Speaker 1: The Nutcracker is the gateway to ballet for a lot
Speaker 1: of people, and that's what it was for LaToya Princess Jackson.
Speaker 1: Princess was in college. She went to see a company
Speaker 1: called Bilethnik, a professional ballet company. They were putting on
Speaker 1: their annual production of The Nutcracker, but it looked different
Speaker 1: than most Nutcrackers.
Speaker 2: You see.
Speaker 3: I'm in the audience and the snow scene comes up,
Speaker 3: and all of these beautiful black ballerinas are dancing and
Speaker 3: the snow is falling on the stage, and it just
Speaker 3: looks so beautiful. I'll never forget the experience. I had
Speaker 3: never seen black ballerinas before, and so in my mind,
Speaker 3: I'm thinking, like, have these people always existed? And if so,
Speaker 3: why didn't I know about this? Because I would have
Speaker 3: loved to have done something like this early on in
Speaker 3: my life.
Speaker 1: She had tried ballet back when she was a teenager,
Speaker 1: but after one class she was discouraged. At fourteen, she
Speaker 1: already felt behind and she was the only black kid
Speaker 1: in the class. This is not for me, she thought.
Speaker 1: But after this performance, Princess approached the directors. She asked
Speaker 1: how to pursue ballet for real and.
Speaker 3: He's like, if you are serious about it, and you
Speaker 3: can put your ego aside and take classes with six
Speaker 3: and seven year olds. So they put me in the
Speaker 3: very basic ballet class with six and seven year olds,
Speaker 3: and I'm literally wearing the same uniforms they're wearing, like
Speaker 3: an adult at the bar with my same color leotard
Speaker 3: that they have on. And I never thought that I
Speaker 3: would be here where I am now, actually working in ballet.
Speaker 1: Princess of made dance her career. She became a dancer,
Speaker 1: a producer, a ballet teacher. She got her master's degree
Speaker 1: at Harvard and Dramatic Arts, and she did some teaching
Speaker 1: through the Boston Ballet.
Speaker 3: Then I look at the Boston Ballet Company and I'm like,
Speaker 3: there's nobody that looks like me. I'm wondering, why, what
Speaker 3: is the purpose of there not being ballerinas that look
Speaker 3: like me in major companies? Where are the black ballerinas?
Speaker 1: What you would come to learn is there were lots
Speaker 1: of black ballerinas, They'd always been there. But there was
Speaker 1: something else too, this pattern of black dancers being pushed
Speaker 1: out of ballet memory and pushed out of ballet even
Speaker 1: as they're intrinsically shaping it.
Speaker 3: So I feel like you can not talk about Balanchin
Speaker 3: without talking about how his esthetic has pulled from the
Speaker 3: black dancing body, and more specifically, how he was inspired
Speaker 3: by dancers like Katherine Dunham and Arthur Mitchell.
Speaker 1: For My Heart podcasts in Rococo Punch, This is the
Speaker 1: Turning Room of Mirrors America Lants, Part eight. American Ballet
Speaker 1: Princess started looking for black ballerinas of the past, and
Speaker 1: one name she came across surprised her. It was a
Speaker 1: name she already knew well, a name most dancers know,
Speaker 1: but she'd only associated it with modern dance, not classical ballet.
Speaker 1: The name was Katherine Dunham. Catherine Dunham led from nineteen
Speaker 1: oh nine to two thousand and six. She's a pillar
Speaker 1: of dance history. She's known for creating a whole new
Speaker 1: form of dance what's called the Dunham technique.
Speaker 3: When I first took that dun On bar class, it
Speaker 3: was more about being connected to the ground as supposed
Speaker 3: to be upright. There were plias, but we were bare feet.
Speaker 3: I can understand this. I feel the movement in my body.
Speaker 3: I feel like I'm actually getting it. I feel like
Speaker 3: I belong in.
Speaker 1: This Dunham technique is a type of modern dance. She
Speaker 1: pulled from dances from Africa and the Caribbean and Europe
Speaker 1: and nixed them with her own ideas about movement.
Speaker 3: I had the syncopated steps, the movement of the hips,
Speaker 3: the isolation of the tors so the lot of movement
Speaker 3: close to the ground.
Speaker 1: Catherine Dunham performed all over with her own company and
Speaker 1: created a school where she taught people like James Dean,
Speaker 1: Sydney Poitier, Shirley McLain and then Princess is looking through
Speaker 1: archives about ballet and here's Catherine Dunham, this person she's
Speaker 1: already felt a connection to through movement. What she learned
Speaker 1: is that before Catherine Dunham became the Catherine Dunham most
Speaker 1: people know, she studied classical ballet and she loved it.
Speaker 3: She really was inspired to be a ballerino. And she
Speaker 3: talked specifically about how she wants to introduce the technique
Speaker 3: of ballet to black dancers and have it at their
Speaker 3: disposal so that they can show the genius of her race.
Speaker 3: She says, the genius of her race, which is the
Speaker 3: genius of our race.
Speaker 1: In her early twenties, Catherine Dunham studied ballet in Chicago
Speaker 1: and then she started to teach it, but that was
Speaker 1: hard to do. Many dance studios refused to let her
Speaker 1: have classes because she and her students were black. Her
Speaker 1: first studio was a converted barn. In nineteen thirty, four
Speaker 1: years before Balancing founded the School of American Ballet, Catherine
Speaker 1: Dunham created her own ballet company. It was one of
Speaker 1: the first black ballet companies in the United States. She
Speaker 1: called it Ballet Negar.
