This is how a dancer is made. “I remember when I was four years old, a magazine with a ballet dancer on the cover came through the gate. I got ideas when I saw this beautiful animal. She looked so happy, and I wasn’t happy at the time. I didn’t know what dancing was.
It gave me something to look forward to and someone to be. Because I was afraid someone would try to take it, I took off the magazine cover and hid it in my underwear.
Michaela DePrince’s story as a dancer is more interesting than most because it was so hard for her. In Sierra Leone, her childhood was shaped by the civil war.
Ballerina Michaela DePrince’s mom died before learning of daughter’s death https://t.co/5peJ47e62T
— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) September 18, 2024
But DePrince, who died at age 29, became the dancer she had always dreamed of being. She performed with top companies like Dutch National Ballet (DNB) and Boston Ballet and spoke about her life with great skill on stages around the world.
She was born Mabinty Bangura in Kenema, in the southeast of Sierra Leone. As a baby, her trader father taught her the Arabic alphabet, which was the first thing that made her want to read. After he was killed by Revolutionary United Front rebels at work in a diamond mine, his brother took in his wife and child, even though they didn’t want to. She was left at a shelter in Makeni by her uncle after her mother died of hunger.
She said that’s where the kids were ranked by how much they liked each other. Staff called DePrince “devil child” because she had vitiligo, a skin disease that caused white spots on her chest. She was always the 27th person in line for food.
Ballerina Michaela DePrince’s mom died before learning of daughter’s death https://t.co/5peJ47e62T
— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) September 18, 2024
When rebel soldiers attacked the orphanage, the kids ran away. They walked through the bush and over mountains for two weeks until they reached a refugee camp in Guinea. From there, they went to Ghana, where they met Elaine and Charles DePrince.
She was a retired special education teacher, and he was an executive at a nutritional supplement company. They adopted Michaela and her friend Mia, whose birth name was also Mabinty. They raised the girls in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and then in Vermont, where Mariel, who was also from the orphanage, joined them.
She would always be affected by what she had seen: her teacher had been killed, and she had nightmares about amputations and other horrible acts. But she was also very interested in math, swimming, and especially dance. She watched a DVD of The Nutcracker over and over again, and when she went to see the ballet in person, the five-year-old loudly pointed out all the mistakes the ballerina made.
Elaine remembered, “She was the funniest child. She was stubborn, strong, contradictory, very smart, competitive, and a perfectionist.” She is tough because of what she’s been through, and as a dancer, she needs that.
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After that, DePrince trained in Philadelphia and at the American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in New York. She was a main character in the award-winning 2011 documentary First Position, which followed young dancers participating at the prestigious Youth America Grand Prix. She also danced on the US TV show Dancing With the Stars.
Her first professional show was Le Corsaire at the Joburg Theater in South Africa in 2012. She then became the youngest dancer in the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Blogger Jane Lambert, who writes about dance, saw her perform the difficult Soviet workout Diana and Actaeon with the junior company of DNB in 2013. She called her “quite simply the most exciting dancer I have seen for quite a while.”
DePrince joined the main company of DNB and danced in works by Balanchine such as Jewels, Who Cares?, and the bubbly Tarantella. She also played lead parts in The Nutcracker and Christopher Wheeldon’s Cinderella, as well as new choreography by British artists such as David Dawson.
As the New York Times put it, she had “sheer power” and “spitfire quickness.” DePrince loved playing parts that played up her strength and sense of purpose. In 2017, she was a guest performer in Giselle by the English National Ballet. She played Myrtha, the cruel leader of the “wilis,” the ghosts of unmarried women who dance men to their deaths. One writer said that her constant jumping was “impossibly high and indefatigable,” which is a pretty scary way to put it.
As the resourceful Swan in the movie Coppelia (2021), a colorful mix of live dance and CGI animation, she also showed how tough she was when she was in a love role. As her fairy-tale town was taken over by a creepy plastic surgeon, her main character, who rode a bright red bike, fought back. “Lovely Michaela is such a strong dancer,” Darcey Bussell, one of her co-stars, said. “But to see her as an actor was special.”
Elaine DePrince died a day after her daughter Michaela passed away. "Grieving two family members who died within a 24 hour period is tragic and devastating," a family spokesperson wrote on social media. https://t.co/Ot8kd0AMp2
— FOX 5 DC (@fox5dc) September 18, 2024
You may remember that DePrince told me in an interview in 2015, “I can say “turtle” now.” She also became famous in Amsterdam. “I was being pulled in so many directions,” she said. “I was doing music videos, playing lead roles, and giving speeches.” It was 2016 when she was moved to soloist at DNB, but an injury gave her time to look into therapy for her PTSD.
She started the Boston Ballet in 2021 and said, “It’s not about being a people-pleaser.” It’s also about having a good job and liking it, as a person and as an artist. In May, she quit the job.
DePrince loved ballet, but her job as an ambassador and role model for children affected by war, for dance, and for black people in ballet may have been even more important. She was in Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album Lemonade, and she had many endorsements and corporate gigs. She was also a powerful speaker and a vivid author, especially in the memoir Taking Flight (2014), which was released in the UK as Hope in a Ballet Shoe and was co-written by Elaine.
As a representative for War Child Netherlands, she put on a gala called “Dare to Dream,” which was a perfect name for it. But she had to be very determined and work very hard to reach her own goals. In a 2014 TEDx Talk, she said, “Most people tell me that my life is a fairy tale.” “But I don’t agree with you.”
Charles passed away in 2020, and Elaine passed away the next day after Michaela. The sisters she left behind are Mia, Amie, Jaye, Mariel, and Bee. Her brothers are Erik and Adam.
