Tonight on the 2026 Academy Awards, Misty Copeland—the trailblazing American Ballet Theatre principal dancer who retired from the corporate final fall—appeared onstage in a burst of feathers, jewels, and flame. It was a placing sight: Throughout a efficiency of “I Lied to You,” the Oscar-nominated tune from Sinners, classical ballet abruptly had the world’s consideration.
If Copeland’s cameo alongside Sinners star Miles Caton, songwriter Raphael Saadiq, Shaboozey, and Alice Smith appeared like a pointed rebuttal to a sure Oscar nominee’s current off-the-cuff comment about ballet current outdoors of the cultural mainstream, the timing, she insists just a few days earlier than the ceremony, is only coincidental. “That’s positively the way it appears,” Copeland advised me from Los Angeles, recent from rehearsal. “However it was by no means. I had agreed to do that earlier than any of these items was taking place and had blown up the best way that it has.”
Certainly, because the efficiency’s artistic producer, Serena Göransson, explains, the Oscars second was conceived as an extension of the world of Ryan Coogler’s movie—a genre-blurring Southern Gothic vampire epic steeped in blues music, folklore, and Black cultural historical past. (Göransson’s husband, Ludwig, wrote Sinners’s Oscar-nominated rating.) And Copeland, in actual fact, was part of that world all alongside.
“Within the film, Misty is referenced by the crimson ballerina [a dancer who leaps and twirls across the frame during the surreal “I Lied to You” sequence], a alternative that was very intentional, echoing her iconic Firebird costume,” Göransson says. “We used to joke on set, ‘Perhaps at some point we’ll get to do that with the true Misty Copeland.’” Because the Oscars approached, it turned out that making that occur required little greater than choosing up the cellphone.
For her look on the Dolby Theatre, “Ryan Coogler was actually eager about having me put on a dressing up that represented one of many iconic roles that I’ve danced in my profession,” Copeland says. “Swan Lake got here up, after which Firebird. And I believe Firebird actually linked to the movie and the tune particularly, by which there are all of those totally different spirits of historical past and tradition and music and dance developing.”
She wasn’t simply any Firebird both. For her efficiency on the Oscars, Copeland wore a dressing up created by theatrical polymath Geoffrey Holder for the landmark 1982 manufacturing of the ballet at Dance Theatre of Harlem, choreographed by John Taras to Igor Stravinsky’s early-Twentieth-century rating. Embedded within the design is a sankofa, an emblem utilized by the Akan folks of Ghana to imply “going again to get it, drawing knowledge from the previous to construct a stronger future,” explains Robert Garland, creative director of Dance Theatre of Harlem—a becoming idea.