Speaker 3: And the company only lasted one month. I think a
Speaker 3: lot of factors happened. You have to have funding, you
Speaker 3: have to have been a factors, and there was the
Speaker 3: discouragement of we don't really want black ballet dancers in
Speaker 3: this space.
Speaker 1: It seemed nearly impossible for white critics to associate black
Speaker 1: people with classical ballet. For example, white writer Walter Terry
Speaker 1: referenced the belief that black dancers were talented at jazz
Speaker 1: and what was referred to as quote primitive dance, not ballet.
Speaker 3: And even some of the reviews they would have words
Speaker 3: like jungle or primal or the ethnic stuff that they're
Speaker 3: doing is great. I love it. Keep doing that, but
Speaker 3: stay away from the classical stuff. Take off those points,
Speaker 3: use dance barefoot, a thing in your element.
Speaker 1: Eventually, Catherine Dunham's ballet teacher advised her to leave ballet
Speaker 1: and try modern dance. Hence the Catherine Dunham most people
Speaker 1: know today. And then she worked with someone who by
Speaker 1: now you're very familiar.
Speaker 3: With, George Balanchin. George Balanchine and Catherine Dunham start to
Speaker 3: work on Cabin in the Sky, a musical.
Speaker 4: They collaborate.
Speaker 3: They were in effect co choreographers.
Speaker 1: The New York Times called Cabin in the Sky a
Speaker 1: Negro fantasy. A white writer came up with this story
Speaker 1: that felt like folklore. The musical came out in nineteen forty.
Speaker 1: The entire cast was black. It was written, lyricized, composed,
Speaker 1: and directed by white people. Katherine Dunham danced in it.
Speaker 1: They asked balancing to stage it.
Speaker 4: They actually lived together during that production because they were
Speaker 4: so broke that they had to live together.
Speaker 1: This is Teresa Ruth Howard. She's a former ballet dancer,
Speaker 1: a dance journalist, and she works with ballet companies around
Speaker 1: the world on equity projects and culture change. She likes
Speaker 1: to imagine Katherine Dunham and George balancing living together during
Speaker 1: this time.
Speaker 4: What are they talking about in the kitchen? But they're
Speaker 4: probably talking about ballet, and they're also probably talking about
Speaker 4: African dance and Caribbean Haitian dance. You know, great artistic
Speaker 4: conversations about how do you blend the two. She's actually
Speaker 4: probably choreographing Cabin in the Sky. Because he didn't know
Speaker 4: anything about that type of dance, he could not have
Speaker 4: choreographed it.
Speaker 1: Valancine seemed aware that his whiteness limited his ability to
Speaker 1: do this musical well. He said, quote, what is the
Speaker 1: use of inventing a series of movements which are a
Speaker 1: white man's idea of a Negro's walk or stance or slouch.
Speaker 1: I only needed to indicate a disposition of the dancers
Speaker 1: on the stage. The rest almost improvised itself. I was
Speaker 1: careful to give dancers steps which they could do better
Speaker 1: than anyone else. Maybe this communicates respect a desire to
Speaker 1: stand out of the dancer's way, But a closer read
Speaker 1: reveals something else. Dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottshield writes, quote
Speaker 1: the reason that he did not need to invent movements
Speaker 1: apart from the creativity of the dancers themselves, was that
Speaker 1: he had a seasoned, talented African American colleague to work with.
Speaker 1: To state that the rest almost improvised itself is to
Speaker 1: fall into the trap of assuming that African peoples do
Speaker 1: not work, train, or practice in order to perform successfully,
Speaker 1: that dancing for them is an inborn trade end quote.
Speaker 1: And there's a hint of arrogance in what Balanchine said
Speaker 1: to Dixon. Gotshield says that Balanchine's words reduce black dancers
Speaker 1: to his puppets. She poses the question did Balancing give
Speaker 1: them steps to do? Or did the dancers suggest and
Speaker 1: show him steps from which he then chose.
Speaker 3: Everything points back to Catherine Dunham. Her work is inspiring
Speaker 3: people like George Balanchine. If you don't have that conversation,
Speaker 3: then you erase her.
Speaker 1: Balancing and Dunham collaborated. They choreographed together, but in the
Speaker 1: playbill just one person was listed.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: Entire production staged by George Balancing. Cabin in the Sky
Speaker 1: was just one example of many times Balanchine worked with
Speaker 1: black dam answers and choreographers on Broadway. He worked with
Speaker 1: Josephine Baker with tap dancer and choreographer Clarence Buddy Bradley
Speaker 1: with the Nicholas Brothers, and even earlier before he came
Speaker 1: to the US, Balancine was drawn in by what black
Speaker 1: artists were doing in Europe. He soaked up the art
Speaker 1: and dance and music of the African diaspora before Balancing
Speaker 1: founded in New York City Ballet, He even talked about
Speaker 1: having an integrated ballet company, half of the dancers black,
Speaker 1: half of the dancers white. It was part of the
Speaker 1: initial sales pitch that Lincoln Kirstein wrote in a letter
Speaker 1: to a potential funder.
