March 7, 2023 • 48 mins
PART EIGHT -
"Blackness is a vehicle. It's a vehicle to get people where they need to go."
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
You see.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
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,
(00:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
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
(01:51):
that they have on. And I never thought that I
would be here where I am now, actually working in ballet.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
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 looked
like me in major companies? Where are the black ballerinas?
Speaker 1 (02:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
So I feel like you can not talk about balanching
without talking about how his aesthetic has pulled from the
black dancing body, and more specifically, how he was inspired
by dancers like Katherine Dunham and Arthur Mitchell.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
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
(03:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
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 plia's, 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.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
This Dunham technique is a type of modern dance. She
pulled from dances from Africa and the Caribbean and Europe
and mixed them with her own ideas about movement.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
I had the syncopated steps, the movement of the hips,
the isolation of the tors, the lot of movement close
to the ground.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Catherine Dunham performed all over with her own company and
created a school where she taught people like James Dean,
Sidney Poitier, Shirley Maclain. 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
(05:04):
people know, she studied classical ballet and she loved it.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
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
(05:35):
genius of our race.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
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 refuse to let her
have classes because she and her students were black. Her
first studio was a converted barn. In nineteen thirty, four
(06:03):
years before Ballenging 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.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
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
(06:36):
in this space.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
And even some of the reviews they would have words
like jungle or primal or the ethnic stuff that they're
doing is great.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Keep doing that, but stay away from the classical stuff.
Take off those points. Youth dance, barefoot, a thing in
your element.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
George Balanchin. George Balanchine and Catherine Dunham start to work
on Cabin in the Sky, a musical.
Speaker 4 (07:37):
They collaborate.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
They were in effect co choreographers.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
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. After Dunham danced in it,
they asked Balancing to stage it.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
They actually lived together during that production because they were
so broke that they had to live together.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
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 Balanging living together during
this time.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
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
(08:52):
anything about that type of dance, he could not have
choreographed it.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
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
(09:23):
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
(09:45):
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
(10:07):
to Dixon. Gottshield says that Balancine'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.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Balancing and Dunham collaborated. They choreographed together, but in the
playbill just one person was listed.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Entire production staged by George balancin. 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
(11:07):
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 New York City Ballet, he even talked about having
an integrated ballet company, half of the dancers black, half
(11:29):
of the dancers white. It was part of the initial
sales pitch that Lincoln Kirstein wrote in a letter to
a potential funder.
Speaker 4 (11:37):
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,
(11:58):
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
(12:19):
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,
(12:42):
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 store.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
When you feel like you started learning more about Balanchine's
relationship to blackness.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
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
(13:31):
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?
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Later Teresa saw Balancine's ballets like Jewels and the Four Temperaments.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
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
(14:15):
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, does it represent that idea at all?
Speaker 1 (14:48):
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 are fundamental aspects of
African dance.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
He loved black culture and blackness. It was something that
was useful to him.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Teresa Ruth Howard read the work of dance scholar Brenda
Dixon Gotshield, who laid out these fundamental principles of African
art and African dance characteristics of the Africanist aesthetic. There's
this youthfulness for one.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
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
(15:46):
you do that? How you turn your knees in and
go all the way down to the ground. Isolations the
spine is not rigid.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
Hips forward, flex feet and hands. He's turning legs in
and rolling hips out.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
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,
(17:20):
any black audience member can see it. Balancing didn't create
these movements.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
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
(18:15):
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
(18:36):
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 Idium into this
new sort of avant garde version of itself in doses,
in order to get him where he needs to be.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
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.
(19:26):
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 in
Balancine's company, who 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 balancing had already worked
(19:48):
with black ballet dancers who had more ballet training than
Arthur Mitchell did.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
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,
(21:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
Soon.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Balancing had a role in mind for Arthur that no
other dancer in the company could fill. He wanted to
make a podad 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.
(22:00):
Balancing 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
(22:23):
a white shirt and tight black pants, Diana wore a
black leotard. The two dancer's 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 in all
these different orientations. At one moment, she's held high in
(22:45):
the air, legs splayed 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.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
It was very.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
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.
