51 pages • 1 hour read
Misty CopelandLife in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
Content Warning: This section contains references to body image issues and body shaming.
Earlier, Misty’s mother showed concern and bitterness about Misty’s relationship with Cindy. After the summer intensive program with the San Francisco Ballet, Sylvia’s irritation grows. She accuses Misty of turning her nose up at Sylvia and her siblings for living in the motel and at the food Sylvia provides when Misty visits on weekends. Misty argues that Cindy is trying to provide her with healthier food options so that she can train safely. Sylvia accuses Cindy of trying to brainwash Misty, an accusation that Misty’s siblings quickly start to echo. Misty admits that she has become accustomed to the nicer house, gifts, healthy food, and stable, quiet environment with Cindy and Patrick, but she does not feel like they are trying to brainwash or unduly influence her. They simply care about her and treat her like a part of their family.
Sylvia demands that Misty return to her family and stop attending Cindy’s school. She enlists help from Elizabeth Cantine to find Misty a different ballet school. Misty is furious and upset, as is Cindy. Cindy suggests that Misty consider filing for emancipation, which she says other child performers and athletes have done when they believed their parents were interfering with their lives and careers. Though Misty loves her mother and knows that she loves her, she worries that Sylvia cannot make the right choices for her dance career, so she agrees.
Misty stays with Cindy’s friends while a lawyer files the claim. Sylvia files a missing person report with the police, and after three days, Misty returns to the motel with her mother, filled with resentment. Sylvia then hires well-known attorney Gloria Allred to take Cindy and Patrick Bradley to court, demanding a restraining order and accusing them of manipulating Misty into requesting emancipation. Misty feels torn and afraid. She withdraws her emancipation request, and Sylvia rescinds the restraining order. Because of Misty’s previous news coverage as a prodigy ballerina, the legal battle gains media attention. At one point, Sylvia drags Misty onto a talk show, during which Sylvia and Cindy argue on camera while Misty sits in the front row of the audience, horrified.
During this ordeal, Misty returns to high school, where she is treated as a spectacle, though her friends try to pretend that everything is normal. She also attends the Lauridsen Ballet Centre, where she discovers that “the fact that [she] had been dancing only two years and was the best student at the San Pedro Dance Center was a testament to that school’s limitations” (129). Though she is talented, much of her early success has been due to the lack of serious competition at the much smaller school. The advanced students at Lauridsen are far better. The instructor treats her fairly but does not give her special treatment. Misty is grateful to be treated like every other ballet student amid her ordeals and relies on the dance school for a sense of stability and normalcy.
To her great sadness, after the end of the hearing, Misty does not see the Bradleys again for more than 10 years. After the trial, Misty starts to wonder if her mother is right. She comes to believe that Cindy and Patrick may have brainwashed her a little, though without malicious intent. She fears that she may have been wrong to resent her mother and apologizes. Writing from her current perspective as an adult, Misty concludes that both her mother and the Bradleys loved her and that she would not have gotten where she is without the Bradelys’ support. She is grateful to them for encouraging her to find her voice.
Finally, her life begins to settle again. Less than a year after her legal battles end, Misty applies to summer intensive programs again and is invited to attend ABT with a full scholarship. In June, at the age of 16, she travels to New York to study with ABT for the first time.
Chapter 7 Summary
During the summer intensive, Misty meets members of the senior staff including John Meehan, the director of ABT’s studio company (an intermediate step for junior dancers before joining the main company), and Kirk Peterson, the summer program ballet master. Early in the summer, John tells Misty that she is “an extraordinary talent” and that they intend to offer her a full-time position with the studio company soon.
While training with the summer program, Misty also meets her idol, Paloma Herrera. However, the meeting is brief, as Paloma is speaking on the phone and barely notices Misty’s presence. Misty leaves feeling a bit disappointed. Later, when Misty becomes a member of the company and gains more media attention, she gives an interview in which she explains her love for Paloma, and Paloma reaches out to thank her for her kind praise.
Misty’s performance becomes a highlight during the end-of-summer student recital. Afterward, Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director of ABT, offers her a position with the studio company. Misty discusses the offer with her mother but eventually decides that she would like to finish her last year of high school. She hopes that ABT will still want her in a year. Kevin assures her that her place is secure.
After graduating from high school, she returns to New York. The famous retired ballerina Isabel Brown offers to host Misty at her home in Manhattan. Isabel, head of the “Brown Dynasty,” danced with ABT when it was founded. Her son became a soloist with ABT, and her daughter became a principal. Misty lives with her for the next two years, and Isabel becomes one of Misty’s biggest supporters.
At the end of the summer, Misty officially becomes a member of the studio company, six young men and six young women who train and rehearse together in preparation for joining the main company. After a year, at age 19, Misty is promoted to the ABT’s corps de ballet, the main body of a ballet company. All dancers in the corps compete to become a soloist and then a principal. Misty states that “in some ways, ballet companies are like the military, hierarchical and rigid, with long grueling days spent exerting yourself physically” (156), even during the off-season when they are not performing on stage.
Unfortunately, having just graduated to the corps de ballet, she suffers a serious back injury and must sit out her entire first year. To treat stress fractures in her lower back, she must wear a back brace for six months. Misty explains that dancers push their bodies to the limit, and sometimes their bodies break.
