Michaela DePrince seems like your typical 17-year-old. She likes Adele and “Glee” and “The Vampire Diaries,” and has a weakness for frozen yogurt.
But she’s also a rarity — having escaped an orphanage in war-ravaged Sierra Leone to become one of America’s few black classical ballerinas.
The new documentary “First Position” follows Michaela and five other young dancers as they compete for scholarships. Michaela won one to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School of American Ballet Theatre, where she’s studied for the past two years.
Tonight she’ll perform in the premiere of ABT’s spring season at the Met; in August, she’ll join the Dance Theatre of Harlem.
In the last few weeks, she’s been on talk shows and “Dancing With the Stars,” and in performances across the city. Even so, points out her proud mom, Elaine, who adopted her as a 4-year-old, she’s also finishing high school online with an A average.
Michaela herself seems wary of all the attention.
“I love it, but I don’t want people to have really high expectations and be disappointed with me,” she said the other day, during a break from rehearsal. “I just want to be a ballet dancer.”
But she understands how compelling her story is. Though her memories are vivid and terrifying, she doesn’t dwell on the horrors of her childhood.
“There was so much going on, it’s hard to forget,” she says. “There was a war around me — I was seeing people die, seeing everybody I cared about being ripped away from me.” Michaela remembers her father dying; the orphanage told Elaine her biological mother starved to death.
In the orphanage, she somehow got a hold of a dance magazine. On the cover was a photo of a beautiful ballerina. Michaela tucked the photo in her underwear (“I didn’t have any pockets”) and kept it. She decided then and there to become a dancer because that’s what happiness looked like — a smiling ballerina.
“I didn’t really think I would ever make it out of Africa,” she says. “I dreamt about it, but I didn’t think it would happen. But when I got here, I thought that I might as well try to live out my dream.”
In a hotel room in Sierra Leone with her new adoptive mother, Michaela whipped the photo out from her underwear and walked across the room on tiptoes, arms in the air. Even though she didn’t speak English, Elaine got the hint.
“It was a pretty clear sign,” she laughs.
After settling into her new home in Cherry Hill, NJ, the little girl saw a video of Balanchine’s “Nutcracker.” She learned every role.
“When I took her to see ‘The Nutcracker’ that Christmas, she noticed when someone made a mistake,” Elaine recalls. “She wasn’t even 5.”
Michaela was soon enrolled at the Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia, where she caught the eye of “First Position” director Bess Kargman.
While the nightmares are behind her, Michaela still has hurdles to leap. There are only a handful of black classical ballerinas in the country, Elaine DePrince notes, and most are fair-skinned. Her daughter has been turned down by a number of companies.
“Sometimes I feel like they seem to really enjoy my performance, yet they won’t take me because I look different,” Michaela says. “You see one color [onstage] and then all the sudden you see the oddball out . . . but if you enjoy my dancing, why should my skin color or body type bother you?”
She sometimes channels her past when she’s dancing. Last week, she performed alongside professional dancers in a benefit to raise money to fight cancer. As she leapt and twirled, Death, danced by a young man in a blazer, tried to grab her from her lover’s embrace.
As Michaela danced, she thought of her adoptive brother, Teddy, who died of AIDS at age 24, when she was 10. (He’d contracted HIV from contaminated blood products used to treat hemophilia.)
“I think my past has helped me to stay strong, but I try not to focus on it anymore,” she says. She smiles and stretches as she prepares to go back to class.
“Now it’s just my mom that gets me through every day.”