(23:40):
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
(24:00):
as a black man. I'm just wondering if that, ever,
you know, was thought of. I'm sure that Arthur Mitchell.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Probably thought of it.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Teresa says, every time she sees the Poda Da 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.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
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
(25:01):
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,
(25:22):
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
(25:45):
goes as I think about him choreographing and using blackness
again as a tool.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
After over a decade in Valancine's company, Arthur Mitchell had
made up his mind.
Speaker 6 (26:00):
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
(26:23):
the daily life of these young people, and they have
a sense of self esteem that yes, I can.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
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 Balanjing, it started with a school and from the school,
Arthur Mitchell would build a company. How would you describe
(26:55):
Arthur Mitchell as a person.
Speaker 5 (26:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Virginia Johnson was a founding member of Arthur Mitchell's ballet company, and.
Speaker 5 (27:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
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.
Speaker 5 (27:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Virginia trained and grew as a dancer at her school
in Washington, DC, and it graduated. She planned to pursue
ballet as a career.
Speaker 5 (28:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
But it was the reality. The reality is nobody was
going to hire.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:24):
She said, you should go ahead and try modern dance,
try contemporary dance, ty jazz things I never studied.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:43):
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
(29:04):
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,
(29:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
So went up.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Arthur Mitchell taught in a church basement on Saint Nicholas
in one hundred and forty first Street.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
And I came and took class for the company. That
first time. He looked at me and 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
(30:21):
see if she comes back.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
And what was he testing?
Speaker 5 (30:25):
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,
(30:50):
but you need to be very, very, very very strong
to be a ballet dancer.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
What Virginia learned when she took that ballet class was
that Arthur Mitchell was starting his own ballet company, the
Dance Theater of Harlem.
Speaker 5 (31:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
This is what I wanted.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
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 he only want at warriors. The established ballet community
(32:19):
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.
(32:41):
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
(33:06):
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 Follen
(33:27):
days because he was very strict about how he wanted
us to represent twenty four to seven.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
There were talented dancers who just felt like they should
be free to be who they were.
Speaker 5 (33:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Still, sometimes individuality was part of the message, and it
started with something basic tights.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
People think about ballet as pink tights and point shus,
and we in the very beginning more pink tights and
point shoos because we wanted to match that look.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
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.
(34:27):
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 balancing, But Teresa
Ruth Howard says, Yan, she wasn't given the chance.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
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
(35:06):
always say, you can't break a line if you don't
make a line.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
But if you.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
Add that up with the peeled apple, then we start
to see a different picture. Yan.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
She would wear flesh colored tights over her pink tights
and rehearsal.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
She thought the flesh colored tights gave her a better line,
and she took it up with Arthur Mitchell.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
And she kept bugging him. She kept saying, we should
be wearing flesh colored tights.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Because she had to dye the tights. She had to
dye all these different shades of brown.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
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.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
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 a that dancing car. And
(36:33):
we've had last colored tights ever since.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Virginia loved to dance, but weirdly enough, she absolutely hated performing.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
I was afraid of it, you know, I was so
afraid of.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
It, especially in some of Balancine's ballets like Agon.
Speaker 5 (36:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
That's my home. I love telling stories.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
She danced in a Fellow Streetcar, Nade Desire, Creole Gizelle.
Virginia was the main character Giselle.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
The story ballets You're Not You.
Speaker 5 (37:36):
Those were ballets that I didn't get as nervous in
because it wasn't me.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
I could become that person.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Virginia was finding herself as a dancer. She was a
dramatic ballerina, a great one.
Speaker 5 (37:58):
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
(38:21):
notice that there's no sound, that's the first thing you notice,
but then you feel it in your heart.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
You feel like there's a hole sort of in your sternum.
Speaker 5 (38:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Nothing like it.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
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 ballerinos dancing today. He called her my Virginia.
(39:11):
How would you describe your relationship with Arthur Mitchell?
Speaker 5 (39:14):
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
(39:35):
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
(39:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
What I have. What hurt? Well? You never.
Speaker 5 (40:18):
I never felt that I was doing it right, that
I was good enough, that it was the thing that
should be.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Never. Never, there was never a moment I was like good.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Never.
