--- title: How Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland Shattered Barriers | TIME description: How Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland Shattered Barriers canonical: https://time.com/video/0sObNBla/ og:title: How Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland Shattered Barriers og:description: How Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland Shattered Barriers og:url: https://time.com/video/0sObNBla/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/0sObNBla/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland Shattered Barriers twitter:description: How Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland Shattered Barriers twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/0sObNBla/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # How Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland Shattered Barriers > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: How Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland Shattered Barriers [Watch (HLS stream): How Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland Shattered Barriers](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/0sObNBla.m3u8) (5:03)  _Published 2018-09-20. How Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland Shattered Barriers_ --- Jul 28, 2023 4:19 AM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Watch: Misty Copeland Wants to Bring the Power of Ballet to a New Generation](/video/UUoxwYSx/) ### Watch: Misty Copeland Wants to Bring the Power of Ballet to a New Generation [Misty Copeland](/video/2Si9Cfem/) ### Misty Copeland [Misty Copeland On Changing the Face of Ballet](/video/hwcdTt33/) ### Misty Copeland On Changing the Face of Ballet --- ## Transcript Thank you all for being here tonight and thank you most of all to Misty for being here. Those of you who are not dancers in the audience, becoming a dancer or getting into ballet at age 13 is considered ancient for a lot of these high Very, very high achieving ballerinas. But that was when you first started dancing. Yeah, I started choreographing I would say around the age of seven. Probably when I started teaching myself to do back walkovers and stuff. And I had a very chaotic upbringing and childhood, and My mom was married, I don't even know, four or five times? And there's six of us. We were living in a motel when I took my first ballet class, but it was around the age of seven that I started creating movement, and Mariah Carey, it was only Mariah Carey. [ LAUGH ] You mentioned being this little brown girl who shows up in New York City At ABT, this incredibly prestigious company. And as a non- dancer, I can't understand how your body type would be considered not ideal. But I guess you were considered too athletic, or too something, and you were under Pressure to feel like you should wear makeup to lighten your skin tone. What was that like as a teenager, to come to this city and feel like you were not right? At that point, I feel like there were just this slew of black women that came into my life- Mm- hm. That were incredible in allowing me to believe that Though there's no one around me in my world that looks like me, I still can succeed with their support, and that I was introduced to so many women, black women that were the first in their fields and it was really important I think for me to see that. We don't know that history that black women for From the beginning of time in ballet have been told to lighten their skin, to shade their nose in a certain way so that they look white. And that was a big part of my youth at American Ballet Theater was hearing those words. I could look around me at ABT and see white women who had my body, or were bigger, or were more athletic, had bigger breasts, and so it was like, this isn't making any sense to me. And I felt like this is just the language that's been allowed to be used in the ballet world, because it's a subjective art form. It's about your aesthetic, and it's so easy just to tell someone, well you do have the right body. When. When in reality, their saying you don't have the right skin color. Matel was making a doll of you after you were named principle dancer. You were insistent that that doll reflect what you actually look like. Yeah. That the calves, actually looked like calves, and that they didn't lighten your skin tone, and they didn't change your noses. Yeah. [ LAUGHS ] That was extremely important to me. It's so empowering for young girls to grow up with a brown Barbie that's a ballerina. And so I wanted to not be just put my name on it, but it's Barbie in a firebird costume. I mean even when there are kind of it's too late to go back and fix her body like the mold like this is what's it's gonna be. And I was like, you better pad her bra Because [ LAUGH ] her chest doesn't look like mine. I would say maybe my first three or four years in the company it was the first time that it really hit me that I was alone. Like I'm the only black woman. And it was in a way that I didn't expect for it to and- And it was the first time that race was really brought to my, like I know that it was talked about behind closed doors when I was a young girl, but it was actually being said in front of me and it was just shocking. I have been told Just that I wasn't allowed to be in the second act of Swan Lake when they did the filming of it. I was told even not to my face but from different ballet mistresses that I shouldn't be allowed to be in Swan Lake period. That's when it has been so important that I've had the people in my life that I do and Raven Wilkinson has been one of those women, even before I knew her, that was so impactful. She was the first black woman to dance in an all- white company, really, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in the 1950s. And I saw a documentary on the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and I was in my early twenties. And I saw this Black woman come on to the screen and it literally was like- I had no idea that there was a black ballerena at that level in that time. And it was like my whole world was changed. Wow. It was my first time I saw myself in another dancer. And that I could relate to her. And it was just like our history is not told. But it exists as black people in the ballet world. 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