Michaela DePrince – ballet star who rose from the chaos of civil war in Sierra Leone – dies at 29

Michaela DePrince performs Giselle with the English National ballet at the Coliseum on 13 January 2017 in London, England. (Photo: Ian Gavan/Getty Images)

By J Brooks Spector

16 Sep 2024

The untimely death of a dancer just entering her prime provokes grief among dancers and lovers of ballet around the world. We reprise our interview with her from 2012 when she starred in Johannesburg.

A dozen years ago, in our article, Knockin’ on stardom’s door, I profiled a young dancer, Michaela DePrince, just as she was on the cusp of joining the ranks of dance stardom. A few days after our interview, she would be dancing the lead in the classic work, Le Corsaire, with the Joburg Ballet at the Joburg Theatre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5sdNwZSWpU&t=2s

While the dancers were on a break during their rehearsal, DePrince and I sat down to talk about her incredible talent and her journey as a dancer. But there was also her even more astonishing personal saga, a journey that had taken her from being a war orphan in Sierra Leone’s chaotic civil war to a dancer of enormous promise.

The other day, the dance world was deeply moved and saddened to learn that at the age of just 29, she has now died. Following her performances in Johannesburg, she had then joined the fabled Dance Theatre of Harlem; then it was on to the Dutch National Ballet; and then it was on to the Boston Ballet.

Along the way, she had been featured in Beyonce’s video, Lemonade, and she had become an active ambassador for the War Child Foundation – a logical extension from her own terrifying childhood experiences.

Michaela DePrince performs Giselle with the English National Ballet at the London Coliseum on 13 January 2017. (Photo: Ian Gavan/Getty Images)

The New York Times, in its obituary, picking up on her career after the Dance Theatre of Harlem, observed, “Ms. DePrince flew back to the United States from the Netherlands for a cameo in Beyoncé’s extended 2016 music video ‘Lemonade.’ She was sponsored by Nike. In discussions of prominent Black ballerinas, she was often mentioned alongside Misty Copeland, and Ms. Copeland described Ms. DePrince, in a 2018 article in The Times, as ‘one of today’s most visible and brilliantly talented young artists.’

“Her remarkable back story as an orphan from Sierra Leone, included in miniature in ‘First Position,’ was told in full in her widely praised memoir, ‘Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina,’ which she wrote with her adoptive mother, Elaine DePrince. It chronicled as complete a transformation in circumstances as could be imagined.”

In what must have come as a yet further, horrific shock to DePrince’s family, her adoptive mother also passed away at almost the same time as Michaela did.

Below is our story, as written, just as Michaela was about to dance on stage in Johannesburg a dozen years ago.

***

23 July 2012

Michaela DePrince comes off the rehearsal dance floor at the South African Mzansi Ballet Theatre’s studios at the Joburg Theatre for a short break, and we have a chance for a chat. She’s seventeen and back in Africa for performances that began getting enormous attention, even before she danced a single step in front of an audience here. Here’s why.

DePrince is already an emerging international ballet talent of note, and she is in Johannesburg to dance the part of Gulnare in the South African premiere of one of ballet’s great classics, Le Corsaire. This ballet features choreography by Angela Malan, after that of Marius Petipa, and it is based on a Byronic heroic poem.

Now, what were you doing at seventeen, eh? Still trying to figure out what you were going to begin studying, when you finally began studying? But DePrince is already being marked for potential greatness as a dancer.

DePrince’s story would already be noteworthy if she were just a very talented teenager on the cusp of fame in a notoriously precise, finicky yet supremely athletic art form where the competition is intense and the mind games are almost as important as the body’s exertions. The classic films The Red Shoes, The Turning Point – or a more recent, more troubling film, Black Swan, come to mind.

But DePrince is a young, talented black woman coming into her own in an art form that was – until fairly recently – seen as the natural preserve of white performers. The usual justifications were muttered beliefs that black bodies were just too big, too broad; too, err, well-rounded to meet the classic specifications of the perfect dancer shapes decreed by balletic tradition and aesthetic sensibilities.

When all else failed as an argument, gatekeepers fell back on the final redoubt of a position that it just wouldn’t look right – all those ethereal white skins and… Better they should go into the other door and do the jazz, tap and modern dance stuff, anything but ballet – but more on that story in a moment.

But for DePrince’s personal saga, there is still more. Much more. There is an extraordinary back-story – or maybe it is actually the story. As a four-year-old, she was one of thousands of war orphans pushed back and forth as the flotsam and jetsam of a chaotic civil war in Sierra Leone. As a four-year-old, she had just barely been rescued and placed in an orphanage near the Sierra Leonean border. Recall the worst scenes from the film Blood Diamond, perhaps, to try to get an idea of what it must have been like.