Speaker 5 (40:32):
No, No, it could always be better. It could always
be better.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Virginia says she only stopped dancing when she realized she
wasn't going to get any better than she already was.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Then I had to say, I've got to go. It's
time to go.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
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,
(41:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Said, well, look, you know I'm going to leave and
I want your to take over.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
He asked her to take over dance leader of Harlem.
She felt she couldn't say no.
Speaker 5 (41:39):
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 the simple enough, They're not just bodies to be shaped.
(42:09):
She's a wiggle monster, a wiggle monster, wiggle Monstern.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Virginia Johnson leads a rehearsal with a toddler on her lap.
She's on tour with a dance theater of Harlem, and
it's one of the dancers.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
Babies, you're so strong.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
What oh, she said, words too? She said words? What
words are we saying?
Speaker 1 (42:39):
Then Virginia stands to give more pointed direction.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
So the tour is fine, I'm not worried about that.
Speaker 5 (42:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yep.
Speaker 5 (42:54):
For me, it seems like the hard thing is the season,
not the tour, the double tour.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
You have to make the season line.
Speaker 5 (43:00):
Yes, my goodness, you can't look in the mirror and
then you turned face upstage.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
So you have to have that clarity.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
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.
Speaker 5 (43:22):
To her, we would have two hundred people in the
room and five of them won't be black. And that
was a very sobering moment. That 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,
(43:43):
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
(44:05):
still like, oh, well, you know, you can do the
contemporary stuff, but you can't do.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
The ballet stuff.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
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.
Speaker 4 (44:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Will, and then erasing that source in a way.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
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
(45:13):
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,
(45:35):
that overtly, they would not be owning that because he
himself didn't own it.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Then it's not part of the oral history that gets
passed down from dancer to student to next generation of
ballet students.
Speaker 4 (45:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Next time on the Turning?
Speaker 7 (46:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
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 Krisa is our assistant producer. Andrea
Assoahe is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
(47:23):
Special thanks to Brenda Dixon Gottshield, who traced the Africanist
aesthetic 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.
(47:44):
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 producer are John
Parati and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch at Katrina Norbel
(48:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
I'm Erica Lance. Thanks for listening.
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.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
You see.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
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,
(00:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
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
(01:51):
that they have on. And I never thought that I
would be here where I am now, actually working in ballet.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
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 looked
like me in major companies? Where are the black ballerinas?
Speaker 1 (02:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
So I feel like you can not talk about balanching
without talking about how his aesthetic has pulled from the
black dancing body, and more specifically, how he was inspired
by dancers like Katherine Dunham and Arthur Mitchell.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
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
(03:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
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 plia's, 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.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
This Dunham technique is a type of modern dance. She
pulled from dances from Africa and the Caribbean and Europe
and mixed them with her own ideas about movement.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
I had the syncopated steps, the movement of the hips,
the isolation of the tors, the lot of movement close
to the ground.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Catherine Dunham performed all over with her own company and
created a school where she taught people like James Dean,
Sidney Poitier, Shirley Maclain. 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
(05:04):
people know, she studied classical ballet and she loved it.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
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
(05:35):
genius of our race.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
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 refuse to let her
have classes because she and her students were black. Her
first studio was a converted barn. In nineteen thirty, four
(06:03):
years before Ballenging 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.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
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
(06:36):
in this space.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
And even some of the reviews they would have words
like jungle or primal or the ethnic stuff that they're
doing is great.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
I love it.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Keep doing that, but stay away from the classical stuff.
Take off those points. Youth dance, barefoot, a thing in
your element.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
George Balanchin. George Balanchine and Catherine Dunham start to work
on Cabin in the Sky, a musical.
Speaker 4 (07:37):
They collaborate.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
They were in effect co choreographers.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
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. After Dunham danced in it,
they asked Balancing to stage it.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
They actually lived together during that production because they were
so broke that they had to live together.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
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 Balanging living together during
this time.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
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
(08:52):
anything about that type of dance, he could not have
choreographed it.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
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
(09:23):
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
(09:45):
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
(10:07):
to Dixon. Gottshield says that Balancine'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.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Balancing and Dunham collaborated. They choreographed together, but in the
playbill just one person was listed.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Quote.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Entire production staged by George balancin. 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
(11:07):
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 New York City Ballet, he even talked about having
an integrated ballet company, half of the dancers black, half
(11:29):
of the dancers white. It was part of the initial
sales pitch that Lincoln Kirstein wrote in a letter to
a potential funder.
