Must be. Hi.

Hi, I'm Cathy. Thank you. Oh, my God. I'm so happy. Does everybody who meets you who used to do ballet stand in automatically in first position? Is that a giveaway?

And so you have.

That's what I have. And I've been doing it. You know what's weird? Preparing for it. I find myself all day standing in first position again. It's been so many years. It makes you stand up straight. It makes you stand up straight. It's so good for you. I know. Thank you for doing this. I'm so thrilled. Thank you for having me. So I actually, when I was about 13, I applied to the Royal Ballet School in London, and I didn't get in, which was just as well because I'd have been way in the backstage of the Korda Ballet, ideally out of the set. But I wanted to meet you for so long, so that's great. So when you come on to a stage, Misty, having not done since 2019, how are we feeling? How's your body doing?

I mean, it's like different air up here. Yeah. Like I say, it's It's like this very sacred space to be in. It's magic what we get to do up here. One of my favorite things to do is to be on the stage before they open the house, they let the audience in. I always am on the stage by myself. It's a very different feeling than being in a studio. The mirrors, it's a completely different depth that you have to get used to. It your center of gravity, your balance, everything. It's something that I always do. It's just to be out here and breathe the air. Are you listening to the ballet?

Are you listening to the music? No.

I know it in my head enough that I could even just go through the movement and I have the rhythm and everything in my body. No, I never put on any music or I just am there. I like to walk through certain parts of the ballet. Can I see something? Can you just... Oh, my gosh. Can you just do plié? I don't even know.

You could do plié for me and I would be-I mean, in my heels, I don't even know what I would do.

There's the firebird movement.

In heels, I can still do. Okay, when I get back into my ballet classes, which I am going to do, because I've looked them up now, which feels scary for me after so many years. Obviously, my body can't do what it could do when it was 13, 15.

And it shouldn't. And it shouldn't. And it shouldn't. And it shouldn't.

And it's just- How are you coping with that? How are you coping with a body that is 40? You've had a child. How is your body What's your relationship with ballet?

It's not even to me about... It's more about the injuries that I've had and dealing with that. I feel good having had a baby. I'm in the gym, I'm doing Pilates and things like that.

You still have the same amazing reach?

I would say so. It's been a while. It's been really inconsistent in terms of what I've been doing with ballet, and that's because of an injury I had to my shin that I'm still managing. It will never be the same. I recently had another operation on it to relieve some of the pressure, and it didn't do anything. That's really the biggest battle that I'm facing, not so much my age or baby, because I feel like we're ever evolving as artists, as people, as women. It's like you have to just move and adjust with that. But when you're dealing with pain, that's a whole other story. So that's where I'm at.

So you're going to give your body a bit of grace as it gets older? Yes. And forgive it for not being misty at 20? Yes.

And that's how it's been my whole career, that you're never going to go back to that person. Your body is never going to be. You have to just continue to let it grow and change.

Is it hard to accept that? Is it hard to think that one day you won't be dancing the way you have been? Your ballet has been in your life for 27 years. Is it a little scary to think that there's going to be a post-performance misty?

No, not at all. I already feel like I'm in this place where it feels really natural. I haven't been on stage in about three years. I know I'll be back on the stage at some point, and it may look very different from what it's been throughout my professional career, but that feels so healthy and normal to me. I have so many things in my life that fulfill what ballet has been, and ballet is still in that. Again, it's the work I'm doing through my foundation. It's these incredible projects that I'm creating with my production company. It's having a sun. It's all of these things. So to me, this feels like a really natural evolution that I'm just going with the flow.

You're so healthy.

I don't know. I feel like towards the beginning of the pandemic, right before I had a back injury, and I think I had just been really overworked. It had been 20 years of working nonstop. I think about vacations where I was still taking ballet class every day, and I had my point shoes no matter where I was in the world. My poor husband would find a studio or a gym, and we'd drive an hour. So I feel like I'm just at a place now where I'm so content and I'm so proud of the career that I've had, and I know that there will be more performances, and it just feels right.

Let's take a seat. I remember somewhere listening to something you said, and you said about how when you were young, your childhood was chaotic. You lived in motels. Your mother had partners who were sometimes abusive. There was a lot of poverty. There was a lot of moving. Did ballet, when you finally found it at the age of 13, give you some sense of control over your body, of something that you hadn't had I think it was more than the control over my body.

I think it was control over the situation. It was control over my life in some way. It was consistency. It was stability. It was an escape, a beautiful artistic expression escape. All of those things were things I don't think I realized I needed or I was craving. I was craving a discipline to have that structure. And ballet was just perfect in every way to fill all of those needs, all of those voids in my life, to be able to think about sometimes not knowing whether we were going to pick up and leave in the morning, what we were going to eat for dinner that night, and to know that I was going to go to ballet class the next day at 3:00 and do pliés and tendues and degages and fondues, it was going to be the same order. There was something so comforting. It made me feel so safe about that.

