Misty Copeland is 'not scared' to face a career beyond dance

The ballet legend tells the BBC's Katty Kay she hasn't been on a stage in three years – and now, after listening to her body, she's evolving her professional aspirations accordingly.

As Misty Copeland sits onstage at New York City's famed Lincoln Center, she says she hasn't danced under the lights in years – and she's not sure when she will again.

In a candid conversation with Katty Kay for her interview series Influential, in which icons including Hugh Bonneville and Ina Garten have opened up to the BBC's special correspondent, Copeland reflects on an iconic career. Aged 41, she has already danced professionally for 27 years – now, she's ready to talk about what comes next.

Named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2015, the same year she made history as the first black woman promoted to principal dancer at the prestigious American Ballet Theatre, Copeland says she's entering a new era. 

"Is it hard to think that one day you won't be dancing the way you have been?" asks Kay. "Not at all," replies Copeland, equally directly. "I already feel like I'm kind of 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 that may look very different from what it's been throughout my professional career."

From on stage to on the page, Copeland has danced in hundreds of shows around the world; written children's books and an autobiography; launched two athletic clothing lines; founded a charitable organisation; and last year, became a mother to her son, Jackson, with her husband, attorney Olu Evans. (She has her own Barbie doll, too.)

"I have so many things in my life that kind of fulfil what ballet has been, and ballet is still in that: it's [also] the work I'm doing through my foundation, it's these incredible projects I'm creating with my production company, it's having a son. To me, this feels like a really natural evolution, that I'm just going with the flow," says Copeland. Calm and resolute, she adds, "I'm so content and I'm so proud of the career that I've had.

One day, she may perform again, but listening to her body and slipping off the pointe shoes, for now, "just feels right".

Copeland speaks with brutal honesty about the pain she's experienced since her earliest days performing. Ballet dancers are often pinned with an "expiration date", based on their ages and bodies. Yet these aren't the only factors pushing women out of the sport; it's also the gruelling nature of dance itself, which certainly hasn't spared Copeland. At 19, she suffered a lumbar stress fracture, taking her out of the spotlight for about a year; since then, she has undergone several surgeries and subsequent painful healing journeys.

Kay asks Copeland how her body, and her relationship to it, has evolved after having a child and entering her 40s. The dancer's answer reveals the truth about her experience in the sport: "It's interesting – it's more about the injuries that I've had and kind of dealing with that. I feel good having had a baby, I'm in the gym, I'm doing Pilates," she says, explaining that the cycle of constantly incurring then recovering from injuries is what's been toughest.

"I recently had another operation to relieve some of the pressure and it didn't do anything, so that's really the biggest battle that I'm facing, not so much my age. We're ever evolving as artists, as people, as women. You kind of have to just move and adjust with that, but when you're dealing with pain, that's a whole other story."

As for living in a body that's different than "Misty at 20", as Kay puts it, Copeland is accepting the change. "You know that you're never going to go back to that person. Your body's never going to be – you have to just continue to let it grow and change."

Thinking back to the early months of the pandemic, Copeland shares her perspective shifted on how much suffering one body should take. "[It was] right before I had a back injury, and I think I had just been really overworked. It had been 20 years of working non-stop. I think about vacations where I was still taking ballet class every day; I had my pointe 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. That's been my life."

Reviewing Copeland's life in pictures, Kay pulls an image of her on stage in the premiere of Firebird, the 2012 Alexei Ratmansky-choreographed ballet in which Copeland danced the titular role, at Lincoln Center, where the two now sit. The production is also the name of a children's book she created to tell the story of a young girl finding her confidence.

"There's so many mixed feelings around this image, because you don't typically see that many black people going into Lincoln Center. So, for what it represents, there's so many happy memories," says Copeland. Yet bitter recollection also tempers the sweet side: "I also had six stress fractures in my tibia [from that performance], and pulled out of the season the next day." 

As she details the pain-laced memories on her way to becoming a principal dancer, Copeland's strength and determination shine through. Resilience is another core theme in Copeland's story. Kay asks her to reflect on a difficult childhood, and asks if she sought bodily autonomy via the strictures of ballet. "I think it was more than the control over my body," she says. "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."

Now, Copeland is finding the escape of expression in other ways — ones that don't put her body on the line quite so much.

In 2022, Copeland founded the Misty Copeland Foundation, a non-profit organisation to bring "greater diversity, equity, and inclusion to dance, especially ballet". The after-school programme offers affordable dance classes, mentorship services, music lessons and health and wellness-related programs to children in underserved areas of the US. In early 2023, Copeland also released Flower, a short film in which she stars that uses dance to explore "intergenerational equity". Flower is the first project from Copeland's Life in Motion Productions, the company she founded with fellow former American Ballet Theater dancer, Leyla Fayyaz.  

Throughout the years, interviewers and fans alike have frequently asked Copeland about her experiences being one of few professional ballet dancers of colour – and this work is where she prefers to take the conversation. "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," she says. 

When pushed to reflect on the body-judgment she faced as a ballet dancer who looked "different" from others in her company, Copeland puts the criticism into context. "I was told I was too muscular, I was too short, my breasts are too big. And to me, that's all code for your skin is too dark, your skin is too brown." 

But she believes it is possible for ballet to be more inclusive. "It's not about what the package is it's how you make people feel; it's how you deliver the performance, the character, and that can be done in a variety of ways", she says, adding the works themselves fail to reflect modern society.

"Ballets were created centuries ago and no longer reflect society today; a lot of them are really sexist, really racist, something that we're conscious of more so in America than elsewhere — ballets are still being performed in blackface in Russia." In 2019, Copeland criticised the Bolshoi Theatre for its use of blackface in performances. According to CNN, the theatre brushed off the criticism, telling Russian state-run media that it would not change its practices.

"I look at myself and my career is not me," Copeland says, when asked why she's influential. "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. I just think of my life and my career as this very holistic thing, it's give and take, and it's not just about me. It's so much bigger than me." 

Kay's conversation with Copeland is the fifth in her revealing, nine-part interview series. New episodes premiere every Thursday at 22:30 ET on the BBC News channel, and will be available the following day on the BBC News YouTube channel. An audio version will be available wherever you get your podcasts.