Minority ballet

As an African-American soloist with the United Kingdom’s Royal Ballet, Eric Underwood says he is often asked why the ballet world isn’t very diverse.

It’s complicated, Underwood says. Race, income, social hierarchies and other factors often conspire to create a situation that excludes people of colour from serious pursuit of dance.

“I feel that because you have to start training as a youngster, it’s the responsibility of the parents or society’s responsibility to introduce children to it,” Underwood says. “A five-year-old child would find it very difficult to come and say, ‘Mom, I’d like to dance’.”

Misty Copeland, who became the American Ballet Theater’s first black female principal dancer in 2015, has spoken about the difficulties of having very few role models in ballet.

“I understand the importance of bringing more diversity to classical ballet...it was this voice inside of me that I needed to get out to represent so many people who have come before me,” Copeland told The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

Underwood and Copeland remain anomalies as people of colour in ballet. Although their headline status would seem to indicate otherwise, directors and artists say there remains a reluctance to drag the art from the 19th century — when white bodies and pale clothes were its image — into the present day.

Amy Fitterer, the executive director of Dance/USA, says things are changing. She said her organisation adopted core values on diversity several years ago, both internally and externally, including through an annual conference.

“We have a lot of ballet companies in our membership and they’ve been engaging in conversations about racial equality for many years,” she said. “I’m feeling every encouraged in the past two years because the conversation has gone from trying to convince people that there is a problem, [to] now we’re finding the directors are really on board.”

She said some directors are going out of their way to promote diversity, holding auditions for females of colour and exchanging information about actions they took to promote diversity and whether those actions work.

“I don’t want to say everything’s good because it’s not,” she said. “We have a long way to go to racially diversify the ballet companies, but they’re making progress. Something has changed. Maybe it’s the reality that the demographics have changed in this country. The conversation is just getting real.”

According t o Underwood, access to “incredibly expensive” classes and the money to pay for them is a challenge for aspiring dancers from rough neighbourhoods like the one he grew up in near Washington, D.C.

Underwood, 32, who joined the Royal Ballet in 2006 and was promoted to soloist in 2008, grew up in Forestville, Maryland.

He recently starred in the production Woolf Works, inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf, at the Royal Opera House in London.

But he got his start in an unlikely way and in an unlikely place. Underwood came to ballet at the age of 14 — very late for a professional dancer — after flubbing his lines during an acting audition to get into a local performance arts school. Determined not to return home to his mother in defeat, he walked into a nearby ballet class and asked to sign up. His talent soon became evident.

“I thought, ‘Well I’ll have a go, I’ll try and be a dancer’. The next thing I know, I’m in ballet boarding school and it led me here to the Royal Ballet,” he said.

“I think if we could introduce ballet to different people from various walks of life you would have more professional dancers that were more diverse.” The Dance Theatre of Harlem, one of the companies where Underwood got his start, was founded in 1969, soon after the death of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, by Arthur Mitchell, the first black principal dancer in a major company — the New York City Ballet — and internationally renowned ballet master Karel Shook. Yet Virginia Johnson, the theatre’s current artistic director, says “companies are still not as diverse as they should be”.

“Blacks have been in ballet at least since the middle of the 1930s,” Johnson said. “You see the odd dancer but you see very few principal dancers.”

She said reaching out to young people and increasing their access to classical ballet training is key. “It takes a good 10 years to create a ballet dancer,” she said.

Cassa Pancho, 38, founder of the British company Ballet Black, says one way to do that is to expose more children to performances.

“Children and teenagers need to see someone who looks like them on stage to keep them invested in ballet,” Pancho said.

She trained at the Royal Academy of Dance, has judged the BBC Young Dancer competition and was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013 for services to classical ballet. Pancho created her company in 2001 specifically to address the lack of dancers of black and Asian descent in the United Kingdom, with an eye toward the future.

“There’s diversity in big companies, but it’s quite small. There are more dancers of colour, but what we need as a dance industry is to create more teachers, choreographers and directors and you won’t get that until the current dancers start to retire. It’s a never-ending circle,” Pancho says.

A number of female African-American dancers paved the way for Copeland, including Copeland’s mentor Raven Wilkinson, who in 1955 became the first black dancer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

There was also Janet Collins and her cousin, Carmen de Lavallade, the Metropolitan Opera’s first black prima ballerinas in the 1950s, and in the 1980s and 1990s, American Ballet soloist Nora Kimball and Lauren Anderson, principal dancer with the Houston Ballet.

Beyond Mitchell, among African-American male dancers who reached great heights were Desmond Richardson, American Ballet Theatre’s principal dancer in the late 1970s and Albert Evans, a principal at the New York City Ballet in the 1990s.

Underwood appreciates those pioneers. But he credits his mother as the major driving force behind his success.

“I was coming from a difficult situation so for me, dancing was a really clear ticket to change that. I felt quite confident that I could do anything because my mom told me a lot, ‘You can be anything you want to be if you put your mind to it’,’” Underwood said. “So I thought, ‘I’m going to put my mind to this and see where it goes’.”