The Nutcracker is the gateway to ballet for a lot of people, and that's what it was for LaToya Princess Jackson. Princess was in college. She went to see a company called Bilethnik, a professional ballet company. They were putting on their annual production of The Nutcracker, but it looked different than most Nutcrackers.
You see.
I'm in the audience and the snow scene comes up, and all of these beautiful black ballerinas are dancing and the snow is falling on the stage, and it just looks so beautiful. I'll never forget the experience. I had never seen black ballerinas before, and so in my mind, I'm thinking, like, have these people always existed? And if so, why didn't I know about this? Because I would have loved to have done something like this early on in my life.
She had tried ballet back when she was a teenager, but after one class she was discouraged. At fourteen, she already felt behind and she was the only black kid in the class. This is not for me, she thought. But after this performance, Princess approached the directors. She asked how to pursue ballet for real and.
He's like, if you are serious about it, and you can put your ego aside and take classes with six and seven year olds. So they put me in the very basic ballet class with six and seven year olds, and I'm literally wearing the same uniforms they're wearing, like an adult at the bar with my same color leotard that they have on. And I never thought that I would be here where I am now, actually working in ballet.
Princess of made dance her career. She became a dancer, a producer, a ballet teacher. She got her master's degree at Harvard and Dramatic Arts, and she did some teaching through the Boston Ballet.
Then I look at the Boston Ballet Company and I'm like, there's nobody that looks like me. I'm wondering, why, what is the purpose of there not being ballerinas that look like me in major companies? Where are the black ballerinas?
What you would come to learn is there were lots of black ballerinas, They'd always been there. But there was something else too, this pattern of black dancers being pushed out of ballet memory and pushed out of ballet even as they're intrinsically shaping it.
So I feel like you can not talk about Balanchin without talking about how his esthetic has pulled from the black dancing body, and more specifically, how he was inspired by dancers like Katherine Dunham and Arthur Mitchell.
For My Heart podcasts in Rococo Punch, This is the Turning Room of Mirrors America Lants, Part eight. American Ballet Princess started looking for black ballerinas of the past, and one name she came across surprised her. It was a name she already knew well, a name most dancers know, but she'd only associated it with modern dance, not classical ballet. The name was Katherine Dunham. Catherine Dunham led from nineteen oh nine to two thousand and six. She's a pillar
of dance history. She's known for creating a whole new form of dance what's called the Dunham technique.
When I first took that dun On bar class, it was more about being connected to the ground as supposed to be upright. There were plias, but we were bare feet. I can understand this. I feel the movement in my body. I feel like I'm actually getting it. I feel like I belong in.
This Dunham technique is a type of modern dance. She pulled from dances from Africa and the Caribbean and Europe and nixed them with her own ideas about movement.
I had the syncopated steps, the movement of the hips, the isolation of the tors so the lot of movement close to the ground.
Catherine Dunham performed all over with her own company and created a school where she taught people like James Dean, Sydney Poitier, Shirley McLain and then Princess is looking through archives about ballet and here's Catherine Dunham, this person she's already felt a connection to through movement. What she learned is that before Catherine Dunham became the Catherine Dunham most people know, she studied classical ballet and she loved it.
She really was inspired to be a ballerino. And she talked specifically about how she wants to introduce the technique of ballet to black dancers and have it at their disposal so that they can show the genius of her race. She says, the genius of her race, which is the genius of our race.
In her early twenties, Catherine Dunham studied ballet in Chicago and then she started to teach it, but that was hard to do. Many dance studios refused to let her have classes because she and her students were black. Her first studio was a converted barn. In nineteen thirty, four years before Balancing founded the School of American Ballet, Catherine Dunham created her own ballet company. It was one of the first black ballet companies in the United States. She called it Ballet Negar.
And the company only lasted one month. I think a lot of factors happened. You have to have funding, you have to have been a factors, and there was the discouragement of we don't really want black ballet dancers in this space.
It seemed nearly impossible for white critics to associate black people with classical ballet. For example, white writer Walter Terry referenced the belief that black dancers were talented at jazz and what was referred to as quote primitive dance, not ballet.
And even some of the reviews they would have words like jungle or primal or the ethnic stuff that they're doing is great. I love it. Keep doing that, but stay away from the classical stuff. Take off those points, use dance barefoot, a thing in your element.