Speaker 4: I want you to invest in this company. I've got
Speaker 4: this incredibly brilliant choreographer and he has these incredible ideas
Speaker 4: of having a company that is, you know, four male,
Speaker 4: four females white, and four of the same negroes. Right,
Speaker 4: this is the language of the time. If we stop there,
Speaker 4: it sounds like, ooh, this is an incredible thing, forward
Speaker 4: thinking for the time. However, if you look down in
Speaker 4: the text, he says, quote, he thinks the Negro part
Speaker 4: of it would be amazingly supple. The combination of suppleness
Speaker 4: and this sense of time superb, So I think he
Speaker 4: means like the timing, like the rhythm right of these negroes,
Speaker 4: and the suppleness, and then he goes on to say,
Speaker 4: imagine them masked, for example. That's the part for me.
Speaker 4: I was like masked, like what are what are they
Speaker 4: doing masked? The idea was to train these dancers together,
Speaker 4: but then these black dancers would somehow be masked on stage,
Speaker 4: so it doesn't give me the feeling of equity and equality.
Speaker 4: Of course, it never came to pass that you would
Speaker 4: see this integrated company on a New York City state.
Speaker 1: When you feel like you started learning more about Balanchine's
Speaker 1: relationship to blackness.
Speaker 4: That's an interesting question because it was not even about movement.
Speaker 4: It was his famous quote about a ballerina should be
Speaker 4: the color of appealed apple. And I can remember I
Speaker 4: was probably around eleven when I heard that, So imagine
Speaker 4: as a black ballet student at the time hearing that
Speaker 4: that was the thought a ballerina should be the color
Speaker 4: of appealed apple, and I remember thinking, well, if you
Speaker 4: leave appealed apple out on the counter for a minute,
Speaker 4: it turns brown anyway, So what does that mean?
Speaker 1: Later Teresa saw Balancine's ballets like Jewels and the Four Temperaments.
Speaker 4: Then you're like, oh, you know, yes, I want to
Speaker 4: dance that. But it's bittersweet because it's attached to this
Speaker 4: idea that you don't have a space in that art form.
Speaker 4: As for him, the irony of it is is that
Speaker 4: in the beginning, he wants to have this integrated company.
Speaker 4: He wants to see black bodies and white bodies represented
Speaker 4: on the same stage. And so he's lauded in a
Speaker 4: way from being the pioneer of diversity in ballet, and
Speaker 4: yet out of his own mouth what a ballerina should
Speaker 4: look like doesn't represent that idea at all.
Speaker 1: I've heard over and over again Balanchine's work allotted for
Speaker 1: his speed, his timing, his pushing ballet over the edge.
Speaker 1: But if you break those movements down, really track their
Speaker 1: essence where they came from. They're fundamental aspects of African dance.
Speaker 4: He loved black culture and blackness. It was something that
Speaker 4: was useful to him.
Speaker 1: Teresa Ruth Howard read the work of dance scholar Brenda
Speaker 1: Dixon Gottshield, who laid out these fundamental principles of African
Speaker 1: art and African dance characteristics of the Africanist aesthetic. There's
Speaker 1: this youthfulness for one.
Speaker 4: Strength, flexibility, speed, it's the ability to do extensions or splits,
Speaker 4: flexibility in the joints. We see this in the jitterbug.
Speaker 4: We see this in a lot of the African dance
Speaker 4: where they syncopate the body and invert the limbs. We
Speaker 4: see this in hip hop, where you wonder, how.
Speaker 2: Do you do that?
Speaker 4: How you turn your knees in and go all the
Speaker 4: way down to the ground. Isolations the spine is not rigid.
Speaker 1: Also, a lack of center or many centers falling off balance.
Speaker 1: There's the rhythm, maybe multiple rhythms at once, and juxtaposing
Speaker 1: opposites at once, like fast energetic movements with a stoic face.
Speaker 4: And that element of coolness that removed sort of aloofness
Speaker 4: that it's almost like you're doing all of this incredible movement,
Speaker 4: but you don't seem to be phased.
Speaker 1: A lot of these movements are in direct contrast to
Speaker 1: traditional classical ballet, or even considered ugly by the ballet establishment,
Speaker 1: but once you list them out, you can't help but
Speaker 1: see them all over balancing's choreography. It's like They're what
Speaker 1: makes balancing, balancing the.
Speaker 4: Hips forward, flex feet and hands. He's turning legs in
Speaker 4: and rolling hips out.
Speaker 1: Even back in Apollo, the ballet that put balancing on
Speaker 1: the map when he was twenty four, is bathed in
Speaker 1: the Africanist esthetic parallel feet and three muses who kaikick
Speaker 1: with their pelvises thrusting forward. Then you can keep going
Speaker 1: down the line of Balanchine ballets, symphony and three movements,
Speaker 1: four temperaments, Concerto Barocco, stars and stripes, Bugaku jewels. Princess says,
Speaker 1: any black audience member can see it. Balancing didn't create
Speaker 1: these movements.
Speaker 3: There's like hip movements and like it's not something that
Speaker 3: you can sometimes articulate. It's something that you just see. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I can see where that came from. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 3: little blackness in there right.
Speaker 1: When you lay it out. It's clear that so much
Speaker 1: of what made Balanchine feel fresh to European and white
Speaker 1: audiences where the Africanist artistic principles he was using. It's like,
Speaker 1: what made Balanchine's ballet feel American was that it was black.
Speaker 4: It's a vehicle. Blackness is a vehicle.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by that it's a.
