Word: ballets
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...Ballet people sometimes say that black people's backs are built wrong or that their behinds are too big," says Shook. "So blacks do have behinds and the girls do have bosoms." Scoffs Mitchell, "It is talent and training that make a ballet dancer." That is not to say that he does not have his own special outlook. He maintains there is something distinctive about a black dancer. "It is not that black people have more rhythm, as is generally believed, it's that their rhythm is built on the pulse and the heartbeat. Black people are loose...
...tiny church basement, the two men created the Dance Theater of Harlem, the nation's first major black ballet company. Two hundred pupils arrived the first day; within a year enrollment had swelled to 800. Some of the kids had attended jazz and tap classes, but hardly any had ever seen a toe shoe. Today D.T.H. is an internationally known company with year-round employment for 27 dancers, a school with a student body of 1,300 and a home of its own in Harlem. "We broke all the rules," Mitchell says proudly, "because...
Manifestations, Arthur Mitchell's first new ballet in five years, was the choreographic focal point on opening night. Under a canopy of stars in a silver Eden, Eve sprang from the stomach of Adam, reclining on aluminum mounds. The audience gasped with pleasure as tiny Susan Lovelle unfolded on point while Homer Bryant turned her around slowly on one leg like a potter molding clay on his wheel. But it was willowy Lydia Abarca, a dancer of pristine lyricism, and Paul Russell, all crackling magnetic energy, who were the undisputed stars of the evening. In William Dollar...
...Giselle. The company's repertory combines the classical tradition and ethnic dance styles. Balanchine's neoclassic ballet Agon floats serenely alongside Geoffrey Holder's mysterious, pulsating Dougla and the virtuoso Russian display pas de deux from Le Corsaire. There is, however, no Giselle. "You'd be surprised how many people feel that because we're not doing Swan Lake that we are not a classical company," Mitchell told TIME'S Rosemarie Tauris. "We don't have enough people or finances to do big 19th century ballets. D.T.H. is not about...
Lydia Abarca, 25, grew up only a few blocks away. At 13, she went downtown on a scholarship to the Harkness School of Ballet. Two years later she was told that she could not dance. When she showed up at a Mitchell audition, she recalls, "he grabbed me and told me to take my clothes off because he wanted to see my feet. I thought he was crazy." Another principal dancer, Virginia Johnson, 24, was being steered into modern dance until she learned about D.T.H. Is there any reason for such a waste of black classical talent...