me hope because Misty has now been a principal dancer with ABT for more than one and a half years now, and she’s such a huge inspiration to not just dancers, but people, everywhere. When she was cast as the Firebird, an “iconic role” (238), she became the first African American woman to be cast as that character in a principal ballet company, ever (241). I learned from this that dreams are not impossible to achieve, though they may take some time, and that giving up and running away is not the way to go. Misty made history the night she performed as the Firebird, and I wish that I had seen her perform. She has achieved what some people said was impossible for her, and has surpassed so many expectations. I definitely look up to

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