Speaker 4: Vehicle to get people where they need to go. We
Speaker 4: see this culturally all the time. We see the Disney
Speaker 4: children like a mighty cyrus, right clean, squeaky clean. And
Speaker 4: when she wants to shift her image to be more adult,
Speaker 4: what does she do. She becomes black adjacent, she starts tworking,
Speaker 4: She surrounds herself with blackness. It gets a little raunchy,
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh. And then all of a sudden we
Speaker 4: stop thinking of her as Hannah Montana, And now she
Speaker 4: has crossed over. And then once she's done crossing over,
Speaker 4: she's going to distance herself from blackness, that is, using
Speaker 4: it as a vehicle to get you to another place.
Speaker 4: So Balancine is using blackness as a vehicle to transform
Speaker 4: the ballet idiom into this new sort of avant garde
Speaker 4: version of itself in doses, in order to get him
Speaker 4: where he needs to be.
Speaker 1: George Balanjan played with the idea of making his company
Speaker 1: half black and half white, but when the time came,
Speaker 1: that idea went out the window pretty fast. For years,
Speaker 1: he didn't hire any black dancers for the New York
Speaker 1: City Ballet, And then came a man named Arthur Mitchell,
Speaker 1: Arthur Mitchell studied at Catherine Dunham's dance school, and then
Speaker 1: he won a scholarship to the School of American Ballet.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty five, he was offered a position at
Speaker 1: Valancine's company. He was the first black dancer ever to
Speaker 1: join it, the first to become a principal with the company.
Speaker 1: Teresa Ruth Howard points out that Arthur Mitchell might not
Speaker 1: have been the most obvious choice. Balancine had already worked
Speaker 1: with black ballet dancers who had more ballet training than
Speaker 1: Arthur Mitchell did.
Speaker 4: He was a jazz dancer, he was a tap dancer.
Speaker 4: He started studying ballet at eighteen years old, so he
Speaker 4: was obviously not a tech cognition, but he had this
Speaker 4: other element that was somehow very enticing to Balanchine. Like
Speaker 4: he had Arthur Mitchell in the studio and he'd say, Arthur,
Speaker 4: show him how it's done.
Speaker 3: There are moves that, even though within the classicism of ballet,
Speaker 3: when Mitchell does, it's still done with the little And
Speaker 3: it's so hard to say, because as black people, we
Speaker 3: have this thing where it's like you just know, like
Speaker 3: that's black dance, Like that's the little that's in there right.
Speaker 1: Arthur Mitchell would later say he danced for his mother
Speaker 1: and his people. He said, quote being the first I
Speaker 1: was representing my people, so I had to go out
Speaker 1: there and be good. I couldn't make a mistake. Mitchell
Speaker 1: said that when he joined the company in nineteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: parents of some dancers called Balanchine and said they didn't
Speaker 1: want their daughter to dance with a black man. In response,
Speaker 1: Balanjing said, well take your daughter out. As Arthur Mitchell
Speaker 1: began to perform with City Ballet, he sometimes heard yelling
Speaker 1: or racial slurs from the audience When the company was
Speaker 1: performing Stars and Stripes on TV, and producers wanted to
Speaker 1: take Arthur Mitchell out of the show. Valancine famously responded,
Speaker 1: if Mitchell doesn't dance, New York City Ballet doesn't dance.
Speaker 2: Soon.
Speaker 1: Balancing had a role in mind for Arthur that no
Speaker 1: other dancer in the company could fill. He wanted to
Speaker 1: make a patta d a duet. Stravinsky had composed a
Speaker 1: twelve tone score with irregular measures balanging, cast Diana Adams,
Speaker 1: a white woman, to be Arthur Mitchell's partner. It was
Speaker 1: called Agone. Balanging spent days with the dancers testing out
Speaker 1: different ideas, seeing what clicked. Their bodies and movements are
Speaker 1: imprinted on the piece. Balanchine likes to juxtapose their black
Speaker 1: and white skin tones through the simple touch of a
Speaker 1: hand or wrist. Arthur Mitchell later said, my skin color
Speaker 1: against hers. It became part of the choreography. In the ballet,
Speaker 1: Arthur wore a white shirt and tight black pants, Diana
Speaker 1: wore a black leotard. The two dancers bodies repeatedly entangle
Speaker 1: each other and pull apart. They walk together, bending their
Speaker 1: knees in synchrony, and Diana curls her leg around Arthur's
Speaker 1: body and all these different orientations. At one moment, She's
Speaker 1: held high in the air, legsplayed wide apart. She leans
Speaker 1: on Arthur's body for support, then slips down his body
Speaker 1: into the splits on the ground. As she slides beneath
Speaker 1: his legs to move behind him, he kneels and reaches
Speaker 1: back for her as she again opens her legs wide
Speaker 1: to the ceiling.
Speaker 4: It was very sexually suggestive. When you're having a black
Speaker 4: man manipulating a white woman's body on stage in that era,
Speaker 4: it's salacious and it's shocking. But also it's very dangerous
Speaker 4: potentially to that black artist because he's got to exit
Speaker 4: the stage door. I don't know if that was even
Speaker 4: a thought that I'm doing this. This is art and
Speaker 4: it's beautiful art. But as I said during BLM, black
Speaker 4: artists live black lives that matter, right, and so like
Speaker 4: the idea that Arthur Mitchell was going to perform this,
Speaker 4: but then he was also going to have to walk
Speaker 4: down the street as a black man. I'm just wondering
Speaker 4: if that, ever, you know, was thought of. I'm sure
Speaker 4: that Arthur Mitchell probably.
Speaker 2: Thought of it.
Speaker 4: This is actually an interracial couple. By giving them the
Speaker 4: specific movements that he gave them, he's really crossing societal
Speaker 4: lines about what's okay.