Eventually, Catherine Dunham's ballet teacher advised her to leave ballet and try modern dance. Hence the Catherine Dunham most people know today. And then she worked with someone who by now you're very familiar.
With, George Balanchin. George Balanchine and Catherine Dunham start to work on Cabin in the Sky, a musical.
They collaborate.
They were in effect co choreographers.
The New York Times called Cabin in the Sky a Negro fantasy. A white writer came up with this story that felt like folklore. The musical came out in nineteen forty. The entire cast was black. It was written, lyricized, composed, and directed by white people. Katherine Dunham danced in it. They asked balancing to stage it.
They actually lived together during that production because they were so broke that they had to live together.
This is Teresa Ruth Howard. She's a former ballet dancer, a dance journalist, and she works with ballet companies around the world on equity projects and culture change. She likes to imagine Katherine Dunham and George balancing living together during this time.
What are they talking about in the kitchen? But they're probably talking about ballet, and they're also probably talking about African dance and Caribbean Haitian dance. You know, great artistic conversations about how do you blend the two. She's actually probably choreographing Cabin in the Sky. Because he didn't know anything about that type of dance, he could not have choreographed it.
Valancine seemed aware that his whiteness limited his ability to do this musical well. He said, quote, what is the use of inventing a series of movements which are a white man's idea of a Negro's walk or stance or slouch. I only needed to indicate a disposition of the dancers on the stage. The rest almost improvised itself. I was careful to give dancers steps which they could do better than anyone else. Maybe this communicates respect a desire to stand out of the dancer's way, But a closer read
reveals something else. Dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottshield writes, quote the reason that he did not need to invent movements apart from the creativity of the dancers themselves, was that he had a seasoned, talented African American colleague to work with. To state that the rest almost improvised itself is to fall into the trap of assuming that African peoples do not work, train, or practice in order to perform successfully, that dancing for them is an inborn trade end quote.
And there's a hint of arrogance in what Balanchine said to Dixon. Gotshield says that Balanchine's words reduce black dancers to his puppets. She poses the question did Balancing give them steps to do? Or did the dancers suggest and show him steps from which he then chose.
Everything points back to Catherine Dunham. Her work is inspiring people like George Balanchine. If you don't have that conversation, then you erase her.
Balancing and Dunham collaborated. They choreographed together, but in the playbill just one person was listed.
Quote.
Entire production staged by George Balancing. Cabin in the Sky was just one example of many times Balanchine worked with black dam answers and choreographers on Broadway. He worked with Josephine Baker with tap dancer and choreographer Clarence Buddy Bradley with the Nicholas Brothers, and even earlier before he came to the US, Balancine was drawn in by what black
artists were doing in Europe. He soaked up the art and dance and music of the African diaspora before Balancing founded in New York City Ballet, He even talked about having an integrated ballet company, half of the dancers black, half of the dancers white. It was part of the initial sales pitch that Lincoln Kirstein wrote in a letter to a potential funder.
I want you to invest in this company. I've got this incredibly brilliant choreographer and he has these incredible ideas of having a company that is, you know, four male, four females white, and four of the same negroes. Right, this is the language of the time. If we stop there, it sounds like, ooh, this is an incredible thing, forward thinking for the time. However, if you look down in the text, he says, quote, he thinks the Negro part
of it would be amazingly supple. The combination of suppleness and this sense of time superb, So I think he means like the timing, like the rhythm right of these negroes, and the suppleness, and then he goes on to say, imagine them masked, for example. That's the part for me. I was like masked, like what are what are they
doing masked? The idea was to train these dancers together, but then these black dancers would somehow be masked on stage, so it doesn't give me the feeling of equity and equality. Of course, it never came to pass that you would see this integrated company on a New York City state.
When you feel like you started learning more about Balanchine's relationship to blackness.
That's an interesting question because it was not even about movement. It was his famous quote about a ballerina should be the color of appealed apple. And I can remember I was probably around eleven when I heard that, So imagine as a black ballet student at the time hearing that that was the thought a ballerina should be the color of appealed apple, and I remember thinking, well, if you leave appealed apple out on the counter for a minute, it turns brown anyway, So what does that mean?
Later Teresa saw Balancine's ballets like Jewels and the Four Temperaments.
