Tonight at the 2026 Academy Awards, Misty Copeland—the trailblazing American Ballet Theatre principal who retired from the company last fall—appeared onstage in a burst of feathers, jewels, and flame. It was a striking sight: during a performance of “I Lied to You,” the Oscar-nominated song from Sinners, classical ballet suddenly had the world’s attention.
If Copeland’s cameo alongside Sinners star Miles Caton, songwriter Raphael Saadiq, Shaboozey, and Alice Smith seemed like a pointed rebuttal to a certain Oscar nominee’s recent off-the-cuff remark about ballet existing outside of the cultural mainstream, the timing, she insists, a few days before the ceremony, is purely coincidental. “That’s definitely how it seems,” Copeland tells me from Los Angeles, fresh from rehearsal. “But it was not at all. I had agreed to do this before any of this stuff was happening and had blown up the way that it has.”
Indeed, as the performance’s creative director, Serena Göransson, explains, the Oscars moment was conceived as an extension of the world of Ryan Coogler’s film—a genre-blurring Southern gothic vampire epic steeped in blues music, folklore, and Black cultural history. (Göransson’s husband, Ludwig, wrote Sinners’s Oscar-nominated score.) And Copeland, in fact, was a part of that world all along.
“In the movie, Misty is referenced by the red ballerina”—a dancer who leaps and twirls across the frame during the surreal “I Lied to You” sequence—“a choice that was very intentional, echoing her iconic Firebird costume,” Göransson says. “We used to joke on set, ‘Maybe one day we’ll get to do this with the real Misty Copeland.’” As the Oscars approached, it turned out that making that happen required little more than picking up the phone.
For her appearance at the Dolby Theatre, “Ryan Coogler was really interested in having me wear a costume that represented one of the iconic roles that I’ve danced in my career,” Copeland says. “Swan Lake came up and then Firebird. And I think Firebird really connected to the film and the song in particular, in which there are all of these different spirits of history and culture and music and dance coming up.”
She wasn’t just any Firebird, either. For her performance at the Oscars, Copeland wore a costume created by theatrical polymath Geoffrey Holder for the landmark 1982 production of the ballet at Dance Theatre of Harlem, choreographed by John Taras to Igor Stravinsky’s early 20th-century score. Embedded in the design is a sankofa, a symbol used by the Akan people of Ghana to mean “‘going back to get it’—drawing wisdom from the past to build a stronger future,” explains Robert Garland, artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem—a fitting concept.