Dancer and choreographer who paved the way for black dancers in the world of classical ballet
ARTHUR MITCHELL, who has died aged 84, was a dancer and choreographer who became a trailblazer for black dancers in classical ballet. A poor boy from Harlem, he starred in the New York City Ballet and founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the first all-black ballet company.
He shot to world fame in 1957 when George Balanchine, New York City Ballet’s founding genius, created Agon, a duet for a black man and a white woman – a sight considered so unacceptable in segregated America that Mitchell’s performance was not allowed on television until 1968.
The first sight of the pantherine Mitchell with the all-white company so shocked early audiences that he remembered a man in the stalls shouting: “My God, they’ve got a n----- in the company!”
But the Russian-born Balanchine was well aware what he was showing, said Mitchell.
“Do you know what it took for Balanchine to put me, a black man, on stage with a white woman?” he said. “This was 1957, before civil rights. He showed me how to take her [by the wrist]. He said, ‘Put your hand on top.’ The skin colours were part of the choreography. He saw what was going to happen in the world and put it on stage.”
Balanchine made the same point again in 1968, the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, by creating a sexually disturbing duo, Pithoprakta, for Mitchell and Suzanne Farrell in which he was not allowed to touch his alluring white partner.
Mitchell’s unsuccessful reaches for Farrell, wrote the critic Robert Garis, showed that “he was trying in the most clear-cut and unsettling way to break a sexual and social taboo, and failing.”
When New York City Ballet took Agon on the programme for their debut in the Soviet Union, Russian audiences in the 6,000-seat Palace of Congresses roared “Meet-shell, Meet-shell” in approval.
Mitchell capitalised on his impact on social politics by launching an all-black dance school in his home ground of Harlem in 1968, and within two years the Dance Theatre of Harlem had made a glittering debut at the Guggenheim Museum. Despite financial and artistic difficulties, the company celebrates its 50th anniversary this season.
Arthur Adam Mitchell was born in Harlem, New York City, on March 27 1934, one of five children of a building superintendent who left the family when Arthur was 12.
“I took over running the family when my father left,” Mitchell told the Los Angeles Times recently. “I shined shoes and delivered meat for a butcher. He paid me in meat for my family. I ran errands for the girls in a neighbourhood bordello. Growing up on Sugar Hill, attending Harlem’s incredible annual Easter Parade, I saw ‘class’ all around me.”
He sang in local church and glee clubs and took tap lessons, and was encouraged by a school counsellor to audition for Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts. There, he took parts on Broadway but was steered by his teacher, Karel Shook, towards ballet.
Offered scholarships on his graduation to either a modern dance faculty or the classical School of American Ballet, he chose the latter, despite the discouraging employment prospects for black ballet dancers.
His grit was recognised by the school’s sponsor and co-founder, Lincoln Kirstein, who also sponsored New York City Ballet. Kirstein recorded that when young Mitchell first entered the School of American Ballet, one father threatened to withdraw “his (pinko-grey, ungifted) daughter” if “this (black, gifted) boy” was allowed to handle her in pas de deux class.
Balanchine had stated in his original vision in 1933 that New York City Ballet should have “eight Caucasian and eight coloured dancers”, and to any protests he would say: “If Mitchell doesn’t dance, City Ballet doesn’t dance.”
The 21-year-old Mitchell debuted in the cowboy romp Western Symphony in 1955, and swiftly emerged in principal roles. Apart from the indelible Agon, Balanchine also created for him the tricky, high-flying role of Puck in his A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he became one of the company’s bestknown stars.
Meanwhile, he took roles in many Broadway musicals – Fred Astaire had been his chief childhood idol. Mitchell first created Broadway dances in the 1957 musical Shinbone Alley, and he maintained a busy parallel life as a jazz and musicals choreographer.
He had the full support of Balanchine and Kirstein when he set up his ballet school in 1968, and the emerging Dance Theatre of Harlem performed alongside New York City Ballet on several occasions.
For the next four decades he paid minute attention to raising black ballet dancers, acquiring a reputation for being a hard taskmaster and a micromanager, though he believed it was essential for black dancers to be better than white ones in the lower ranks even to get hired.
Mitchell’s choreographic works included a Creole Giselle in 1984, co-created with the British choreographer Frederic Franklin, which reworked the 1840 classic in a black folkloric idiom, set in a steaming Louisiana jungle.
At its peak DTH had 44 dancers and became world-renowned for the passion and stylishness of its unique company – the glamorous Diaghilev ballerina, Alexandra Danilova, coached it in 19th-century Russian classics such as Paquita.
Mitchell’s artistic drive was not matched, however, by his talent for management, and in 2004 the company shut down for several years with debts of $2 million while attempts were made to persuade him to hand over the reins.
The company reopened in 2010 with 16 dancers, and Mitchell was preparing a ballet for its 50th anniversary season when he died.
Asked in January this year what he considered his crowning achievement, Arthur Mitchell said: “That I actually bucked society, and an art form that was three, four hundred years old, and brought black people into it.”
However, as he observed last year, the black principal dancer remains rare in US and European classical ballet. Despite the sporadic blaze of stars such as Carlos Acosta at the Royal Ballet, Albert Evans at New York City Ballet and Misty Copeland at American Ballet Theatre, black dancers tend to be more drawn into contemporary forms of dance.
Mitchell’s many awards included Kennedy Center Honors, a Macarthur Fellowship and his induction into the National Museum of Dance, as well as many honorary doctorates from universities such as Harvard, the Juilliard School and Hamilton College.
He left no immediate family.