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.
Yet DePrince, who has died aged 29, would become the ballerina she dreamed of, performing with leading companies, including Dutch National Ballet (DNB) and Boston Ballet, and sharing her experience with eloquence on the world stage.
Born Mabinty Bangura in Kenema, south-eastern Sierra Leone, she was first encouraged to read when her father, a trader, taught her the Arabic alphabet as a toddler. After he was killed by rebels from the Revolutionary United Front in the diamond mine where he was working, his wife and child were reluctantly taken in by his brother. Her mother died of starvation, and her uncle left the her at an orphanage in Makeni.
There, she said, the children were ranked in order of favour. Staff called DePrince “devil child”, due to the white patches on her chest from vitiligo, a pigmentation condition. Ranked 27th of 27, she was always last in line for food.
When rebel soldiers attacked the orphanage, the children fled, walking for two weeks through the jungle and over mountains until reaching a refugee camp in Guinea and then on to Ghana, where she met Elaine and Charles DePrince.
The American couple – she was a retired special educational needs teacher, he an executive at a nutritional supplement company – adopted Michaela and her friend Mia (whose birth name was also Mabinty), raising them first in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and then Vermont (they were later joined by Mariel, also from the orphanage).
The experience inevitably left scars: she had seen her teacher murdered and was haunted by images of amputations and other atrocities. But she also enthusiastically pursued maths, swimming and especially ballet. She constantly watched a DVD of The Nutcracker, and when taken to see the ballet on stagethe five-year-old loudly pointed out all the ballerina’s errors.
“She was the funniest child,” Elaine recalled, “stubborn, strong, contrary, very bright, competitive and a perfectionist. She is very tough because of everything she has lived through, and she needs that now as a dancer.”
DePrince went on to train in Philadelphia and at the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at American Ballet Theatre in New York. She was prominent in the award-winning documentary First Position (2011), following young dancers competing at the prestigious Youth America Grand Prix, and also performed on the US TV series Dancing With the Stars.
After her professional debut in Le Corsaire at the Joburg theatre, South Africa, in 2012, she joined Dance Theatre of Harlem as the youngest member of the company. She moved to Amsterdam in 2013, where the dance blogger Jane Lambert saw her dance the virtuosic Soviet workout Diana and Actaeon with the junior company of DNB, describing her as “quite simply the most exciting dancer I have seen for quite a while”.
DePrince joined the main company of DNB, performing Balanchine (including Jewels, Who Cares? and the fizzy Tarantella), leading roles in The Nutcracker and Christopher Wheeldon’s Cinderella, and new work by British choreographers including David Dawson.
The New York Times praised her “sheer power” and “spitfire quickness”, and DePrince gleamed in roles that exploited her strength and purpose. Guesting in English National Ballet’s Giselle in 2017, she played Myrtha, implacable leader of the “wilis”, spirits of jilted brides who dance men to their deaths. She was chillingly effective, her relentless jump described by one writer as “impossibly high and apparently indefatigable.”
She also drew on her resilience in romantic mode, playing the resourceful Swan in the film Coppelia (2021), a colourful blend of live dance and CGI animation. Her heroine, cycling around on a bright red bike, resisted as her fairy-tale village fell under the spell of a creepy cosmetic surgeon. “Lovely Michaela is such a strong dancer,” said her co-star Darcey Bussell, “but to see her as an actor was really special.”
DePrince learned Dutch (“I can say “turtle” now,” she told me in a 2015 interview) and became an Amsterdam celebrity. “I would be doing music videos, I’d be performing principal roles, [giving] speeches,” she said, “I was being pulled in so many directions.” She was promoted to soloist at DNB in 2016, but injury gave her time to explore therapy to address her post-traumatic stress disorder.
In 2021 she joined Boston Ballet, explaining, “it’s not about being a people pleaser. It’s about also having a good career and enjoying it, as both a human being and as an artist.” She left the company in May.
Although DePrince was dedicated to ballet, her work as an ambassador and role model – for children affected by war, for dance, for black representation in ballet – was arguably even more far-reaching. Alongside attention-grabbing appearances in Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016) and a multitude of endorsements and corporate gigs, she was a commanding speaker and vivid author, notably in the memoir Taking Flight (2014, published in the UK as Hope in a Ballet Shoe), written with Elaine.
The gala she led for War Child Netherlands as an ambassador was fittingly titled “Dare to Dream,” but realising her own ambitions depended on remarkable resolve and unsparing hard work. “Most people tell me that my life is a fairytale,” she declared in a 2014 TEDx Talk. “But I have to say I strongly disagree.”
Charles died in 2020 and Elaine died a day after Michaela. She is survived by her sisters Mia, Amie, Jaye, Mariel and Bee, and her brothers Erik and Adam.
• Michaela DePrince (Mabinty Bangura), ballet dancer, born 6 January 1995; died 10 September 2024