Then you're like, oh, you know, yes, I want to dance that. But it's bittersweet because it's attached to this idea that you don't have a space in that art form. As for him, the irony of it is is that in the beginning, he wants to have this integrated company. He wants to see black bodies and white bodies represented
on the same stage. And so he's lauded in a way from being the pioneer of diversity in ballet, and yet out of his own mouth what a ballerina should look like doesn't represent that idea at all.
I've heard over and over again Balanchine's work allotted for his speed, his timing, his pushing ballet over the edge. But if you break those movements down, really track their essence where they came from. They're fundamental aspects of African dance.
He loved black culture and blackness. It was something that was useful to him.
Teresa Ruth Howard read the work of dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottshield, who laid out these fundamental principles of African art and African dance characteristics of the Africanist aesthetic. There's this youthfulness for one.
Strength, flexibility, speed, it's the ability to do extensions or splits, flexibility in the joints. We see this in the jitterbug. We see this in a lot of the African dance where they syncopate the body and invert the limbs. We see this in hip hop, where you wonder, how.
Do you do that?
How you turn your knees in and go all the way down to the ground. Isolations the spine is not rigid.
Also, a lack of center or many centers falling off balance. There's the rhythm, maybe multiple rhythms at once, and juxtaposing opposites at once, like fast energetic movements with a stoic face.
And that element of coolness that removed sort of aloofness that it's almost like you're doing all of this incredible movement, but you don't seem to be phased.
A lot of these movements are in direct contrast to traditional classical ballet, or even considered ugly by the ballet establishment, but once you list them out, you can't help but see them all over balancing's choreography. It's like They're what makes balancing, balancing the.
Hips forward, flex feet and hands. He's turning legs in and rolling hips out.
Even back in Apollo, the ballet that put balancing on the map when he was twenty four, is bathed in the Africanist esthetic parallel feet and three muses who kaikick with their pelvises thrusting forward. Then you can keep going down the line of Balanchine ballets, symphony and three movements, four temperaments, Concerto Barocco, stars and stripes, Bugaku jewels. Princess says, any black audience member can see it. Balancing didn't create these movements.
There's like hip movements and like it's not something that you can sometimes articulate. It's something that you just see. Yeah, I can see where that came from. Yeah, that's a little blackness in there right.
When you lay it out. It's clear that so much of what made Balanchine feel fresh to European and white audiences where the Africanist artistic principles he was using. It's like, what made Balanchine's ballet feel American was that it was black.
It's a vehicle. Blackness is a vehicle.
What do you mean by that it's a.
Vehicle to get people where they need to go. We see this culturally all the time. We see the Disney children like a mighty cyrus, right clean, squeaky clean. And when she wants to shift her image to be more adult, what does she do. She becomes black adjacent, she starts tworking, She surrounds herself with blackness. It gets a little raunchy, Oh my gosh. And then all of a sudden we stop thinking of her as Hannah Montana, And now she
has crossed over. And then once she's done crossing over, she's going to distance herself from blackness, that is, using it as a vehicle to get you to another place. So Balancine is using blackness as a vehicle to transform the ballet idiom into this new sort of avant garde version of itself in doses, in order to get him where he needs to be.
George Balanjan played with the idea of making his company half black and half white, but when the time came, that idea went out the window pretty fast. For years, he didn't hire any black dancers for the New York City Ballet, And then came a man named Arthur Mitchell, Arthur Mitchell studied at Catherine Dunham's dance school, and then he won a scholarship to the School of American Ballet. In nineteen fifty five, he was offered a position at
Valancine's company. He was the first black dancer ever to join it, the first to become a principal with the company. Teresa Ruth Howard points out that Arthur Mitchell might not have been the most obvious choice. Balancine had already worked with black ballet dancers who had more ballet training than Arthur Mitchell did.
He was a jazz dancer, he was a tap dancer. He started studying ballet at eighteen years old, so he was obviously not a tech cognition, but he had this other element that was somehow very enticing to Balanchine. Like he had Arthur Mitchell in the studio and he'd say, Arthur, show him how it's done.
There are moves that, even though within the classicism of ballet, when Mitchell does, it's still done with the little And it's so hard to say, because as black people, we have this thing where it's like you just know, like that's black dance, Like that's the little that's in there right.