Speaker 1: Teresa says, every time she sees the padada danced by
Speaker 1: a black man and a white woman, she gets a
Speaker 1: nod in her stomach. She senses the danger and it
Speaker 1: hits her on a cellular level.
Speaker 4: Emmett Till was lynched in nineteen fifty five. Agon Is
Speaker 4: choreographed in nineteen fifty seven. Emmett Till is a young
Speaker 4: boy who it was suggested that he was flirting with
Speaker 4: or whistled at, a white woman Balanchine as a black
Speaker 4: male body on stage next to a white woman. They
Speaker 4: both are scantily clad as dancers are right, the body
Speaker 4: is fully exposed. And now when you think about the
Speaker 4: movements of Agon, you tell me what you would see,
Speaker 4: how you would feel, especially as a black person, it's
Speaker 4: easy to just say, oh, it's a wonderful piece. It
Speaker 4: was so courageous, courageous for whom who really needed the
Speaker 4: courage to choreograph it, what courage was necessary to actually
Speaker 4: perform it as a black man. That's where my mind
Speaker 4: goes as I think about him choreographing and using blackness
Speaker 4: again as a tool.
Speaker 1: After over a decade in Valancine's company, Arthur Mitchell had
Speaker 1: made up his mind.
Speaker 5: I was dancing with New York City vallet and doctor
Speaker 5: Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated, and I felt I
Speaker 5: must come back to my community, Harlem and do something
Speaker 5: and do what I do well, which was dance and
Speaker 5: teach dancing. And I felt that the discipline that you
Speaker 5: learned from studying the classic dance would then go into
Speaker 5: the daily life of these young people, and they have
Speaker 5: a sense of self esteem that yes, I can.
Speaker 1: He started with a garage and poured all the money
Speaker 1: he had into a dance floor, a bar and mirrors.
Speaker 1: It got so hot under the tin roof they left
Speaker 1: the sides open and kids started showing up. Just like
Speaker 1: with balanging, it started with a school and from the school,
Speaker 1: Arthur Mitchell would build a company. How would you describe
Speaker 1: Arthur Mitchell as a person.
Speaker 2: So but this amazing amount of energy. He had a
Speaker 2: tenor voice. The first time I heard his voice, I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, his voice is so high.
Speaker 1: Virginia Johnson was a founding member of Arthur Mitchell's ballet company, and.
Speaker 2: He was always yelling. Oh my god, he was always yelling.
Speaker 2: But he also had this laugh that he would after
Speaker 2: he brutalizes you, No, he wasn't brutalizing you. After he
Speaker 2: directs you very distinctly. Then he'd find some joke to say,
Speaker 2: and then he would laugh and it would be punctuated
Speaker 2: with that Arthur Mitchell laugh.
Speaker 1: There's a story Virginia Johnson has told many times. She
Speaker 1: was born in nineteen fifty and she started ballet when
Speaker 1: she was three years old.
Speaker 2: I fell in love with it right from the start
Speaker 2: because I loved moving to music. I loved the whole
Speaker 2: idea of making the music in my body and having
Speaker 2: some relationship to this thing that was so incredibly beautiful.
Speaker 1: Virginia trained and grew as a dancer at her school
Speaker 1: in Washington, DC, and it graduated. She planned to pursue
Speaker 1: ballet as a career.
Speaker 2: When I was graduating, the director called me in and
Speaker 2: she said, well, you know, Virginia, you're going to have
Speaker 2: a career. You're very talented, but nobody's going to hire
Speaker 2: you in ballet. But it was the reality. The reality
Speaker 2: is nobody was going to hire.
Speaker 1: Me at this point in nineteen sixty nine, The New
Speaker 1: York City Ballet, for example, had literally never hired a
Speaker 1: black female dancer, not one.
Speaker 2: She said, you should go ahead and try modern dance,
Speaker 2: try contemporary dance, ty jazz, things I had never studied.
Speaker 1: So instead of auditioning for ballet companies, Virginia went to NYU.
Speaker 1: She studied modern dance and joined the Black Student Union,
Speaker 1: all the while missing ballet.
Speaker 2: I remember we went and visited the president of the
Speaker 2: university at some point told him that he had to
Speaker 2: deinvest from South Africa. So I had a little bit
Speaker 2: of a militant phase. But those people were looking at
Speaker 2: me like, well, what's wrong with you? Why are you
Speaker 2: a ballet dancer? And so I was a young person.
Speaker 2: I took that very seriously. Why I am a I
Speaker 2: a ballad answer? That was a really rough period, and
Speaker 2: I did have this identity that was not acceptable to
Speaker 2: what people thought I should have, and there were many
Speaker 2: periods of questioning about that. I became aware of the
Speaker 2: fact that, oh my god, I'm doing this art form
Speaker 2: and it's not an art form that is usually assigned
Speaker 2: to my race. But you know, the love of it
Speaker 2: was so strong, and the identity I felt in it
Speaker 2: was so strong. I didn't feel like it was something
Speaker 2: that was applicate. I felt like it was something that
Speaker 2: it's essentially who I am. Ballet is essentially who I am.
Speaker 1: Virginia heard that Arthur Mitchell was teaching ballet classes in
Speaker 1: Harlem on Saturdays. So she figured she'd go get her
Speaker 1: ballet fixed each Saturday and she'd be okay.
Speaker 2: So what up?
Speaker 1: Arthur Mitchell taught in a church basement on Saint Nicholas
Speaker 1: in one hundred and forty first Street.
