Sat 1/21 @ 3 & 7:30PM
Dance Theatre of Harlem performs at PlayhouseSquare this weekend, so we spoke on the phone with the company’s artistic director Virginia Johnson.
CoolCleveland: Please tell our readers about the upcoming concert starting with the new dance by Dianne McIntyre, Change.
Virginia Johnson: Dianne is a dance icon so we were very happy to bring her to DTH as part of our Women Who Move Us initiative. Change is a dance for three women and it really is about the power of African-American females and their history as change-makers in this country.
CC: Dianne McIntyre is from Cleveland and is based in Cleveland, but we find that many Clevelanders don’t know much about her. How would you explain her importance to our readers?
VJ: I’ll tell a personal story that will maybe reflect on that. I moved to New York wanting to be a dancer and during the years 1968 to 1975 or so I was in this amazing environment of people — African-Americans — who decided they had something to say about who we were. There were people like Eleo Pomare and Rod Rodgers and all the usual folks who were making amazing, powerful protest dances, things very much of their time. And then there was this woman named Dianne McIntyre who was making dance about being who she was. And that dance was revolutionary because she was a black woman who was just talking about dancing and she didn’t feel she had to do a civil rights thing or a protest thing. She was just herself, letting the power of her creativity express itself, just the way I’m sure Martha Graham felt when she was making her dances. Dianne was a real pioneer in that she was using her own experience, using her own sensitivity, to create dances that were unlike any other. And it was mesmerizing.
CC: “Making dance about who she was…” That’s a thought we might come back to later. We understand that Change is danced en pointe even though Dianne has never choreographed anything en pointe before.
VJ: It was a voyage of exploration. Both Dianne and the dancers were testing the boundaries of what’s possible.
CC: Here’s another dance in your upcoming Cleveland concert that sounds interesting, System.
VJ: System was choreographed by Francesca Harper, a member of DTH who went to Germany to dance with William Forsythe.
CC: Which definitely gets our attention. Forsythe was such an important ballet innovator but his companies, Ballet Frankfurt and the Forsythe Company, have never played Cleveland.
VJ: There are Forsythian elements to System. Francesca doesn’t only have material which she puts on dancers’ bodies; she also has a way of molding improvisations as part of the creative process. One of the things she was challenging the young dancers of this company to do was to express and consider who they are as dancers of color.
CC: Again, there’s the search for personal identity in dance. Tell our readers about Return by Robert Garland, a dance we saw DTH perform in Akron back in February of 2014.
VJ: Return is the quintessential Dance Theatre of Harlem piece. It is about using classical ballet to express the contemporary African-American experience, and so it’s done to the music of Aretha Franklin and James Brown. Of course it uses pirouettes and double tours but it also has a Soul Train Line built into it so it’s that mixture, that combination of influences that makes America a unique culture.
CC: Return was a lot of fun, a very crowd-pleasing piece.
VJ: And there’s a fourth piece on the program, Equilibrium (Brotherhood), a dance for three gentlemen choreographed for DTH last year by Darrell Grand Moultry. It’s a celebration of brotherhood, of men working together, being unified and in harmony. It’s kind of a programing bookend to Change in that one is for three women and the other is for three men.
CC: Music?
VJ: By Kenji Bunch.
CC: And what’s the dancing like?
VJ: It’s very athletic and based largely in the classical idiom.
CC: That gives our readers a preview of the coming concert. DTH’s (mostly) African-American dancers explore identity through the medium of (mostly) classical dance. But let’s get some historical perspective here. What’s the history of African-Americans in ballet? How did Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook come to co-found Dance Theatre of Harlem?
VJ: When Arthur Mitchell set out to make a ballet school for African-Americans he enlisted Karel Shook, whose studio was one of the few that welcomed African-Americans into ballet classes. So Alvin Ailey, Carmen de Lavallade and Mary Hinkson would all be in Karel’s class because we all know that ballet is the strongest training that the body can have, a foundation for all techniques.
In 1968 Arthur Mitchell was engaged by the United States government to go to Brazil to form a ballet company — the U.S. was trying to build stronger relations with Brazil — so he went back and forth to Brazil several times. But when he went to the airport on April 4, 1968 of course that was the day Martin Luther King was assassinated and that stopped him in his tracks. “Why am I going to some foreign country when there’s so much work to be done for my people here? What can I do even though I’m just a ballet dancer?” (Laughs.) He would often say, “I’m just a ballet dancer.”
So Arthur looked around the community of Harlem where the young people really had no future. The schools were failing. There was no expectation that their lives would be anything other than miserable. He said, “I’m going to teach them a classical art form, I’m going to teach them ballet because by giving them that, they’ll learn discipline, they’ll learn focus, and they’ll learn, most important of all, perseverance, because nothing happens overnight. You’ve got to go in there and push for the long haul.”