Arthur Mitchell would later say he danced for his mother and his people. He said, quote being the first I was representing my people, so I had to go out there and be good. I couldn't make a mistake. Mitchell said that when he joined the company in nineteen fifty five, parents of some dancers called Balanchine and said they didn't want their daughter to dance with a black man. In response,
Balanjing said, well take your daughter out. As Arthur Mitchell began to perform with City Ballet, he sometimes heard yelling or racial slurs from the audience When the company was performing Stars and Stripes on TV, and producers wanted to take Arthur Mitchell out of the show. Valancine famously responded, if Mitchell doesn't dance, New York City Ballet doesn't dance.
Soon.
Balancing had a role in mind for Arthur that no other dancer in the company could fill. He wanted to make a patta d a duet. Stravinsky had composed a twelve tone score with irregular measures balanging, cast Diana Adams, a white woman, to be Arthur Mitchell's partner. It was called Agone. Balanging spent days with the dancers testing out different ideas, seeing what clicked. Their bodies and movements are
imprinted on the piece. Balanchine likes to juxtapose their black and white skin tones through the simple touch of a hand or wrist. Arthur Mitchell later said, my skin color against hers. It became part of the choreography. In the ballet, Arthur wore a white shirt and tight black pants, Diana wore a black leotard. The two dancers bodies repeatedly entangle each other and pull apart. They walk together, bending their knees in synchrony, and Diana curls her leg around Arthur's
body and all these different orientations. At one moment, She's held high in the air, legsplayed wide apart. She leans on Arthur's body for support, then slips down his body into the splits on the ground. As she slides beneath his legs to move behind him, he kneels and reaches back for her as she again opens her legs wide to the ceiling.
It was very sexually suggestive. When you're having a black man manipulating a white woman's body on stage in that era, it's salacious and it's shocking. But also it's very dangerous potentially to that black artist because he's got to exit the stage door. I don't know if that was even a thought that I'm doing this. This is art and
it's beautiful art. But as I said during BLM, black artists live black lives that matter, right, and so like the idea that Arthur Mitchell was going to perform this, but then he was also going to have to walk down the street as a black man. I'm just wondering if that, ever, you know, was thought of. I'm sure that Arthur Mitchell probably.
Thought of it.
This is actually an interracial couple. By giving them the specific movements that he gave them, he's really crossing societal lines about what's okay.
Teresa says, every time she sees the padada danced by a black man and a white woman, she gets a nod in her stomach. She senses the danger and it hits her on a cellular level.
Emmett Till was lynched in nineteen fifty five. Agon Is choreographed in nineteen fifty seven. Emmett Till is a young boy who it was suggested that he was flirting with or whistled at, a white woman Balanchine as a black male body on stage next to a white woman. They both are scantily clad as dancers are right, the body is fully exposed. And now when you think about the movements of Agon, you tell me what you would see, how you would feel, especially as a black person, it's
easy to just say, oh, it's a wonderful piece. It was so courageous, courageous for whom who really needed the courage to choreograph it, what courage was necessary to actually perform it as a black man. That's where my mind goes as I think about him choreographing and using blackness again as a tool.
After over a decade in Valancine's company, Arthur Mitchell had made up his mind.
I was dancing with New York City vallet and doctor Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated, and I felt I must come back to my community, Harlem and do something and do what I do well, which was dance and teach dancing. And I felt that the discipline that you learned from studying the classic dance would then go into the daily life of these young people, and they have a sense of self esteem that yes, I can.
He started with a garage and poured all the money he had into a dance floor, a bar and mirrors. It got so hot under the tin roof they left the sides open and kids started showing up. Just like with balanging, it started with a school and from the school, Arthur Mitchell would build a company. How would you describe Arthur Mitchell as a person.
So but this amazing amount of energy. He had a tenor voice. The first time I heard his voice, I was like, oh, his voice is so high.
Virginia Johnson was a founding member of Arthur Mitchell's ballet company, and.
He was always yelling. Oh my god, he was always yelling. But he also had this laugh that he would after he brutalizes you, No, he wasn't brutalizing you. After he directs you very distinctly. Then he'd find some joke to say, and then he would laugh and it would be punctuated with that Arthur Mitchell laugh.
There's a story Virginia Johnson has told many times. She was born in nineteen fifty and she started ballet when she was three years old.