Speaker 2: And I came and took class for the company. That
Speaker 2: first time, he looked at me and he said, well,
Speaker 2: there's some material there, but I'm going to have to
Speaker 2: retrain you. You can't dance at all. And that's what he
Speaker 2: said to me after the class. Well, you know, it
Speaker 2: was a test. It was a total test. Let me
Speaker 2: be as harsh to this woman as I possibly can
Speaker 2: and see if she comes back.
Speaker 1: And what was he testing?
Speaker 2: He was testing my determination, He was testing my what
Speaker 2: is that insulation? Can I keep the person separate from
Speaker 2: the artist to be Can I wound her so much
Speaker 2: that she can't stand it? Or can she just like
Speaker 2: put on the armor and do what needs to be done. Horrible,
Speaker 2: but you need to be very, very, very very strong
Speaker 2: to be a ballet dancer.
Speaker 1: What Virginia learned when she took that ballet class was
Speaker 1: that Arthur Mitchell was starting his own ballet company, the
Speaker 1: Dance Theater of Harlem.
Speaker 2: And so I had to get my parents to understand
Speaker 2: that I should walk away from the full scholarship and
Speaker 2: stipend at NYU. I was like, wait, what, You're going
Speaker 2: to walk away from that to work in the basement
Speaker 2: of a church with this maniac on a ballet company
Speaker 2: that nobody wants. This is what I wanted. I was
Speaker 2: and Mitchell knew that he was creating a company, was
Speaker 2: set out to do something that people said couldn't happen,
Speaker 2: So he didn't want to have to hold people's hand
Speaker 2: through that process, like Okay, are you going to be
Speaker 2: a warrior or are you going to be a whimp?
Speaker 2: And the only one at Warriors? The established Vallet community
Speaker 2: were dubious about whether we should be in existence and
Speaker 2: whether we could make this work. Also, in the black press,
Speaker 2: there were people going, you know, why this is the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties, Why are you doing the white man's art form.
Speaker 2: You should be doing your own heritage, something that has
Speaker 2: some validity. But isn't my heritage whatever I took in
Speaker 2: here in this country, and isn't this part of it.
Speaker 2: We did feel a sense of power by being together.
Speaker 2: Arthur Mitchell was such a dynamic and visionary leader. He
Speaker 2: took all of this very mixed bag of people and
Speaker 2: created a company, made us into one, and made us
Speaker 2: into his army of changing people's minds. There was a
Speaker 2: lot of talking about what we represented and how we
Speaker 2: had to be flawless. We were charged with being super
Speaker 2: people all the way through. We had to look right,
Speaker 2: We had to dance right. We had to behave right,
Speaker 2: and it was a very narrowly defined right. Lots of
Speaker 2: people didn't make it in those first dance theater Hollen
Speaker 2: days because he was very strict about how he wanted
Speaker 2: us to represent twenty four to seven. They were talented
Speaker 2: dancers who just felt like they should be free to
Speaker 2: be who they were. But each of us agreed that
Speaker 2: this was more important than our individual need to be
Speaker 2: an individual to make the statement about what was possible
Speaker 2: in the art form.
Speaker 1: Still, sometimes individuality was part of the message, and it
Speaker 1: started with something basic tights.
Speaker 2: People think about ballet as pink tights and point shusy,
Speaker 2: and we in the very beginning more pink tights and
Speaker 2: point SHOs because we wanted to match that look.
Speaker 1: But ballet pink is not just pink. It's about creating
Speaker 1: an elongated line, one that stretches from the tips of
Speaker 1: your fingers to your face, to your legs to your toes.
Speaker 1: For white dancers, pink does that. But Yangie Stevenson, another
Speaker 1: member of Dance Leader of Harlem, wanted to do things differently.
Speaker 1: Before she joined Arthur Mitchell's company, she'd received a scholarship
Speaker 1: to the school of American Ballet. It had been her
Speaker 1: dream to join Balanchine's company. She stayed in the school
Speaker 1: for years waiting to be chosen by Balanchin. But Teresa
Speaker 1: Ruth Howard says, Yan, she wasn't given the chance.
Speaker 4: She's training, she's seeing her white colleagues get contracts, and
Speaker 4: her teacher asked, well, do you want me to ask
Speaker 4: mister Balancin what he wants to do with you? And
Speaker 4: the teacher came back and said, well, you know, he's
Speaker 4: just not ready to break the line. And Yan, she
Speaker 4: was a deeply brown skinned woman, right, And so I
Speaker 4: always say, you can't break a line if you don't
Speaker 4: make a line. But if you add that up with
Speaker 4: the peeled apple, then we start to see a different picture.
Speaker 2: Yan.
Speaker 1: She later said she noticed when she wore pink tights
Speaker 1: her arms didn't match her legs. She felt disjointed. Now
Speaker 1: at Dance Theater of Harlem, Yan she was on a
Speaker 1: mission to make a change to that very line.
Speaker 2: She would wear flesh colored tights over her pink tights
Speaker 2: and rehearsal.
Speaker 1: She thought the flesh colored tights gave her a better line,
Speaker 1: and she took it up with Arthur Mitchell.
Speaker 2: And she kept bugging him. She kept saying, we should
Speaker 2: be wearing flesh colored tights.
Speaker 1: Clearly, Arthur Mitchell was drawn to this idea. He thought
Speaker 1: this was a statement his company could make, and he
Speaker 1: must have started scheming with the wardrobe mistress.
