Word: dancers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Less than seven years ago, Arthur Mitchell was performing with New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, the first black principal dancer in an American company. His fame grew as he partnered all of Balanchine's great ballerinas, from Maria Tallchief to Suzanne Farrell. Then in April 1968, after the shock of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, he decided that it was time to do something for black people. His first move was to approach the eminent American dance teacher Karel Shook, then ballet master of the Netherlands National Ballet...
...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...
...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's Combat they achieved what some others are not yet quite up to: the melting intuitive linking of movements that occurs as dancers move beyond the science...
...Tchaikovsky filter through the windows of the three-story brick building on 152nd Street. Inside rehearsal pianos thump in the three studios, trumpet blasts pierce the music room, and sewing machines buzz in the basement costume department. A nine-year-old pastes sequins on a ballerina's tutu. Dancers study acting, music, dance notation. D.T.H. builds its own scenery, and company members help the technical crew put up the show. They even know how to make costumes. If a dancer's costume pulls or sags in the crotch, he can tell the seamstress that he has to have...
...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...