I fell in love with it right from the start because I loved moving to music. I loved the whole idea of making the music in my body and having some relationship to this thing that was so incredibly beautiful.
Virginia trained and grew as a dancer at her school in Washington, DC, and it graduated. She planned to pursue ballet as a career.
When I was graduating, the director called me in and she said, well, you know, Virginia, you're going to have a career. You're very talented, but nobody's going to hire you in ballet. But it was the reality. The reality is nobody was going to hire.
Me at this point in nineteen sixty nine, The New York City Ballet, for example, had literally never hired a black female dancer, not one.
She said, you should go ahead and try modern dance, try contemporary dance, ty jazz, things I had never studied.
So instead of auditioning for ballet companies, Virginia went to NYU. She studied modern dance and joined the Black Student Union, all the while missing ballet.
I remember we went and visited the president of the university at some point told him that he had to deinvest from South Africa. So I had a little bit of a militant phase. But those people were looking at me like, well, what's wrong with you? Why are you a ballet dancer? And so I was a young person. I took that very seriously. Why I am a I
a ballad answer? That was a really rough period, and I did have this identity that was not acceptable to what people thought I should have, and there were many periods of questioning about that. I became aware of the fact that, oh my god, I'm doing this art form and it's not an art form that is usually assigned to my race. But you know, the love of it was so strong, and the identity I felt in it was so strong. I didn't feel like it was something
that was applicate. I felt like it was something that it's essentially who I am. Ballet is essentially who I am.
Virginia heard that Arthur Mitchell was teaching ballet classes in Harlem on Saturdays. So she figured she'd go get her ballet fixed each Saturday and she'd be okay.
So what up?
Arthur Mitchell taught in a church basement on Saint Nicholas in one hundred and forty first Street.
And I came and took class for the company. That first time, he looked at me and he said, well, there's some material there, but I'm going to have to retrain you. You can't dance at all. And that's what he said to me after the class. Well, you know, it was a test. It was a total test. Let me be as harsh to this woman as I possibly can and see if she comes back.
And what was he testing?
He was testing my determination, He was testing my what is that insulation? Can I keep the person separate from the artist to be Can I wound her so much that she can't stand it? Or can she just like put on the armor and do what needs to be done. Horrible, but you need to be very, very, very very strong to be a ballet dancer.
What Virginia learned when she took that ballet class was that Arthur Mitchell was starting his own ballet company, the Dance Theater of Harlem.
And so I had to get my parents to understand that I should walk away from the full scholarship and stipend at NYU. I was like, wait, what, You're going to walk away from that to work in the basement of a church with this maniac on a ballet company
that nobody wants. This is what I wanted. I was and Mitchell knew that he was creating a company, was set out to do something that people said couldn't happen, So he didn't want to have to hold people's hand through that process, like Okay, are you going to be a warrior or are you going to be a whimp? And the only one at Warriors? The established Vallet community were dubious about whether we should be in existence and
whether we could make this work. Also, in the black press, there were people going, you know, why this is the nineteen sixties, Why are you doing the white man's art form. You should be doing your own heritage, something that has some validity. But isn't my heritage whatever I took in here in this country, and isn't this part of it. We did feel a sense of power by being together.
Arthur Mitchell was such a dynamic and visionary leader. He took all of this very mixed bag of people and created a company, made us into one, and made us into his army of changing people's minds. There was a lot of talking about what we represented and how we had to be flawless. We were charged with being super people all the way through. We had to look right, We had to dance right. We had to behave right,
and it was a very narrowly defined right. Lots of people didn't make it in those first dance theater Hollen days because he was very strict about how he wanted us to represent twenty four to seven. They were talented dancers who just felt like they should be free to be who they were. But each of us agreed that this was more important than our individual need to be an individual to make the statement about what was possible in the art form.
Still, sometimes individuality was part of the message, and it started with something basic tights.
People think about ballet as pink tights and point shusy, and we in the very beginning more pink tights and point SHOs because we wanted to match that look.
But ballet pink is not just pink. It's about creating an elongated line, one that stretches from the tips of your fingers to your face, to your legs to your toes. For white dancers, pink does that. But Yangie Stevenson, another member of Dance Leader of Harlem, wanted to do things differently. Before she joined Arthur Mitchell's company, she'd received a scholarship to the school of American Ballet. It had been her dream to join Balanchine's company. She stayed in the school
for years waiting to be chosen by Balanchin. But Teresa Ruth Howard says, Yan, she wasn't given the chance.
