Coming to theatres and to VOD today, Wednesday, October 14: A BALLERINA’S TALE
Nelson George’s portrait of a groundbreaking dancer made its bow at Tribeca this Spring. It has since screened at Rio, Milwaukee, Urbanworld, Bentonville, Vancouver, and the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, among other events.
In its 75-year history, the American Ballet Theatre had never had an African-American female principal dancer – until Misty Copeland. George follows Copeland as she reckons with the physical stresses placed on dancer’s bodies, sustaining a potentially career-ending injury during her landmark turn in THE FIREBIRD that left her unable to dance for seven months. As the film reveals, she defied predictions and returned to ABT to continue to dance, but, just as importantly, her success in breaking substantial racial barriers catapulted Copeland into the public eye. This larger cultural context is more the point of George’s film rather than offering a straightforward biography of a talented dancer, noting, for example, that her turn as Firebird drew a substantial African-American audience to the Metropolitan Opera House for the first time in recent memory. While the film could have gone into Copeland’s family issues, or expanded on the very briefly mentioned eating disorder episode early in her time at ABT, what resonates more is how she came to be mentored into her larger role by other pioneering African American women, stepping outside of the personal and into her broader significance within the art form itself. Similarly, George’s film is noteworthy more for its subject and her impact than for any bravura filmmaking on display.
what (not) to doc 