Black ballerinas are demanding to see more pointe shoes that match their skin color. Although the industry has made progress in terms of meeting the needs of Black ballerinas, the dancers say it’s not still enough. Many ballerinas, including Misty Copeland, are forced to take matters into their own hands by covering their pink pointe shoes with darker foundations or paint.
Robin Williams, who has been a ballet dancer for over 60 years, said she was recently able to buy brown pointe shoes for the first time. Williams, who was the only Black ballerina in her company when she started her career decades ago, reflected on how far the industry has come since the 1960s.
“We weren’t accepted in ballet classes and there were few choreographers,” Williams said in an interview with CNN. “My teacher happened to mention that we had on pink tights because the tights, and the shoes, were supposed to match our skin tone. I thought about it when she said that because I was like, ‘Well our skin isn’t pink.’ And I never forgot that.”
Legendary ballerina Misty Copeland has also been speaking up about the lack of appropriate shoes for Black dancers such as herself. In a recent viral TikTok video, the 41-year-old changemaker showed how she has to cover her baby pink pointe shoes with a foundation matching her skin tone, a process known as pancaking.
In late September, Copeland started a petition to urge Apple to provide different colors of the pointe shoe emoji. The petition has received over 50,000 out of the 70,000 signatures requested. She said Apple’s inability to include different shades of pointe shoes is a “constant reminder of the subtle ways dancers of color have not been included.”
@mistycopeland This is about more than an emoji, help us #MakeAPointe and sign the petition at the link in bio! 🩰 #balletdancers #blackdancers #blackdancersoftiktok
Cortney Taylor Key, another Black ballerina, also pancakes her shoes.
“I learned pancaking from my DTH sisters at Harlem, where I’m from, and really for me it was a rite of passage, but I understand that it is also equally frustrating … to have to do it, it’s tedious,” she told CNN.
Taylor Key, a teacher at The Misty Copeland Foundation, danced in pink tights when she studied ballet at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
“I hadn’t woken up yet,” Key said. “It wasn’t until I graduated that I even had ventured to New York and got to see the Dance Theatre of Harlem and I saw [flesh-toned tights] and understood.”
In the same interview with CNN, Key applauded leaders such as Copeland for speaking up, saying, “It sucks that nobody came before her, but she’s definitely deserving and what she’s doing for the community right now … I couldn’t be more proud to be working for her organization.”
Check out Copeland’s recent appearance on The Today Show, where she highlighted the importance of Apple offering a variety of skin tones for the ballerina slipper emoji.