She's training, she's seeing her white colleagues get contracts, and her teacher asked, well, do you want me to ask mister Balancin what he wants to do with you? And the teacher came back and said, well, you know, he's just not ready to break the line. And Yan, she was a deeply brown skinned woman, right, And so I always say, you can't break a line if you don't make a line. But if you add that up with the peeled apple, then we start to see a different picture.
Yan.
She later said she noticed when she wore pink tights her arms didn't match her legs. She felt disjointed. Now at Dance Theater of Harlem, Yan she was on a mission to make a change to that very line.
She would wear flesh colored tights over her pink tights and rehearsal.
She thought the flesh colored tights gave her a better line, and she took it up with Arthur Mitchell.
And she kept bugging him. She kept saying, we should be wearing flesh colored tights.
Clearly, Arthur Mitchell was drawn to this idea. He thought this was a statement his company could make, and he must have started scheming with the wardrobe mistress.
Because she had to dye the tights. She had to dye all these different shades of brown.
All these smooth, feathery strips of fabric in a range of beautiful brown heath. To get this prism of colors, the wardrobe mistress would need precision, and to extend the line, the shoes would need to match too. They debuted their new look on a European tour.
We were all different shades of brown, and so everybody had a pair of tights that met their own skin color. So when the curtain goes up on the stage, then you have this. It's not a rainbow, but it's all these shoes and it's so rich, and it's so nuanced, and it's so individual, non matching, and that was part of what was so gorgeous about dancing aar and we've had flash colored tights ever since.
Virginia loved to dance, But weirdly enough, she absolutely hated performing.
I was afraid of it, you know, I was so afraid of.
It, especially in some of Valancine's ballets like Agon.
I was not the athletic, abstract ballery. I never had that kind of sharp clarity, that precision, and I felt so exposed in those works. But then we started doing story ballets. That's my home. I love telling stories.
She danced in a Fellow Streetcarnde Desire Creole Gizelle. Virginia was the main character Giselle.
The story ballets You're Not You. Those were ballets that I didn't get as nervous in because it wasn't me. I could become that person.
Virginia was finding herself as a dancer. She was a dramatic ballerina, a great one.
I could feel the audience come to me, and I could feel myself go out to them, and I could feel that really dynamic connection between us living that story. That thing would happen, right. It gets a different kind of quiet. It's like you're in a vacuum together. You notice that there's no sound, that's the first thing you notice, But then you feel it in your heart. You feel like there's a hole sort of in your STERNA. Yeah,
in the center, in the core of your being. You feel the energy coming in here and you just feel this exchange of energy and it's nothing like it.
Virginia held a special place and dance Theater of Harlem, a founding member of Principal, A ballerina who danced the great roles. She was quiet and focused, always at the section of the ballet bar, distant from the rest, close to Arthur Mitchell. Arthur Mitchell said she was one of the truly great ballerinas dancing today. He called her my Virginia. How would you describe your relationship with Arthur Mitchell?
Obedient servant dancers were seen and not heard at all. Once again, it's a different time from now. It was a very hierarchical environment where decisions were made above our heads and we followed through. It was about serving a vision to present the ideal was for the greater good of everyone, and I also the obedient part was a necessity to get the work done. In retrospect, I think he had respect for who I was and what I could do, but that wasn't something that he could manifest
on a daily basis. I can remember feeling so crushed and unhappy, but getting to do what I love doing. So you know it's a trade off. You say, Okay, that's hurt, but ooh look what I have. What hurt? Well? You never I never felt that I was doing it right, that I was good enough, that it was the thing that it should be. Never. Never, there was never a moment I was like good.
Never.
No, no, it could always be better. It could always be better.
Virginia says she only stopped dancing when she realized she wasn't going to get any better than she already was.
Then I had to say, I've got to go. It's time to go.
After twenty eight years with the company, she retired from the stage. She became the founding editor in chief of Point Magazine, a magazine I poured over and kept in slippery, lopsided piles under my bed as a kid. In the meantime, dance Leader of Harlem was struggling. Money was always an issue, and in two thousand and four the company went on hiatus. The break was supposed to be temporary, but years passed, and then in two thousand and nine, Arthur Mitchell called Virginia.
