Misty Copeland: 'My career really is just now beginning'

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Misty Copeland has already achieved a crossover pop-culture fame that few dancers could ever hope to have. She's a best-selling author, a celebrity spokeswoman and a role model. In just the past five months, she's appeared in a Broadway show, presented at the Tonys, danced on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" and attended a White House state dinner. And now she's in the movies — the subject of "A Ballerina's Tale," a new documentary by Nelson George.

And yet, Copeland recently began just her first season as a principal ballerina with American Ballet Theatre. "I do feel that my career really is just now beginning," she says, laughing at how incongruous that sounds.

The offers and opportunities keep coming — but no matter the distractions, one thing comes first, she says. "I've never sacrificed a ballet class, I've never sacrificed a rehearsal, and that will never happen," Copeland said in a recent interview, scheduled on a Monday because that's the only day she can ever take off from her ABT duties. "It's not a hard balance. The dance is always first."

It's been less than four months since Copeland, now 33, made dance history by becoming the first female African-American principal dancer in ABT's 75-year history. That came just days after her widely covered New York debut in the ultimate ballerina role, Odette/Odile in "Swan Lake." It's a famously demanding role for any ballerina, but for Copeland, it was that much tougher because the world was watching.

There was another challenge, too, one that hardly anyone watching that historic performance was aware of. Copeland was still feeling the effects of surgery she had in 2012 to repair six stress fractures in her left tibia. It was a career-threatening injury; she's still not 100 percent.

"It's been three years and I'm still not jumping fully," Copeland says. "I mean, 32 fouettes [whipping turns] in 'Swan Lake' are on my surgery leg, and still today it's a struggle. It's so painful." But there's a reason the public didn't know about her injury, Copeland says: "We're not meant to expose those things. We're onstage presenting this beautiful, effortless experience for the audience."

George met Copeland at her 2012 debut in "Firebird," a huge leap in her career at the time. Backstage afterward, Copeland confessed she was in terrible pain, and she had to pull out of later performances. Once she'd had her surgery, George suggested a film that would chronicle her struggle.

They began shooting as Copeland attended one of her first post-surgery ballet classes, clearly nervous and unsteady. The film also includes footage of Copeland's first post-surgery guest performance, with a small company in Brooklyn.

"It's so hard to watch!" Copeland says now. "But it was just something I had to do, for my own sanity and confidence."

The film, which opened in New York earlier this month and went into wider release on Friday, also touches, not surprisingly, on the obstacles — including loneliness and self-doubt — that Copeland experienced as she rose through the ranks in the heavily white environment of classical dance. She comments early in the film that some people think she focuses too much on her race — on the fact that she is not just a ballerina, but a black ballerina.

"It's true," she says now. "It's brought up to me all the time that I focus too much on that, that art isn't about that, and you don't see color in art. But so much of the accomplishment that I have is that I'm a black ballerina. It wouldn't be the accomplishment that it is if I were just another girl who happened to have bigger breasts and was made a principal dancer!"

For now, Copeland needs to dance as much as she can and fit in the rest when possible.

"There's no, like, I'm gonna go off and be this celebrity and then I'll come in and do this performance," she notes. "It just doesn't work that way. And the company, they could care less if Jay Z wants me to come and perform at his concert! Their focus is putting on the best performers and performances they can."