For Misty Copeland, life has come full circle. At 13, the prima ballerina danced in her first full-length ballet, a San Pedro production of “The Nutcracker.” Her second “Nutcracker” was a Debbie Allen production, “The Hot Chocolate Nutcracker,” in Los Angeles. As a company member and later principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, she’s performed the classic ballet around the country.
And now, Copeland is making her feature film debut in Disney’s epic fantasy “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms.”
“This is not something I ever saw in my future,” Copeland said last week, shortly before the film’s premiere in Hollywood. “It’s just incredible to be able to be representing ballet at this level in a movie that’s going to reach so many people for so many generations to come. And the fact that I’m a brown ballerina, as a representation of ballet, is insane.”
Now playing nationwide, the visually lavish adventure film is inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 fairy tale, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.” In 1892, the tale was transformed into the original ballet featuring music from the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
In Disney’s whimsical rendition, Mackenzie Foy plays Clara, a young woman who stumbles upon a fantasy world where her late mother was considered a queen. Directed by Lasse Hallstrom and Joe Johnston, it also stars Morgan Freeman as Clara’s godfather and Keira Knightley as the Sugar Plum Fairy and includes performances by classical music stars pianist Lang Lang and conductor Gustavo Dudamel on the soundtrack.
While “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” isn’t centered on dance, the film features two ballet sequences — one a performance within the movie and another over the ending credits — starring Copeland as simply “The Ballerina.”
“If audiences were going to see ‘Nutcracker’ over the holiday season, we owed them some beautiful dance sequences,” said Sean Bailey, president of Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Production. “We thought, ‘Who would be the No.1 person in our minds to do this?’ and Misty was immediately the name.”
The film’s ballet sequence is less than 10 minutes and tells the backstory of the four realms, including the Land of Flowers and the Land of Sweets, through dance rather than exposition. Wearing an elegant white bodice and tutu, Copeland turns and leaps through the realms with dizzying speed. She also shares a brief pas de deux with Ukrainian ballet “bad boy” Sergei Polunin.
Those involved recognize that simply including the sequence in the film represents an important opportunity. Copeland, devoted to increasing access to the often-exclusionary ballet world, believes that a film like “Nutcracker” — already considered a gateway ballet — opens the door for diverse audiences to experience the art form.
“(People) feel comfortable sitting in a movie theater rather than walking through the doors of the Metropolitan Opera House; you feel that ‘Oh, that’s not for me.’ Especially as black people, that’s not a space for us,” Copeland said. “Everyone goes to the movie theater, so this is an amazing way to do that.”
The 36-year-old is an unlikely ballet star. Copeland grew up poor in San Pedro, sharing a motel room with her single mother and five siblings. She was discovered at 13, when she took her first ballet class through an outreach program for underprivileged youth at the San Pedro Boys & Girls Club.
A prodigy, Copeland quickly ascended the ballet ranks, earning a spot in the internationally renowned company American Ballet Theatre at age 18. In 2015, she made history as the first black woman promoted to principal dancer in the company’s 75-year history.
As a black dancer with a nontraditional ballet body, Copeland redefined what it means to be a ballerina and catapulted from the exclusive world of ballet into the pop culture consciousness. The dancer was the subject of the 2015 documentary “A Ballerina’s Tale,” wrote an autobiography and has been on the cover of Time magazine, becoming a rare household name from the dance community.
For her role in Disney’s “Nutcracker,” Copeland was afforded some creative control and chose to work with the London Royal Ballet’s artist-in-residence, Liam Scarlett.
“I had worked with him before, so it was nice to have someone that I was familiar with and knew my body and how I moved — (someone who) could … say to the director, ‘This angle is better for a dancer’s line,'” Copeland said. Together, they spent many hours in a dance studio working on the film.