Speaker 4 (11:37):
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,
(11:58):
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
(12:19):
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,
(12:42):
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 store.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
When you feel like you started learning more about Balanchine's
relationship to blackness.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
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
(13:31):
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?
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Later Teresa saw Balancine's ballets like Jewels and the Four Temperaments.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
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
(14:15):
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, does it represent that idea at all?
Speaker 1 (14:48):
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 are fundamental aspects of
African dance.
Speaker 4 (15:03):
He loved black culture and blackness. It was something that
was useful to him.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
Teresa Ruth Howard read the work of dance scholar Brenda
Dixon Gotshield, who laid out these fundamental principles of African
art and African dance characteristics of the Africanist aesthetic. There's
this youthfulness for one.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
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
(15:46):
you do that? How you turn your knees in and
go all the way down to the ground. Isolations the
spine is not rigid.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
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.
Speaker 4 (16:40):
Hips forward, flex feet and hands. He's turning legs in
and rolling hips out.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
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,
(17:20):
any black audience member can see it. Balancing didn't create
these movements.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
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
(18:15):
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
(18:36):
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 Idium into this
new sort of avant garde version of itself in doses,
in order to get him where he needs to be.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
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.
(19:26):
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 in
Balancine's company, who 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 balancing had already worked
(19:48):
with black ballet dancers who had more ballet training than
Arthur Mitchell did.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
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,
(21:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
Soon.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Balancing had a role in mind for Arthur that no
other dancer in the company could fill. He wanted to
make a podad 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.
(22:00):
Balancing 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
(22:23):
a white shirt and tight black pants, Diana wore a
black leotard. The two dancer's 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 in all
these different orientations. At one moment, she's held high in
(22:45):
the air, legs splayed 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.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
It was very.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
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.
(23:40):
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
(24:00):
as a black man. I'm just wondering if that, ever,
you know, was thought of. I'm sure that Arthur Mitchell.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Probably thought of it.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Teresa says, every time she sees the Poda Da 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.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
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
(25:01):
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,
(25:22):
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
(25:45):
goes as I think about him choreographing and using blackness
again as a tool.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
After over a decade in Valancine's company, Arthur Mitchell had
made up his mind.
Speaker 6 (26:00):
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
(26:23):
the daily life of these young people, and they have
a sense of self esteem that yes, I can.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
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 Balanjing, it started with a school and from the school,
Arthur Mitchell would build a company. How would you describe
(26:55):
Arthur Mitchell as a person.
Speaker 5 (26:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Virginia Johnson was a founding member of Arthur Mitchell's ballet company, and.
Speaker 5 (27:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
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.
Speaker 5 (27:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Virginia trained and grew as a dancer at her school
in Washington, DC, and it graduated. She planned to pursue
ballet as a career.
Speaker 5 (28:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
But it was the reality. The reality is nobody was
going to hire.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:24):
She said, you should go ahead and try modern dance,
try contemporary dance, ty jazz things I never studied.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
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.
Speaker 5 (28:43):
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
(29:04):
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,
(29:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
So went up.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Arthur Mitchell taught in a church basement on Saint Nicholas
in one hundred and forty first Street.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
And I came and took class for the company. That
first time. He looked at me and 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
(30:21):
see if she comes back.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
And what was he testing?
Speaker 5 (30:25):
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,
(30:50):
but you need to be very, very, very very strong
to be a ballet dancer.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
What Virginia learned when she took that ballet class was
that Arthur Mitchell was starting his own ballet company, the
Dance Theater of Harlem.
Speaker 5 (31:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
This is what I wanted.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
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 he only want at warriors. The established ballet community
(32:19):
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.
(32:41):
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
(33:06):
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 Follen
(33:27):
days because he was very strict about how he wanted
us to represent twenty four to seven.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
There were talented dancers who just felt like they should
be free to be who they were.
Speaker 5 (33:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Still, sometimes individuality was part of the message, and it
started with something basic tights.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
People think about ballet as pink tights and point shus,
and we in the very beginning more pink tights and
point shoos because we wanted to match that look.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
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.
