Misty Copeland

speaker

575 appearances 3 recordings 2 series first heard Jun 2025 last heard 8 Nov

Misty Copeland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.

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The Daily · 'The Interview': Misty Copeland Changed Ballet. Now She's Ready to Move On. · 7 Jun 2025 podcast

So to be able to go into a studio every day at 3 p.m. and know I was going to do plies and tendus and degages and rond de chambre, like as a child to know what's coming, that safety is so important. And I think that it helped. I feel like I grew and developed as a person immensely in like the first three years of dance.

I feel like it's ingrained in me now, like that structure and that discipline because of ballet, that it's helped me in how I approach everything in my life.

I think it was having—being able to see her point of view and her perspective. I mean, as a young girl and, you know, not always knowing why she made certain decisions. I think those were the things I didn't understand when, you know, through my, I don't know, eight-year-old eyes, I'm like, but why do we have a home? Why don't—you know, it seemed so simple and clear. And I think—

you know, with age and as a wife and as a mom, I definitely have a different understanding of the choices that she made and why. And when you're thinking about six children and just being able to provide for them in some way, you know, as a single parent, you know, that was extremely difficult. I think that I have just more of an understanding that she never really got to grow up or, you

became a mom, you know, at a young age. And I think, you know, being adopted and being an only child and kind of wanting to create her own family, but not really being prepared to do so, I think I just have a lot more empathy and understanding of why certain things happen the way they did.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's been a narrative that's kind of been created and just kind of carried on throughout my career, which is why I think people are often shocked when they see me and they're like, oh, you're very petite, like you look like a ballerina. And I think the narrative that's been created is really that, you know, I don't have the body. I'm too big. I'm too this.

But it's so complex. Yeah. You know, at 13 years old, the reason that things happened so quickly for me was because I was so natural. I had all the, you know, the right body proportions that they look for. You know, I had a small head and long legs and long arms and long feet. And I was flexible and I was strong. And then I became a professional dancer.

And all of a sudden, I no longer had the right body type. So, you know, I went from being a prodigy to all of a sudden being, you know, like a you're wrong for dance and you're this. And it's kind of, it was like shocking to me, but it was like, this is just crazy that I could go from being this prodigy, this ideal Balanchine ballerina, besides my skin color, to, you know, not being right.

And so up until my final year, you know, 2019, when I was performing, I remember seeing reviews about me being too big and not, you know, and it's just wild, the narrative that just continues forever. That we really have to pay attention to and kind of use our own eyes and not kind of be told what's in front of us when we have eyes and a brain and can make those decisions.

It is a nightmare. I'm 42. I'll be 43 by the time the show happens. And it's been five years since I've really been physical. And all of those injuries that have been there, they're awake and they're angry. And I'm dealing with a lot right now. I have torn a labral tear that happened during my training recently.

And then I found out I have all these other injuries, like old injuries that I never like acknowledged and just danced through. You know, my doctor was like, I think you should stop dancing. I'm like, I'm trying. I'm trying to. I'm not putting pointe shoes back on at this point. Like I've decided that I want to go on stage again. And not be kind of self-conscious of things.

And I've had this mindset throughout my career that like a year will go by and I will never be that person again. You know, I'll never be that body again. I will never move like I did, you know, at 13, at 24, you know, at 32. And so it's just kind of finding comfort in that, that like this is the new body I'm in. So it's very humbling.

But the reason that I've fallen in love with dance is this consistency of being in a studio and feeling this sense of protection without the outside noise. And that's been missing from my life over the course of these five years that I've been away from dance.

So it's nice to be back in this kind of protective bubble where you can just focus on what you're not looking at a phone, you're just listening to music and you're moving your body. And there's something that feels so necessary, like to have that in my life.

benefited your dancing absolutely i mean that's the thing i think that especially every ballerina experiences you know the older you get the less you can do physically but the more life experiences you have to pull from and so there's something so beautiful about ballerinas as they age and so that part's really exciting again i get into the studio and i'm like i'm I don't care how high my leg is.

You know, I don't care how high I'm jumping. I have just like a different purpose. You know, it's not about, you know, oh, today I didn't do as many pirouettes or I wasn't on my leg. I wasn't on balance. You know, all of these other things that are like a distraction, I think.

So to me, it's a beautiful thing to be at this point in my career and to be able to have control over what I'm performing that feels really good.

Yes, I do.

I have it in my bag over there.

You can open it and dig through. I don't know what's in there. You can unzip it and just, yeah. Yeah, I started journaling probably around the same time that I started at the Boys and Girls Club when I was seven years old. And this one, there's not much in it, but it was around the time that I was pregnant with my son Jackson and then right after I gave birth to him that I was going to share.

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