Chapter 8 Summary
Misty asks the reader to picture the classical image of a ballerina, “a fragile-limbed pixie, with flaxen hair and ivory skin, spinning in pale pink tulle” (162). She remarks that she does not fit that image. To many, this is the only acceptable image of a dancer because racism still exists in the classical ballet world. She knows that she survived early on because she was protected from that racism by her mentors, for which she is lucky and blessed. However, she faces it now as an adult. Before her back injury, she could at least adhere to the classical ballet body: slender, lithe, and flat-chested, if not white. However, this is because even at the age of 19, she “weigh[s] less than one hundred pounds. And [she] ha[s] never menstruated” (163).
Misty experiences delayed puberty, common among young dancers and athletes. During her spinal recovery, her doctor accelerates her puberty with medication. Very quickly, her body changes. She menstruates, gains 10 pounds within weeks, and develops full breasts. Once she returns to New York to begin dancing again, she has a woman’s body. She realizes that the ABT wants the “little girl” that she used to be.
The ABT staff tell her that she needs to “lengthen” her body, meaning lose weight. She adds that contrary to widespread belief, ballet companies do not perform “weigh-ins” or give dire warnings to “lose weight or else” (167). While some dancers develop unhealthy eating patterns, Misty says that eating disorders are not as common as media portrayals would lead one to think. Her only experiences with eating disorders are in film dramas and documentaries. However, she becomes increasingly concerned about her weight while also feeling rebellious against the company’s demands. In response, she briefly suffers from emotional overeating. She develops a routine of ordering two dozen donuts to her apartment, eating the entire box in one sitting, and feeling guilty the next day, only to then repeat the routine again.
Though it takes time, she finds a balance and learns what works for her body and what does not. She finds new methods of exercise and alters her eating habits. At last, she learns to take care of her body so that she can ensure her best in every performance. In time, ABT learns to accept “that [her] curves are part of who [she is] as a dancer, not something [she] need[s] to lose to become one” (171).
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
Tensions hinted at earlier in Chapter 5 come to bear in Chapter 6, as Misty’s mother decides to pull Misty from her ballet classes with Cindy and bring her back home after two years. To focus on the conflict between Sylvia and Cindy, Misty shifts through the timeline, discussing incidents both before and after the summer intensive program in San Francisco, as well as looking ahead to far in the future when she is an adult. Her experiences with and reflections on this period of her life emphasize The Power of Mentorship despite her mentors’ mistakes.
The entire sequence of events—Misty filing for emancipation, the court case, and the resolution—is one of the most traumatic experiences of Misty’s life. Though she does not explicitly say so, it is clear that none of the adults give her needs and wishes serious attention or care during the proceedings. This is especially true for her mother, who puts her own insecurities and jealousies above her daughter’s well-being. Misty explains that leaving Cindy’s household is even more traumatic for her than leaving Harold, whom she considered to be her father. On the other hand, she recognizes that the Bradleys did try to shape her worldview and goals to meet theirs. The situation illustrates that even when adults love and have the best intentions for children, they are nevertheless flawed human beings who make mistakes and can behave selfishly. As an adult, Misty eventually forms her own, more nuanced understanding of her mother and Cindy’s motives and love for her. Her experiences teach her that while mentors can be crucial to one’s development, they should not be considered perfect or omniscient. Though Cindy’s mentorship ends at this point in her life, and Misty realizes that Cindy’s school had in some ways been holding her back, she remains grateful for the guidance and gifts she received. Mentorship is powerful even when it is flawed.
From here on, the memoir shifts almost entirely away from family concerns to focus solely on Misty’s ballet career, in which the theme of Dedication and Discipline takes center stage. Chapter 7 moves quickly through Misty’s summer intensive program with American Ballet Theatre at the age of 16 and her promotion to the corps de ballet at age 19. This implies both that Misty feels like this period passes by rapidly and that these transitions are relatively easy and painless. That relative painlessness, however, only makes the setback Misty faces all the more jarring. Just as she is beginning to climb the ranks, she suffers her first major setback in the form of a spinal stress fracture. To contextualize her injury, Misty describes the enormous physical strain dancers put on their bodies to create their art. Her injury is not the result of a random accident; rather, it is the culmination of the strain ballet puts on her body. This is a risk all dancers take and highlights the dedication and discipline required to succeed in such competitive careers. Misty implies that sacrifice, even of your body, is necessary to success in creative careers in general and ballet specifically.
Chapter 8 extends the discussion of bodies by discussing the body image issues many dancers face, particularly in the context of the Intersections of Race, Identity, and Art. Misty faces unique challenges as a Black woman with a curvy figure. Her body defies the model of the ideal ballerina: “a fragile-limbed pixie, with flaxen hair and ivory skin, spinning in pale pink tulle” (162). Misty balances two sometimes conflicting ideas in this chapter, arguing both that the ballet world imposes unreasonable and racist physical standards on its dancers and that a dancer needs dedication and discipline to properly maintain the instrument that is their body. Misty acknowledges that the ballet world can spark unhealthy attitudes about body image and weight, sometimes leading to eating disorders. Yet she also insists that the body ballet demands can be achieved through hard work, fitness, and careful eating habits. Simultaneously, she confronts the ingrained racist stereotypes within the ballet world that penalize her for not being able to conform to the white, “fragile-limbed pixie” (162), stereotypical image of a ballerina. By asking the reader to picture the stereotypical white ballerina archetype, Misty points to the unspoken but deeply embedded racial identity within ballet and challenges that identity by demanding that her body also be included. At the same time, she describes the way she worked to make her body conform more closely to ballet’s size and shape standards. These contradictions illustrate the complexity of the intersections between race and art. To practice her art, Misty must simultaneously defy and conform to its problematic standards.