Once she was safe in the orphanage, the staff told her a family would never adopt her because she was “the devil’s child”. Really. Imagine being told that – repeatedly – as a preschooler, after surviving that barbaric civil war. But the devil’s child? Because she suffered from that skin condition, vitiligo (you know, Michael Jackson’s skin condition), where there is a loss of brown pigment resulting in irregular white patches that continue to feel like normal skin. DePrince says, with an unnerving matter-of-factness, “This is something I don’t think you should tell a child.”

For some reason, call it luck, an Olympian dice roll, whatever, as a child in that orphanage, she found a discarded magazine at the gate of her orphanage. On the cover of the magazine was a picture of a ballet dancer wearing a tiara, tutu and pointe shoes.

Do you remember all this? she is asked. “It is very hard not to remember something like this,” she murmurs. Yes, of course. It is impossible not to conjure up the scene: The four-year-old DePrince studying the picture; what is this person doing, why are they doing it, what are they wearing? “It was a picture of a ballerina, and seeing that dancer, and seeing it at such a terrible time of my life, it just completely gave me hope and I thought to myself: if I ever got adopted, maybe I could be just like this person.”

So she hid the magazine cover in her clothing and gave the rest of the magazine to the other children to distract them. She studied this picture and decided that whatever this woman was doing, she wanted to do it, would do this too, herself, when she got older. Then there was a secular deus ex machina. Americans adopted her, despite the premonitions of imminent devil’s child-dom, and she moved to the US, where she grew up amid a boisterous family with sisters and nieces and – miraculously – she became a normal child with dreams – and the possibility she could achieve them.

It is like a Hollywood film. Wait a second now; it is a film by Bess Kargman, First Position, released in 2011, and now coming to South Africa. It follows six young dancers from around the world as they prepare for the Youth America Grand Prix, one of the world’s most prestigious ballet competitions. And one of the stars of the film is Michaela DePrince – still just sixteen years old at that point.

Talking with her, she is so unaffected, so normal, it is scary. She describes starting dance classes in the Philadelphia area, up on point at seven, and being pushed upward into tougher, more advanced classes with other children three or four years older than she is. She was driven to learn this art. Along the way, she recalls being at a competition and classes in Holland a few years back where she says she was still “really bad”; she had “biscuits” she says – ballet lingo for really big, awkward feet. There is a grimace as she recalls her performances back then.

Despite the practice and her place in the ballet world, she says she really understands the need to get an outside life, to not just be a “bun head,” to grow up and get married, and do all the other things in life. But for now, whenever she is not dancing, taking dance classes or practising, she swims with her friends, gets out to the beach – and buys lots and lots of heels. She giggles and says she has about two hundred pairs of heels. And she lives on Facebook and Twitter when she is not working at her art.

We talk about American dance companies and she says she just loves the American Ballet Theatre and longs to dance with them professionally in the future. And then we talk about specific ballets – she loves being in Le Corsaire because you can be a flesh and blood character, just like one can in Don Quixote as well – although she also wants to dance Aurora in Sleeping Beauty and the twined white and black swans in Swan Lake. Les Sylvide is less attractive – you have to have a “mask” for a face.

We talk a bit about technique and she says she always wants to feel the floor when she dances. As a result, unlike many dancers, she doesn’t put fleece in her pointe shoes and there are no adhesive bandages in her shoes to get in the way of the sensations of dancing.

There is a wonderful irony in Michaela DePrince’s arrival in South Africa to dance here. That, of course, is aside from all the astonishing facts of her survival, perseverance and success. Come autumn in America [in 2012], DePrince will be joining the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) company and school in New York City.

Now, this is not just any ballet company. This is the group that Arthur Mitchell – the African-American dancer who shattered the colour bar at the New York City Ballet, dancing an electrifying Puck in George Balanchine’s Midsummer Night’s Dream – founded as an act of faith and commitment to his community and art in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, in 1968.

And it is also the company that came to South Africa to herald the end of South Africa’s cultural isolation as apartheid collapsed. And this company just happened to dance on the same stage at the Joburg Theatre (then called the Civic), just two months shy of twenty years ago.

The head of the school and company, now, is South African dancer Laveen Naidu, who, back then, was a student at the DTH’s dance school in New York and who received his first professional opportunity to perform before a hometown audience as part of the DTH’s South Africa tour a generation ago. And now it is Michaela DePrince’s turn to perform here – and to follow into the DTH tradition of “dancing through barriers” as their South African tour was subtitled, back then.

And how was the premiere of Le Corsaire at a fundraising gala evening for the South African company? Definitely worth going back to see a second time. DM

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23 July 2012