How quickly did you know how good you were?

I don't know that I ever really knew how good I was or believed I was just doing something that I loved. I was doing something where I felt I was being supported and nurtured, which I'd never felt. From the time I started, my teacher was telling me I was a prodigy. I was receiving full scholarships when I would audition summer intensive programs. There were a lot of schools that wanted me. But in my mind, I knew that I was far behind the other students and that I had a lot of catching up to do. But I knew that I was a fighter, and I knew that this was something that I wanted to do. I was going to work as hard as I possibly could to catch up and get to where I needed to be and wanted to be.

You came to New York from California, and I wonder how much of a shock it was to get to the American Ballet ballet theater and look around and see that you were the only Black dancer. You must have known ballet was white, very white. Did you know it was that white that you would come here and be the only one?

I'm not sure how aware I was. My teacher, Cindy Bradley, is an incredible woman, and she was very conscious of the fact that I'm a Black woman, that I was a black girl, and that I needed to be as focused on getting the training that I needed to get in order to get to where we wanted me to go, which was to dance professionally for American Ballet Theater or another professional company. When I moved to New York City, it definitely was a shock. I don't think that I was prepared enough in knowing how to navigate the space, where I would get support from, because it's not something that's really built in to the professional surroundings and atmosphere in a ballet company. They expect you to come in and be an adult. At 17 years old and someone who was very guarded and isolated, I was not at all prepared to take on what it meant to be the only in the company.

You're also in ballet uniquely, all expected to be identical. I mean, that's the whole thing about what has been over centuries. The quarter ballet looked exactly the same. They looked the same, they had the same body. They had the same outfit. They had the same skin color. They moved you did identify. That was the essence of ballet, right? And in a way, of all the many disruptive things you've done, I feel it's disrupting that notion of what ballet had to be. For centuries, it was like that. Then you came along and we said no.

I think there are so many things that I think about in terms of disrupting the field and provoking the conversation to be really intentional about the lack of diversity. But you're right. But I have to say that I'm not the first to do it. There have been so many Black dancers that have come into professional ballet companies and been the only or been one of maybe two, and it hasn't always been accepted. For the most part, a lot of the black dancers that have been taken into elite professional companies have lighter skin or are biracial because they can easily fit in. They can pancake their skin to be a lighter color to fit in with the rest of the corps de ballet.

It would be harder if you had darker skin. Would you be misty-coated?

Absolutely, it would be harder. I mean, there are so many dancers that have the talent. This is not an issue of not being able to find talented black and brown dancers. This is an issue of not having the support, not having the access or opportunity, and not being seen as equal. All the girls put on powder, but you're being asked to put on the same color powder, pancake, white. Then that's when I start to think, What's going on here? Do they want me to look like myself, or do they want me to be an individual and still be able to take on this character, but as myself in my brown skin, and that's who I am. Like I said, it's a lot easier for a lighter skin black woman, I want to say in particular, woman, because it's a different journey for black men to blend in with the company. Then that's another battle that we have to face, whether or not we want to color our skin.

In the When you said, Hold on, why am I putting a white makeup?

Yeah, it was a tough conversation to have and even tough to absorb what that really means and how it really is making me feel internally. It's hard because it's mixed in with this idea of, well, within these certain ballets, if you think of Swan Lake or Giselle or even La Bayadier, and you're supposed to be otherworldly or you're supposed to be a fairy or a creature not be alive. And so they say that you need to make your skin matte or not shiny. And so it took me a couple of years to feel confident enough and comfortable enough to go and have agency over myself and express what it was I was feeling with my artistic director and with the artistic staff.

How much has changed, Misty? Just like even in the conversation in the United States, we've had so much of people, me too, George Floyd, even COVID. How much is the conversation different today than how it would have been even five years ago.

It was mind-blowing to me to see the shift happen during COVID and with the uprising of Black Lives Matter and the murder of George Floyd. It was something that I knew I would always be fighting for, to push this conversation, to see real change happen. But I never imagined it would happen so quickly. There's still so much that needs to be done.

I think ballet becomes more open to diversity, not just of color of somebody's skin, but also even their body type. We have tons of ballet dancers with eating disorders. They starve themselves. They just look unhealthyfully thin. Then I imagine you come along, you were told this. Your body was what? Was it told you're not traditional or something? Yeah.

I mean, there's so much deeper underlying meaning behind the things I was told. Because when people meet me, they're like, Wow, you're really small. You're very petite, and you're lean. I've had to think a lot about why those things are being said to me or even look at the bodies next to me of the dancers who are not Black and say, Do we look that different? I mean, I was told I was too muscular, I was too short, my breasts are too big. To me, that's all code for your skin is too dark, your skin is too brown. But it is possible. This is an art form, and it's subjective. It's a creative environment where it's not about, to me, it's not about what the package is. It's how you make people feel. It's the interpretation. It's how you deliver the performance, the character. And that can be done in a variety of bodies, people, wherever they come from.