(34:27):
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 balancing, But Teresa
Ruth Howard says, Yan, she wasn't given the chance.
Speaker 4 (34:43):
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
(35:06):
always say, you can't break a line if you don't
make a line.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
But if you.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
Add that up with the peeled apple, then we start
to see a different picture. Yan.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
She would wear flesh colored tights over her pink tights
and rehearsal.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
She thought the flesh colored tights gave her a better line,
and she took it up with Arthur Mitchell.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
And she kept bugging him. She kept saying, we should
be wearing flesh colored tights.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Because she had to dye the tights. She had to
dye all these different shades of brown.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
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.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
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 a that dancing car. And
(36:33):
we've had last colored tights ever since.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Virginia loved to dance, but weirdly enough, she absolutely hated performing.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
I was afraid of it, you know, I was so
afraid of.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
It, especially in some of Balancine's ballets like Agon.
Speaker 5 (36:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
That's my home. I love telling stories.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
She danced in a Fellow Streetcar, Nade Desire, Creole Gizelle.
Virginia was the main character Giselle.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
The story ballets You're Not You.
Speaker 5 (37:36):
Those were ballets that I didn't get as nervous in
because it wasn't me.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
I could become that person.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Virginia was finding herself as a dancer. She was a
dramatic ballerina, a great one.
Speaker 5 (37:58):
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
(38:21):
notice that there's no sound, that's the first thing you notice,
but then you feel it in your heart.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
You feel like there's a hole sort of in your sternum.
Speaker 5 (38:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Nothing like it.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
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 ballerinos dancing today. He called her my Virginia.
(39:11):
How would you describe your relationship with Arthur Mitchell?
Speaker 5 (39:14):
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
(39:35):
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
(39:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
What I have. What hurt? Well? You never.
Speaker 5 (40:18):
I never felt that I was doing it right, that
I was good enough, that it was the thing that
should be.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Never. Never, there was never a moment I was like good.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Never.
Speaker 5 (40:32):
No, No, it could always be better. It could always
be better.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Virginia says she only stopped dancing when she realized she
wasn't going to get any better than she already was.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
Then I had to say, I've got to go. It's
time to go.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
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,
(41:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Said, well, look, you know I'm going to leave and
I want your to take over.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
He asked her to take over dance leader of Harlem.
She felt she couldn't say no.
Speaker 5 (41:39):
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 the simple enough, They're not just bodies to be shaped.
(42:09):
She's a wiggle monster, a wiggle monster, wiggle Monstern.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Virginia Johnson leads a rehearsal with a toddler on her lap.
She's on tour with a dance theater of Harlem, and
it's one of the dancers.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
Babies, you're so strong.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
What oh, she said, words too? She said words? What
words are we saying?
Speaker 1 (42:39):
Then Virginia stands to give more pointed direction.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
So the tour is fine, I'm not worried about that.
Speaker 5 (42:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
Yep.
Speaker 5 (42:54):
For me, it seems like the hard thing is the season,
not the tour, the double tour.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
You have to make the season line.
Speaker 5 (43:00):
Yes, my goodness, you can't look in the mirror and
then you turned face upstage.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
So you have to have that clarity.
Speaker 1 (43:10):
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.
Speaker 5 (43:22):
To her, we would have two hundred people in the
room and five of them won't be black. And that
was a very sobering moment. That 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,
(43:43):
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
(44:05):
still like, oh, well, you know, you can do the
contemporary stuff, but you can't do.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
The ballet stuff.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
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.
Speaker 4 (44:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
Will, and then erasing that source in a way.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
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
(45:13):
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,
(45:35):
that overtly, they would not be owning that because he
himself didn't own it.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Then it's not part of the oral history that gets
passed down from dancer to student to next generation of
ballet students.
Speaker 4 (45:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Next time on the Turning?
Speaker 7 (46:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
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 Krisa is our assistant producer. Andrea
Assoahe is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
(47:23):
Special thanks to Brenda Dixon Gottshield, who traced the Africanist
aesthetic 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.
(47:44):
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 producer are John
Parati and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch at Katrina Norbel
(48:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
I'm Erica Lance. Thanks for listening.
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