Misty Copeland

A Reason To Smile

Credit: Getty Images

We are taking a little departure for this week’s reason to smile. Instead of choosing a song, we selected a ballet and groundbreaking dancer, one of the all-time greats.

This week, prima ballerina Misty Copeland took her final twirl on the stage at New York’s Lincoln Center. She is retiring from the American Ballet Theatre, her home for the past 25 years.

Copeland made history when she became ABT’s first Black woman to become a principal dancer ten years ago. Since joining ABT, one of the three leading classical companies in the country, she has become an ambassador for diversity in the ballet world, which is notoriously white.

For a ballerina, Copeland got a late start. Growing up in a low-income family in San Pedro, California, she often slept on the floor of a motel room with her five siblings. Her early training was unconventional. She didn’t take her first ballet class until she was 13 years old, when she enrolled at a local Boys & Girls Club. Within months, the dance prodigy was already on pointe, dancing on her tiptoes for the uninitiated, something that takes most dancers years to achieve. At 19, she joined ABT’s corps de ballet.

Copeland was also the first Black dancer to perform the dual role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. Here, she performs a solo from the ballet with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 2017.

The 43 year old crossover star has written two memoirs, appeared on Broadway in “On The Town,” toured with Prince, and was a judge on a tv dance competition. Copeland is the embodiment of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and champions DEI efforts through her eponymous foundation, where she will now focus her energies.

Copeland told The New York Times Magazine that her whole career “is proof that when you have diversity, people come together and want to understand each other and want to be a community together.”

If you want to enjoy all the songs chosen for A Reason To Smile, you can listen to this Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly.

If you are able to, please support my team, who make pieces like this possible.

No matter how you subscribe, I thank you for reading, watching, and listening.

Stay Steady,

Dan