This was the making of a ballerina. “When I was four years old, a magazine with a ballet dancer on the cover came through the orphanage gate. When I saw this beautiful creature, I was inspired. I didn’t know what ballet was, but she looked so happy – and it was a time when I wasn’t happy. It gave me something to hope for, somebody to be. I took the magazine cover off and hid it in my underwear, because I was scared someone would try to take it away.”
Michaela DePrince’s ballerina origin story is more striking than most, because her circumstances were so harsh: her childhood was shaped by civil war in Sierra Leone.
