The Globe and Mail (Ontario Edition)

WAR ORPHAN TURNED LEADING BALLERINA HAD AN ATHLETIC STYLE

Her back story, as detailed in her widely praised memoir, chronicled as complete a transforma­tion of circumstan­ces as could be imagined

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 Sept. 10 in New York. She was 29. Her death was confirmed by her siblings Mia and Erik. 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, 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, 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.”

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 of 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 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 favoured 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 neighbouri­ng state of Guinea. Walking to the border, Mabinty saw hundreds of dead and decaying bodies.

Around the same time, thousands of miles away in

I would like to change the way people see Black dancers. I would hate to disappoint anybody. MICHAELA DEPRINCE DANCER

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 HIV, 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 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, Michael a began to board at herbal let 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 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 she could focus on dancing.

It was clear 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, she 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, Mia and Erik said. She had been living in both New York and Boston.

In addition to them, Ms. DePrince leaves 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 adopt ive 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 Sept. 11, a day after Michaela did. Her health had been declining in recent months after her congenital heart failure worse ned. 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.