He said, well, look, you know I'm going to leave, and I want you to take over.
He asked her to take over Dance Theater of Harlem. She felt she couldn't say no.
I definitely, definitely, definitely did not want to be the brutal leader that Arthur Mitchell was. I definitely wanted to be somebody who recognized the individuals in the room and got them to grow and to become great artists without harming them. Simple enough, they're not just bodies to be shaped. She's a wiggle monster, A wiggle monster, wiggle monster, you're.
Gonna Virginia Johnson leads a rehearsal with a toddler on her lap. She's on tour with Dance Theater of Harlem, and it's one of the dancers.
Babies, you're so strong.
Whoa. The little girl comes along on tour with the company, and Virginia and the other dancers keep her on their hips when mom is dancing.
What oh, she said, words too? She said words? What words are we saying?
Then Virginia stands to give more pointed direction.
So the tour is fine. I'm not worried about that. But then everything just kind of goes flat and we have to have the three dimensional quality. Yeah, so you have you do downstage and upstage and then downstage. Yeah. For me, it seems like the hard thing is the season, not the tour, the double tour. You have to make the season. Yes, my goodness, you can't look in the mirror and then you turned face up stage, So you have to have that clarity.
There are nineteen dancers in the company now. But Virginia says when she first started to rebuild a dance theater of Harlem from scratch, the task wasn't easy. She decided to have a national audition.
To her we would have two hundred people in the room and five of them would be black. And that was a very sobering moment. It was a very sobering moment. And that hit me like, Okay, you know, Dance Seat of Harlem has been off the stage for almost ten years, and people are no longer thinking about us in ballet now. I was not just looking for African American dancers, and I didn't just hire African American dancers, but that's an important part of our message to put us on the
stage where other companies weren't. Even as late as twenty ten eleven, nobody wanted us in ballet. You know, it's still like, oh, well, you know, you can do the contemporary stuff, but you can't do the ballet stuff.
Black ballet dancers still hear this all the time. Maybe try contemporary. I talked to a dance leader of Harlem company member whose teacher said this just a few years ago.
You know, as we begin to fill in or rewrite the narrative, correct the narrative, we're starting to uncover the reality that whiteness as a construct has continuously used blackness to expand itself, if you.
Will, and then erasing that source in a way.
When you to be blunt when you are stealing things from people, are you citing your sources? Yes, I stole this from over here. No, And here's the reality. And I say that glibly. But the reality is is that it wasn't even considered to be stealing, Like the idea that white people thought that entitlement meant that they could take anything they wanted and absorb it. There was never
even an idea that one should include these people. They're lesser than right, given that it would make sense that no one in the Balanchine legacy would be talking about it that overtly they would not be owning that because he himself didn't own it.
Then it's not part of the oral history that gets passed down from dancer to student to next generation of ballet students.
Absolutely not, because they don't see it as a part of their story. Actually they see it as a footnote. Oh and then that thing. They don't see it as the actual sort of nucleus of what we understand to be the balancing aesthetic, that it's based on the African aesthetic. But what if we did.
Next time on the Turning?
In ballet companies, there's a lot of couples. I remember thinking to myself, I should get a boyfriend in the company to secure my job. If I could, like really show that I was a straight woman somehow, that would secure my spot.
The Turning is a production of Rococo, Punch and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and produced by Alan Lance Lesser and Me. Our story editor is Emily Foreman. Mixing and sound designed by James Trout. Jessica Crisa is our assistant producer. Andrea Assuage is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado. Special thanks to Brenda Dixon Gotshield, who traced the Africanist esthetic through Balanjine's ballets in her book Digging the Africanist
Presence in American Performance, Dance and other contexts. Also special thanks to Teresa Ruth Howard. She's created an incredible online resource called Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet or mob Ballet. It presents the stories of more than six hundred Black artists in the field of ballet. You can read them all at mobballet dot org. Our executive producers are John Parati and Jessica Alpert at Rocco Punch at Gatrina Norbel
and Nikki Etour at iHeart Podcasts. For photos and more details on the series, follow us on Instagram at Rococo Punch, and you can reach out via email The Turning at Rococo Punch dot com. I'm Erica Lance. Thanks for listening.