Misty Copeland on Her Short Film ‘Flower’ and Transitioning From the Ballet Stage to the Big Screen

Cori Murray
·7 min read
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When Misty Copeland filmed the last scenes of the short Flower, she was, in her words, “very pregnant.” Not only was she blooming into motherhood, she was entering a new beginning as a producer and actor.

Flower is the first project from Copeland’s Life in Motion Productions, which she co-founded with fellow American Ballet Theatre dancer-turned-producer Leyla Fayyaz. Directed by Lauren Finerman and written by Fayyaz, the 28-minute short made its debut at the Tribeca Festival earlier this month, and it will be screened July 1 at the Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park as part of its Summer in the City series.

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The film follows Rose (Copeland) as she carries the weight of providing a home, caring for her dementia-suffering mother and teaching young ballerinas in her Oakland community, which is gentrifying at an alarming rate.

Here, Copeland, the first Black woman named a principal dancer at ABT, speaks about making the transition from stage to screen, returning to the spotlight after three years and being intentional about being an artist.

What is the origin story of Flower?

This is something that really developed and grew from this small idea from Nelson George, who’s an executive producer on the film. I met him through my first documentary, A Ballerina’s Tale. He was the director and producer. When he came to one of my performances in Los Angeles, we talked afterwards and he was like, “Of course, you danced beautifully, but I was just really blown away by the acting.” With a lot of these ballets, that’s how we communicate and tell the story. The idea grew into that we wanted it to be about a style of dance in the community. We were going back and forth, and we knew we needed to tell a story about a city that’s really dealing with an important issue.

Your character, Rose, doesn’t speak in the film. Why isn’t there any dialogue?

That has been my only form of storytelling since I was 13 years old. To me, it’s innate and it’s so powerful. It’s something that me and my partner in my production company, Leyla Fayyaz, [agreed on]. She was a former ballerina as well for American Ballet Theatre before she went into television and producing. But it’s been a mission of ours through the production company to be able to show this. I want to say it’s a unique form, but this is an old form. For so many years in Hollywood, there were full films that were just dance-focused or just music-focused that didn’t have scenes with dialogue, so it’s something that we understand. Movement and music, these are universal languages, and so we really want to get back to that and make the art form more relevant. We often say it’s to really normalize the arts experience in America, which it’s seen as something that’s not for us, or it’s too elite, or we don’t understand it. But it was really interesting to see, again, the response and that people really understood what was happening. It just takes a different type of commitment to watching; you have to put your phone down. You can’t just be doing other things and listening. You really have to watch, and that’s what it is to be in a theater. That’s what it is experiencing the arts yourself, is that your full mind, body, soul are dedicated to what’s happening or what you’re experiencing.

There’s a moment when Rose meets the houseless people on the street and she’s having a conversation. But for a moment, the film felt like it switched to a documentary. Was that intentional?

Nelson, Leyla and I were making special trips to Oakland to do research. We spent a lot of time in homeless encampments, in shelters, in the RV community; we really wanted to get it right and to include that community that wasn’t going to be offensive or wasn’t going to exploit them. We were like, “Let’s capture this footage, but we don’t really know how we’re going to utilize it.” With this being a silent film, we thought about how we wanted to be able to show the community in a real way. We didn’t want actors playing houseless people. We thought about using what they were saying in the credits because it was so powerful. We thought more and more about it, and our director, who was so incredible, suggested, “Why don’t we give voice to the voiceless that they’re the only ones in the film that actually speak?” It just clicked immediately when we edited that way.

You often speak of the support of Black women in your life and in your work as a ballerina, but this film paired you with some incredible Black men: choreographer Alonzo King, Grammy award-winning artist Raphael Saadiq, LINES dancer Babatunji Johnson, creative directors Rich and Tone Talauega (choreographers for MJ the Musical), executive producer Nelson George and obviously your husband, Olu Evans, who introduced you to Oakland.

You’re making me think about it in such a bigger, more powerful way — just the power of the Black men that really brought so much to this film. In the last three or four years, I was spending a lot more time in Oakland because my husband’s father was in a car accident and he passed away two years ago. But he was a big inspiration, too, within this film. This amazing Black man, he’s so Oakland, he was so Oakland. Then of course, my husband, and then Nelson’s inspiration and Rich+Tone and Alonzo and Raphael and Babatunji. I think that it was just incredible to have these three women at the forefront of making the film happen. But the inspiration and the artistic draw came from these Black men, which I haven’t had a lot of experience in that way. Like you said, I’ve dealt with a lot of Black women who have been behind me, but I think that it definitely set the tone in a different way, in grounding for this film.

When the short premiered at the Tribeca Festival, this was your reintroduction into a public life after having your son, Jackson. How was it making this film as a mother?

When we started the film, I was not pregnant. It wasn’t a thought really in our minds. But the very last day of shooting in Oakland — and we were only shooting for three days — someone came on set with a COVID case. We had to shut down the last day of shooting. That day and the following day, we were supposed to shoot the big dance sequence and all of the shots inside of the house, but we had to shut it down. We had to find another time where everyone can coordinate together and we can finish this film. We went away for a couple of months and I ended up getting pregnant. So we had to come back and finish the last house shots. There’s a solo where I’m on a stage, and then there’s the final pas de deux in the black void. I’m very pregnant in all of that.

Wow.

It was so interesting to experience. Alonzo King was with me on the set during that final dance sequence, and he was like, “You’re a very different artist right now.” Having this person inside of me, that shifted me as a performer. We had to angle the camera in a lot of different ways too, so that you didn’t see anything. Two days after, I gave birth and I was in an editing session over Zoom. We got to get this over the finish line! But it definitely gave me a different lens of how I’m viewing the relationship between these two women and understanding it in a different way, and I’m sure that that came through in the way that we edited it.

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