Tom's Life Bits

You've loaded an old revision of the document! If you save it, you will create a new version with this data.

===== Michaela DePrince Ballerina from Sierra Leone =====

Michaela DePrince, War Orphan Turned Leading Ballerina, Dies at 29\\

{{:arts:2024-09-17_064503.jpg|}}\\

In an impoverished orphanage in Sierra Leone, she longed to dance ballet. After being adopted by American parents, her improbable dream came true.\\

Michaela DePrince, an acclaimed ballerina born during the civil war in Sierra Leone whose life story was no less fantastical than the fairy tales that inspire ballet, died on Tuesday in New York City. She was 29.\\

Her death was confirmed by her siblings Mia and Erik DePrince. They said the cause was not “immediately clear” and declined to provide further details.

Ms. DePrince crammed a career’s worth of achievements into the 2010s.

At the beginning of the decade, she gained notice for her role in “First Position,” a popular documentary by Bess Kargman about a competition that propels teenage dancers into the upper reaches of the profession.

She then became a principal dancer with the Dance Theater of Harlem before being recruited by the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam. She had lead roles in such major ballets as “The Nutcracker” and “Coppelia,” and she was a soloist in “Cinderella” and George Balanchine’s “Tarantella.”

Ms. DePrince gained a reputation for an athletic style. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Roslyn Sulcas credited her with “spitfire quickness.” Dance Spirit magazine wrote in 2012, “Powerful is the first word that comes to mind.”

Ms. DePrince flew back to the United States from the Netherlands for a cameo in Beyoncé’s music video for the song “Freedom,” from her 2016 album, “Lemonade.” She was sponsored by Nike. In discussions of prominent Black ballerinas, she was often mentioned alongside Misty Copeland. Writing in The Times in 2018, Ms. Copeland described her as “one of today’s most visible and brilliantly talented young artists.”

Ms. DePrince’s 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.

She was born Mabinty Bangura on Jan. 6, 1995, in a rural area of the Kenema District in southeastern Sierra Leone, in coastal West Africa. Her father harvested rice and made shea butter on land he owned with his brother. He also worked in diamond mines.

Mabinty was born with vitiligo, a skin condition that made her skin spotted. Some people, including her uncle, thought that this made her a carrier of bad luck. Told that she would be unmarriageable, her father replied by saying that it was all the more important, then, for her to get an education. She learned to read and write in Arabic and gained fluency in several African languages.

Everything changed when her father was murdered at the mines. She and her mother were taken in by her uncle. In her book, she describes being beaten by him and denied food. Her mother tried to protect her but eventually died of malnutrition and fever. Her uncle took her to an orphanage.

There, she was given a new name that was also a ranking: No. 27 — the least favored among all of the children in her new home. She was served food last, and as a result received the least, and she was given to understand that she deserved her lowly position because of her speckled skin. There was another girl at the orphanage whose birth name was Mabinty. She was designated No. 26, because of her left-handedness. The girls became best friends.

Life at the orphanage involved beatings, malnourishment and horrific sights, including the murder of a teacher.

One day, a gust of wind blew an issue of Dance Magazine into the orphanage. Its cover bore an image of a ballerina en pointe. She was smiling; she looked happy. Mabinty, too, wanted to be happy. She took to twirling around and standing on the tips of her toes. She kept the magazine cover as a talisman.

Eventually, a militia group occupied the orphanage. The residents fled to the neighboring state of Guinea. Walking to the border, Mabinty saw hundreds of dead and decaying bodies.

About the same time, thousands of miles away in Cherry Hill, N.J., a retired special education teacher named Elaine DePrince and her husband, Charles DePrince, an executive at a nutritional supplement company, were planning to adopt.

Elaine had looked forward to adopting children since she first learned of the concept of adoption as a little girl. In the 1980s, she adopted three boys with hemophilia, feeling it was her duty because other adoptive parents did not want to deal with their medical issues. In the early 1990s, all of them contracted H.I.V., as did many other people with hemophilia who relied on blood-clotting products. It led to their deaths.

One of their adopted sons, Michael, had been inspired by the idea of adopting a baby from a war-torn country in Africa. After his death, the DePrinces resolved to do just that. Elaine flew to Africa planning to adopt a girl named Mabinty, whom she had seen smiling in a photograph.

When Elaine arrived, she was told that there were two Mabintys. She decided to adopt both of them. No. 26 became Mia Mabinty DePrince; No. 27 became Michaela Mabinty DePrince, named after Michael.

Elaine brought her daughters to her hotel room, where she had a suitcase full of toys. Mia delightedly began to play. Michaela searched through Elaine’s luggage. Elaine was confused. Then Michaela showed her the beloved magazine cover and began to pirouette. She had been looking for dancing shoes.

In New Jersey, Elaine promised Michaela that she could attend ballet classes once she was able to speak English. She was quickly discovered to be talented, and she threw herself into dance.

When the family moved to Vermont, Michaela began to board at her ballet school and enrolled in an online high school. The separation from her family was painful — she would call Mia in tears because she missed her so much — but she would later explain her decision to leave home by saying that her goal was to pursue ballet.

“First Position” documents Michaela as she earns a scholarship to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at the American Ballet Theater in New York. A year after the movie came out, she was already being reviewed as a dancer in The Times. By 2014, she was performing in Amsterdam as a soloist in “Swan Lake.” The Dutch National Ballet had to place a moratorium on requests to interview Ms. DePrince so that she could focus on dancing.

t was clear that she put enormous pressure on herself. “I would like to change the way people see Black dancers,” she told The Guardian in 2012. “I would hate to disappoint anybody.”

In 2017, Ms. DePrince ruptured her Achilles’ tendon. No longer able to lose herself in ballet, she found herself dwelling on the recurring nightmares she was having, about her childhood. It struck her that all the endorsements, engagements, interviews, writing assignments and music videos that involved her retelling her life story were causing her to relive her darkest memories.

“If I hadn’t ruptured my Achilles, I don’t think I would have had the time and space to be able to know how important my mental health was,” she told Pointe magazine in 2021. That year, she left her position as a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet to return to the United States as a second soloist with the Boston Ballet. Pointe described the decision as a surprise for the dance world.

Ms. DePrince left the Boston Ballet this year, her siblings Mia and Erik said. She had been living in both New York and Boston.

In addition to them, Ms. DePrince is survived by another brother, Adam DePrince, and four more sisters, all of them adopted from Africa by her family — Amie DePrince, Jaye DePrince, Mariel DePrince and Bee Green.

Her adoptive father’s death in 2020, which followed a struggle with Parkinson’s disease, helped motivate Michaela to leave the Netherlands. Her adoptive mother died on Wednesday, a day after Michaela did. Her health had been declining in recent months after her congenital heart failure worsened. She died before she could learn of Michaela’s death. After the deaths of three of her sons, her family said, her being spared that knowledge was an act of divine grace.

Edit summary

Note: By editing this page you agree to license your content under the following license: CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International