Speaker 2: Because she had to dye the tights. She had to
Speaker 2: dye all these different shades of brown.
Speaker 1: All these smooth, feathery strips of fabric in a range
Speaker 1: of beautiful brown heath. To get this prism of colors,
Speaker 1: the wardrobe mistress would need precision, and to extend the line,
Speaker 1: the shoes would need to match too. They debuted their
Speaker 1: new look on a European tour.
Speaker 2: We were all different shades of brown, and so everybody
Speaker 2: had a pair of tights that met their own skin color.
Speaker 2: So when the curtain goes up on the stage, then
Speaker 2: you have this. It's not a rainbow, but it's all
Speaker 2: these shoes and it's so rich, and it's so nuanced,
Speaker 2: and it's so individual, non matching, and that was part
Speaker 2: of what was so gorgeous about dancing aar and we've
Speaker 2: had flash colored tights ever since.
Speaker 1: Virginia loved to dance, But weirdly enough, she absolutely hated performing.
Speaker 2: I was afraid of it, you know, I was so
Speaker 2: afraid of.
Speaker 1: It, especially in some of Valancine's ballets like Agon.
Speaker 2: I was not the athletic, abstract ballery. I never had
Speaker 2: that kind of sharp clarity, that precision, and I felt
Speaker 2: so exposed in those works. But then we started doing
Speaker 2: story ballets. That's my home. I love telling stories.
Speaker 1: She danced in a Fellow Streetcarnde Desire Creole Gizelle. Virginia
Speaker 1: was the main character Giselle.
Speaker 2: The story ballets You're Not You. Those were ballets that
Speaker 2: I didn't get as nervous in because it wasn't me.
Speaker 2: I could become that person.
Speaker 1: Virginia was finding herself as a dancer. She was a
Speaker 1: dramatic ballerina, a great one.
Speaker 2: I could feel the audience come to me, and I
Speaker 2: could feel myself go out to them, and I could
Speaker 2: feel that really dynamic connection between us living that story.
Speaker 2: That thing would happen, right. It gets a different kind
Speaker 2: of quiet. It's like you're in a vacuum together. You
Speaker 2: notice that there's no sound, that's the first thing you notice,
Speaker 2: But then you feel it in your heart. You feel
Speaker 2: like there's a hole sort of in your STERNA. Yeah,
Speaker 2: in the center, in the core of your being. You
Speaker 2: feel the energy coming in here and you just feel
Speaker 2: this exchange of energy and it's nothing like it.
Speaker 1: Virginia held a special place and dance Theater of Harlem,
Speaker 1: a founding member of Principal, A ballerina who danced the
Speaker 1: great roles. She was quiet and focused, always at the
Speaker 1: section of the ballet bar, distant from the rest, close
Speaker 1: to Arthur Mitchell. Arthur Mitchell said she was one of
Speaker 1: the truly great ballerinas dancing today. He called her my Virginia.
Speaker 1: How would you describe your relationship with Arthur Mitchell?
Speaker 2: Obedient servant dancers were seen and not heard at all.
Speaker 2: Once again, it's a different time from now. It was
Speaker 2: a very hierarchical environment where decisions were made above our
Speaker 2: heads and we followed through. It was about serving a
Speaker 2: vision to present the ideal was for the greater good
Speaker 2: of everyone, and I also the obedient part was a
Speaker 2: necessity to get the work done. In retrospect, I think
Speaker 2: he had respect for who I was and what I
Speaker 2: could do, but that wasn't something that he could manifest
Speaker 2: on a daily basis. I can remember feeling so crushed
Speaker 2: and unhappy, but getting to do what I love doing.
Speaker 2: So you know it's a trade off. You say, Okay,
Speaker 2: that's hurt, but ooh look what I have. What hurt? Well?
Speaker 2: You never I never felt that I was doing it right,
Speaker 2: that I was good enough, that it was the thing
Speaker 2: that it should be. Never. Never, there was never a
Speaker 2: moment I was like good.
Speaker 3: Never.
Speaker 2: No, no, it could always be better. It could always
Speaker 2: be better.
Speaker 1: Virginia says she only stopped dancing when she realized she
Speaker 1: wasn't going to get any better than she already was.
Speaker 2: Then I had to say, I've got to go. It's
Speaker 2: time to go.
Speaker 1: After twenty eight years with the company, she retired from
Speaker 1: the stage. She became the founding editor in chief of
Speaker 1: Point Magazine, a magazine I poured over and kept in slippery,
Speaker 1: lopsided piles under my bed as a kid. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: dance Leader of Harlem was struggling. Money was always an issue,
Speaker 1: and in two thousand and four the company went on hiatus.
Speaker 1: The break was supposed to be temporary, but years passed,
Speaker 1: and then in two thousand and nine, Arthur Mitchell called Virginia.
Speaker 2: He said, well, look, you know I'm going to leave,
Speaker 2: and I want you to take over.
Speaker 1: He asked her to take over Dance Theater of Harlem.
Speaker 1: She felt she couldn't say no.
Speaker 2: I definitely, definitely, definitely did not want to be the
Speaker 2: brutal leader that Arthur Mitchell was. I definitely wanted to
Speaker 2: be somebody who recognized the individuals in the room and
Speaker 2: got them to grow and to become great artists without
Speaker 2: harming them. Simple enough, they're not just bodies to be shaped.
Speaker 2: She's a wiggle monster, A wiggle monster, wiggle monster, you're.