The characters themselves aren't real.

That's a big part of it, too. I mean, of course, there needs to be an evolution, I think of a lot of the stories that we're telling in ballet that were created centuries ago that no longer reflect society. They don't reflect what people experience today. A lot of them are really sexist, really racist. So it's something that we're conscious of, more so in America than we are in other countries. There are still ballets that are being performed in blackface in Russia.

You got into a bit of a spat.

Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think that it's so necessary to speak up that we're no longer living in these times where there's no access to seeing what they're doing at the Bolshoy or the Mariinsky or whatever company, the Royal Ballet, you go on YouTube, whatever it is, and you have access to seeing all of this. So it's not like they're isolated in a place where they feel people won't be offended who's coming to see them. That's their reasoning behind it. Well, we're not America. We don't have the history of slavery that you do, and we don't think that people will be offended because this is just what we've always done. That's not the case. So many people are watching in the world. We have so much access to all of this. I just think that it's time that we can hold on to the tradition and some of these ballets that, of course, people still want to see, but we have to continue to evolve, and it has to represent more than just one type of person.

Yeah, that's a great way of bringing it. Okay, I don't want to keep you seated in check because I have Misty Copeland on today.

No, no. I feel like I'm wasting my opportunity here.

I have something to show you. Okay, I'm going to show you this.

Oh, I'm very excited.

So we have to move all of the cameras over. Okay. We're going to sit here and show you something. We're going to sit here if I can actually get down here. You know an 80-year-old, but we can get down there. Okay. So... Seans from your life, Misty Copeland. Oh, my gosh. And I want your reaction to look at it. This photograph. So this.

Oh.

You know this one? Yes. I'm sure you know all of these. This one I love. How long did it take you to get on points?

I think it was two months. So this was the very- Two months? Yeah. This was the very first time I ever put on a point shoes and stood on point. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty wild. Yeah. I mean, I was 13. I had I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. It's putting point shoes on after two months.

Okay. This we were talking about earlier. This was here at Lincoln Center, right? Yes.

This is the firebird. It's probably in that first performance at Lincoln Center. There's so many mixed feelings around this image because, like you were saying earlier, what that night represented for Black and Brown community to come out and support, we'd never seen that many fill the house of the Metropolitan Opera House. I remember people sending me photographs of the line that was wrapped around and outside of the fountain that were just Black people. It was like, Are they going to church? What's happening? Because that's what you don't typically see, that many Black people going into Lincoln Center. For what it represents, there's so many happy memories. But then I also had six stress fractures in my tibia and pulled out of the season the next day. The next day? And ended up having a plate scrid into my tibia.

So you basically did that once. Were you in agony the whole time? Yes.

I mean, once you go on stage, so much as the adrenaline and everything, so much is forgotten. Is it a great painkiller? Yes, it's a great painkiller. But then as soon as all of that subsides, and I remember taking the subway home that night, and it hurt just to stand. And you knew you couldn't. There's no way. I knew that that was it.

How do you deal with disappointments like that?

For me, I tend to not go inside into this dark place. I try and find ways to do whatever I can that's in my control. And so during that time, I found a teacher that would work with me doing floor bar movement and exercises. I wasn't standing, but I was still continuing to keep my muscles strong and in form. I just kept working on things that I had control over, and I never have followed this path that anyone else has. I always thought there's still hope, even at 29 years old, when I got injured, that I could be a principal dancer And I just kept that in my mind.

Because here you were a soloist.

I was still a soloist.

Another way you've been influential, by the way. Okay.

It's good.

This must have felt good.

That was unbelievably surreal. I remember being... I was on my way to rehearsal from the Upper West Side. I was heading downtown, and I remember my manager, Gildo, calling me and telling me that I was going to be one of the covers. And I was just... I couldn't... I was like, no, not until I see it, is it really real? That was an unbelievable time. I had been promoted to principal dancer, and it just was a whirlwind. But even seeing something like this, it took me years to really accept that I had been promoted and that this history had taken place. Abt 75-year history, breaking that barrier of being the first black woman.

Why do you think you're influential?

I've never been asked. I've talked about before. I think that because I look at myself in my career as not me, it's what I represent. It's all of the people that have gotten me to this place that I stand on the shoulders of It's giving them voice. It's giving a voice to the voiceless, to so many who haven't been given the same opportunities as me, that it's about giving back to those who need guidance and need support. I just think of my life and my career as this very holistic thing and that it's a give and take, and that it's not just about me. It's so much bigger than me.

Misty, it's been wonderful.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.Thank you.Thank you.Thank you.Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.