Accepted into the elite Juilliard School in 1961 at age 10, she spent four years there, the lone Black girl surrounded by affluent white girls. At the time, many ballet companies rejected Black ...

She said she never saw herself as a great turner, or able to master some of the Black Swan’s tricky footwork. “It has every single ballet step in the book,” Miller says of the iconic ballet.

ballet dancer Unity Phelan stopped just before launching into the famed 32 fouettés – those crowd-pleasing whiplash turns on one leg performed by Odile, the devious Black Swan. “No fouettés ...