Speaker 1: Gonna Virginia Johnson leads a rehearsal with a toddler on
Speaker 1: her lap. She's on tour with Dance Theater of Harlem,
Speaker 1: and it's one of the dancers.
Speaker 2: Babies, you're so strong.
Speaker 1: Whoa. The little girl comes along on tour with the company,
Speaker 1: and Virginia and the other dancers keep her on their
Speaker 1: hips when mom is dancing.
Speaker 2: What oh, she said, words too? She said words? What
Speaker 2: words are we saying?
Speaker 1: Then Virginia stands to give more pointed direction.
Speaker 2: So the tour is fine. I'm not worried about that.
Speaker 2: But then everything just kind of goes flat and we
Speaker 2: have to have the three dimensional quality. Yeah, so you
Speaker 2: have you do downstage and upstage and then downstage. Yeah.
Speaker 2: For me, it seems like the hard thing is the season,
Speaker 2: not the tour, the double tour. You have to make
Speaker 2: the season. Yes, my goodness, you can't look in the
Speaker 2: mirror and then you turned face up stage, So you
Speaker 2: have to have that clarity.
Speaker 1: There are nineteen dancers in the company now. But Virginia
Speaker 1: says when she first started to rebuild a dance theater
Speaker 1: of Harlem from scratch, the task wasn't easy. She decided
Speaker 1: to have a national audition.
Speaker 2: To her we would have two hundred people in the
Speaker 2: room and five of them would be black. And that
Speaker 2: was a very sobering moment. It was a very sobering moment.
Speaker 2: And that hit me like, Okay, you know, Dance Seat
Speaker 2: of Harlem has been off the stage for almost ten years,
Speaker 2: and people are no longer thinking about us in ballet now.
Speaker 2: I was not just looking for African American dancers, and
Speaker 2: I didn't just hire African American dancers, but that's an
Speaker 2: important part of our message to put us on the
Speaker 2: stage where other companies weren't. Even as late as twenty
Speaker 2: ten eleven, nobody wanted us in ballet. You know, it's
Speaker 2: still like, oh, well, you know, you can do the
Speaker 2: contemporary stuff, but you can't do the ballet stuff.
Speaker 1: Black ballet dancers still hear this all the time. Maybe
Speaker 1: try contemporary. I talked to a dance leader of Harlem
Speaker 1: company member whose teacher said this just a few years ago.
Speaker 4: You know, as we begin to fill in or rewrite
Speaker 4: the narrative, correct the narrative, we're starting to uncover the
Speaker 4: reality that whiteness as a construct has continuously used blackness
Speaker 4: to expand itself, if you.
Speaker 1: Will, and then erasing that source in a way.
Speaker 4: When you to be blunt when you are stealing things
Speaker 4: from people, are you citing your sources? Yes, I stole
Speaker 4: this from over here. No, And here's the reality. And
Speaker 4: I say that glibly. But the reality is is that
Speaker 4: it wasn't even considered to be stealing, Like the idea
Speaker 4: that white people thought that entitlement meant that they could
Speaker 4: take anything they wanted and absorb it. There was never
Speaker 4: even an idea that one should include these people. They're
Speaker 4: lesser than right, given that it would make sense that
Speaker 4: no one in the Balanchine legacy would be talking about
Speaker 4: it that overtly they would not be owning that because
Speaker 4: he himself didn't own it.
Speaker 1: Then it's not part of the oral history that gets
Speaker 1: passed down from dancer to student to next generation of
Speaker 1: ballet students.
Speaker 4: Absolutely not, because they don't see it as a part
Speaker 4: of their story. Actually they see it as a footnote.
Speaker 4: Oh and then that thing. They don't see it as
Speaker 4: the actual sort of nucleus of what we understand to
Speaker 4: be the balancing aesthetic, that it's based on the African aesthetic.
Speaker 4: But what if we did.
Speaker 1: Next time on the Turning?
Speaker 6: In ballet companies, there's a lot of couples. I remember
Speaker 6: thinking to myself, I should get a boyfriend in the
Speaker 6: company to secure my job. If I could, like really
Speaker 6: show that I was a straight woman somehow, that would
Speaker 6: secure my spot.
Speaker 1: The Turning is a production of Rococo, Punch and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1: It's written and produced by Alan Lance Lesser and Me.
Speaker 1: Our story editor is Emily Foreman. Mixing and sound designed
Speaker 1: by James Trout. Jessica Crisa is our assistant producer. Andrea
Speaker 1: Assuage is our digital producer. Fact checking by Andrea Lopez Crusado.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Brenda Dixon Gotshield, who traced the Africanist
Speaker 1: esthetic through Balanjine's ballets in her book Digging the Africanist
Speaker 1: Presence in American Performance, Dance and other contexts. Also special
Speaker 1: thanks to Teresa Ruth Howard. She's created an incredible online
Speaker 1: resource called Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet or mob Ballet.
Speaker 1: It presents the stories of more than six hundred Black
Speaker 1: artists in the field of ballet. You can read them
Speaker 1: all at mobballet dot org. Our executive producers are John
Speaker 1: Parati and Jessica Alpert at Rocco Punch at Gatrina Norbel
Speaker 1: and Nikki Etour at iHeart Podcasts. For photos and more
Speaker 1: details on the series, follow us on Instagram at Rococo Punch,
Speaker 1: and you can reach out via email The Turning at
Speaker 1: Rococo Punch dot com. I'm Erica Lance. Thanks for listening.