So he created Dance Theatre of Harlem as a school in the basement of a church and, being the dynamic person that he was, he soon had 400 students. He was exciting! Then he thought that these people needed something to look up to, a role model, something to aspire to, and he created Dance Theatre of Harlem as a performing company.
Meanwhile, I’d been told I could never be a ballet dancer so I came to DTH and danced there from 1969 to 1997 and during that time DTH changed a lot of minds. We traveled the world. We traveled back and forth across the country. Some people thought we were the Harlem Globetrotters.
CC: (Laughs.)
VJ: Tall black people, you know. And some people thought, “Why are you doing the white man’s art? You don’t have the bodies or the temperaments.” But by the end of every performance people were standing and cheering so DTH was a very powerful tool for changing people’s minds.
CC: Then you became founding editor-in-chief of Pointe Magazine.
VJ: I retired from DTH in 1997. I was very old and it was time for me to do something else. The opportunity with Pointe Magazine came along. I was given the opportunity to imagine what a ballet magazine would be, what was needed for young dancers. The publishers thought it was a good idea. Isn’t that wild?
CC: Obviously, you were ready for it. Then, as you tell your story on video, Arthur Mitchell called and said, “I think I’d like for you to take over the company,” to bring DTH back from its hiatus.
VJ: Before the hiatus in 2004 we were touring the country with 55 dancers and two semitrailers full of costumes and lights, a highly deluxe package that was simply not sustainable. Then when we went on hiatus it was going to be for a year or two, maybe less, but it ended up being more than eight years. When we started back up, the main thing we knew was that DTH was very important and that it had to survive as a touring company. So now we have 16 dancers in the company and we pack our wardrobe and take it onto the plane with us. We’re much leaner but we’re able to get the work out there.
CC: When we talked with Laveen Naidu (formerly Executive Director of DTH) in 2014, he said that DTH can turn a profit on tour, which flabbergasted us, because that’s not the case with most dance companies.
VJ: We’re looking at things in a different way now. We realize that, unlike most ballet companies in America, DTH must be a touring company. We have an important message about empowerment through the arts that we must take to cities that don’t have access to the idea that what is expected of you is not necessarily all you can do. If you have talent and access to opportunity then you can do things that people think you can’t. So much of our lives is prescribed by this-is-the-way-it-is; DTH is about invest-in-what-you-can-be-and-see-what-happens. We’re about making a different future. And that’s the message we need to take to cities around the world.
CC: You surprised us when we spoke in 2014. We asked you about the dearth of opportunities for African-American ballet dancers and you replied that things were changing for the better. You cited programs at the American Ballet Theatre Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, New York City Ballet’s School of American Ballet, and North Carolina School for the Arts, programs that provide opportunities for black dancers in classical ballet. Would you still say that that’s the case?
VJ: Absolutely things are changing. There is a change in the attitude about who belongs in ballet. Why the change is happening is not uniform. Some are doing it because their board of directors wants them to represent the public they’re dancing for, because in order to diversify their audience they need to diversify what they put on stage. And some artistic directors are interested in bringing something that’s not predictable to their stage. There are lots of reasons why this is happening but it’s happening across the country; people are trying to change the way that ballet looks.
In February, DTH is convening a group of artistic directors to talk about how to support this desire for change because, you know, first you have to decide you want a diverse company and then you have to find out how to prepare that. It takes 10 years to make a dancer so you can’t suddenly say, “Ok, I want 10 African-Americans in my company” if you haven’t trained them. There has to be a process and now people are beginning to say, “I want this to happen.”
CC: In an effort to sum up, let us quote from an interview with choreographer Royce Zachary who mentioned you while commenting on this same issue.
“Ballet is a difficult culture to fit into, period. And it derives from a European art form, which makes it all the more difficult for people of color to fit the mold. But athletic, skillful, talented, intellectually inclined, and classically trained African-American dancers have been around for a long time and will continue to be around for eternity. Virginia Johnson said it best. ‘A lot about ballet is about erasing the individual and making you fit into a unified whole… but it’s not about erasing who you are.’”
VJ: Royce makes a really good point about “culturally different” and that’s what makes me enthusiastic about the change that is coming. There’s a realization on the part of many company directors that a cultural shift is necessary. The question is how to accomplish that shift without losing what’s important in ballet. That’s the moment we’re in right now.
It’s going to be a progression. It’s going to be an awakening. It’s going to be an opening up of eyes that has not happened before because if you were black you had to fit into the white culture.
Are we going to make this more of a two-way street? That’s the journey we’re going to be on.
Dance Theatre of Harlem, presented by DANCECleveland, performs at PlayhouseSquare’s Ohio Theatre Sat 1/21 @ 3 & 7:30pm. Tickets, starting at $25, are available at DANCECleveland.org or by calling PlayhouseSquare at 216-241-6000.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]
Cleveland, OH 44115