A Quote by Misty Copeland
It's going to take a while before we see a real shift in the students and the dancers that are going into professional companies because it takes so many years of training, but I do think that there's a new crop of dancers, of minority dancers that are entering into the ballet world.
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The Royal Ballet is the best paid company, but the dancers get nothing. The stage crew get paid three times more than the dancers, and they have a job for life - dancers only have 10 years.
A producer wouldn't think of making a film about ballet dancers without using real dancers, but they will cast actors who have never held a bat in baseball films.
For 20 years, I've been running an institute in Chennai where serious dancers from Kerala come with aspirations of becoming professional dancers.
So many people report to be contemporary dancers, and they're not. They are sort of jazz dancers that feel like they're throwing a bit of classical in there. I mean, a true contemporary dancer has got ballet as their base and classical ballet, and that is their base. And then they choose to extemporize on that and go into a contemporary world.
I know that dancers, especially ballet dancers, can't do it forever.
I would love for dancers to be treated better and for dancers to have support, for dancers to have managers, agents. This is the only art form that does not have a proper support system.
So many dancers feel that what they look like is more important than who they are. This is a real danger for dancers who focus for years on appearances and think of themselves as merely a body. The choreographer can't work with them in the realm of ideas. It's a huge problem if they haven't been connecting internally. If they've decided that what's inside is of little value, they can only try to approximate some kind of look.
Dancers can get to see almost everything now. When I used to go into companies to make a piece, the dancers had hardly ever seen my work. Now they can watch it on YouTube. It means they're much faster at picking up material.
I'm still trying to change the way people see black dancers that we can become delicate dancers, that we can be a ballerina.
It's important to get well-rounded right off the bat. A lot of experienced dancers can get pigeonholed into one thing. I've been hired for a lot of different gigs simply because I can do a lot of different things with different levels of dancers. And it's sad to me that some dancers don't do more.
I will say a lot of dancers do such beautiful things for their body and then they smoke a cigarette. I've never been a smoker, but I realized after taking yoga . . . in ballet you're not encouraged to do a lot of breathing. I think in a weird way, a lot of dancers find relief in actually breathing.
My idea for the Jamison Project was rather like a pickup company. The idea was to give the dancers a taste of the menu. Today, dancers need to try as many companies as possible without having a drop-dead loyalty to me or anyone else. They like to have the leeway to go their own way.
I don't have many actors in my family, but I do have a Great Uncle that is a film-maker in Philadelphia, and my great-great-grandparents were Flamenco dancers in the 30's in New York, they were Spanish dancers.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
Do you know what I've learned? That although ecstasy is the ability to stand outside yourself, dance is a way of rising up into space, of discovering new dimensions while still remaining in touch with your body. When you dance, the spiritual world and the real world manage to coexist quite happily. I think classical ballet dancers dance on pointe because they're simultaneously touching the earth and reaching up to the skies.
I don't ever use dancers, and when I do, it's literally, like, four break dancers.
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