African-American ballerina who danced in US South at height of KKK aggression
Raven Wilkinson, who has died aged 83, was as remarkable for her personal courage as for her lyrical artistry. The only black female member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1950s, she was the first woman of colour to dance classical ballet on the regional stages of the United States, and did so at the height of Ku Klux Klan activity against racial desegregation.
The dangers facing her were epitomised in November 1956 when the company’s buses arrived to perform in Montgomery, Alabama, finding the streets thronged with marchers wearing the KKK’s notorious white hoods and gowns. At the hotel Wilkinson was relieved to see families peaceably eating in the dining room, when she suddenly noticed a pile of white
Klan hoods and gowns stacked on a chair.
It could hardly have been a more explosive situation. Montgomery had been the centre of race protests for a year since Rosa Parks had outraged southern racists by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white traveller. The Ballet Russe had arrived days after the Supreme Court banned segregation on buses, prompting the Klan to stage a mass meeting calling for violent resistance.
While her colleagues performed at the theatre, the terrified Wilkinson spent the evening locked in her room, staring out of the window as Klansmen burned a cross. At the theatre men barged into dancers on stage, demanding: ‘‘Where’s the n ***** ?’’
On another occasion, in Atlanta, Georgia, Wilkinson was evicted from the troupe’s hotel and told to stay in a ‘‘coloured’’ establishment. She stuck it out for seven years before realising she would never be a leading ballerina in such conditions, and retreated to a convent.
Anne Raven Wilkinson was born on February 2, 1935, in Manhattan, the daughter of Harlem dentist Frost Bernie Wilkinson and his wife, Anne. Growing up in the desirable Dunbar Apartments, New York’s first garden apartment complex, built by John D Rockefeller in the 1920s to upgrade Harlem housing conditions, she was often taken to the theatre by her mother. Seeing the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in Coppelia when she was 5 made her determined to become a ballerina – she did not dream she would be a trailblazer in that very company.
Fortuitously the company’s director, Russian emigre´ Serge Denham, took over the school where she was studying ballet, under Maria Swoboda. She auditioned twice, in vain, and only then realised the block her race presented to a company that relied in part on touring America’s southern states. ‘‘I thought to myself, I’m not going to turn around and walk away,’’ she recalled. ‘‘It’s going to have to be proven to me. I’m going to keep trying, keep on, keep on.’’
Two years later Denham, impressed by her artistry as well as her firmness of purpose, recruited her into the corps de ballet. At first, as the company buses passed through American towns on one-night stands, the paleskinned Wilkinson’s race was not obvious among the Hispanic contingent of the corps, but once she was promoted to soloist in ‘‘white’’ ballets such as Les Sylphides, Giselle, Swan Lake and Ballet Imperial, she was increasingly racially identified and targeted. By the late 1950s Denham would only let her dance in ‘‘safe’’ cities. Colleagues urged her to abandon classical ballet or join a ‘‘black dance’’ troupe.
‘‘I didn’t want to put the company in danger, but I also never wanted to deny what I was,’’ she recalled. ‘‘If someone questioned me directly, I couldn’t say: ‘No, I’m not black.’ Some of the other dancers suggested that I say I was Spanish. But that’s like telling the world there’s something wrong with what you are.’’ Exhausted, in 1961 she retreated into an Anglican convent in Wisconsin, convinced she would never dance again.
After a year, regaining self-confidence, she applied for dance jobs, but American companies would still not accept her in the civil tensions. Eventually a black male dancer, Sylvester Campbell, urged her to join him at Dutch National Ballet, Amsterdam. In Europe she forged a distinguished classical career, and when the company toured the US, she inspired young Virginia Johnson, later a major black American ballerina and now artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem.
In 1973, homesick, Wilkinson returned to the US, joining New York City Opera as a dancer and later an acting ‘‘super’’ until her mid-seventies. She also had roles in a 1987 Broadway staging of South Pacific and Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music (1990-91).
The public rediscovered her through her modest but riveting participation in an award-winning 2005 documentary about her old company and subsequently the focus on today’s leading black American ballerina, Misty Copeland, caused a new realisation of her trailblazing career six decades earlier. Copeland named her as her mentor, and she was interviewed in the younger ballerina’s biofilm A Dancer’s Tale and in recent documentaries such as Black Ballerina and Stillness Broken.
She is survived by her brother, Frost Bernie Wilkinson Jnr.
‘‘I didn’t want to put the company in danger, but I also never wanted to deny what I was.’’ Raven Wilkinson on the pressure she faced to hide her ethnicity during her ballet career