Arthur Mitchell

Trailblazer was first black ballet dancer to become international star

Arthur Mitchell, dancer. Born: 27 March, 1934 in New York City. Died: 19 September, 2018 in Manhattan, aged 84.

Arthur Mitchell, a charismatic dancer with New York City Ballet in the 1950s and ’60s and the founding director of the groundbreaking Dance Theater of Harlem, has died at the age of 84.

Mitchell, the first black ballet dancer to achieve international stardom, was one of the most popular dancers with New York City Ballet, where he danced from 1956 to 1968 and displayed a dazzling presence, superlative artistry and powerful sense of self.

That charisma served him well as the director of Dance Theater of Harlem, the nation’s first major black classical company, as it navigated its way through severe financial problems in recent decades and complex aesthetic questions about the relationship of black contemporary dancers to an 18th-century European art form.

When asked in an interview in January what he considered his greatest achievement, he said, “That I actually bucked society, and an art form that was three, four hundred years old, and brought black people into it.”

His dancing in just two roles created for him by George Balanchine ensured him a place in American ballet history.

In the first, in Agon, a trailblazing masterwork of 20thcentury ballet that had its premiere in 1957, Mitchell embodied the edgy energy of the piece in a difficult, central pas de deux that Balanchine choreographed for him and Diana Adams.

In the January interview, Mitchell described Balanchine’s challenge.

“Can you imagine the audacity to take an African-american and Diana Adams, the essence and purity of Caucasian dance, and to put them together on the stage?” he said. “Everybody was against him. He knew what he was going against, and he said, ‘You know my dear, this has got to be perfect.’”

Five years after Agon, Balanchine created the role of a lifetime for Mitchell as the high-flying, hard-dancing, naughty Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He would forever be identified with the role.

One of the last ballets Mitchell performed with City Ballet was Balanchine’s Requiem Canticles, a tribute to the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr created shortly after he was killed in 1968. Profoundly affected by the King assassination, Mitchellbegantoworktowardestablishingaschoolthatwouldprovide the children of Harlem with the kinds of opportunities he had enjoyed.

He founded the Dance Theater of Harlem the next year with Karel Shook, a friend and longtime mentor. In the early 2000s, the company, along with its dance school, faced mounting debt, and it was forced to go on hiatus in 2004. But it returned to performance in reduced form in 2012 and now tours regularly and performs at City Center. The school today has more than 300 students. Mitchell became artistic director emeritus of Dance Theater in 2011. e returned to the company in August to oversee a production of Tones II, a restaging of one of his older ballets. It is to be performed in April, to commemorate Dance Theater’s 50th anniversary.

Arthuradammitchelljrwas born in Harlem on March 27, 1934, one of five children. His father was a building superintendent, and his mother, Willie Mae (Hearns) Mitchell, was a housewife.as a child he sang in a Police Athletic League glee club and in the Convent Avenue Baptist Church choir, and he took rudimentary tap classes in neighborhood schools.

An avid social dancer all his life, Mitchell had his first exposure to formal training when a junior high school guidance counsellor saw him dancing at a class party and suggested that he audition for the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan.

Mitchell worked so hard there that in stretching he tore his stomach muscles and was hospitalised. But he was soon performing with the school’s modern-dance ensemble and experimenting with his own choreography. He also performed in Europe and the United States with Donald Mckayle (who died in April), Louis Johnson, Sophie Maslow and Anna Sokolow, and he played an angel in a 1952 revival of the Virgil Thomson-gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts in New York and Paris.

Mitchell was 18 when he began studying with Shook, a demanding ballet teacher who encouraged black dancers to train in classical dance. On his graduation from the High School of Performing Arts he was offered a modern-dance scholarship at Bennington College in Vermont and a ballet scholarship at the School of American Ballet in New York. He chose to study ballet, although there were almost no performing outlets for black dancers in the field.

Beneath Mitchell’s gleaming smile and sunny charm was a tenacity of belief and purpose that could be almost frightening. In Lincoln Kirstein, a founder with Balanchine of the City Ballet school and company, Mitchell found a similarly stubborn friend. To get into the company’s corps de ballet, Kirstein told him, he must dance like a principal.

During his student years, Mitchell performed in modern dance and on Broadway in House of Flowers and he was on tour in Europe with the John Butler Dance Theater when the invitation came to join City Ballet for the 195556 season. He made his debut that season in a lead male role in Balanchine’s Western Symphony, replacing Jacques d’amboise, who was making a film. Years later, Mitchell recalled hearing gasps and at least one racist comment from the audience when he entered the stage that night.

A quick learner, he was often asked to take on major roles and fill in for unavailable principal dancers while he was still in the corps de ballet. In his 15 years with City Ballet, he also created roles in ballets by John Taras and John Butler and in others by Balanchine.

In the haunting second half of Balanchine’s Metastaseis and Pithoprakta, Mitchell and Suzanne Farrell moved like loose-bodied rag dolls whom Balanchine seemed to be flinging about the stage. And Mitchell drew on his early tap lessons when Balanchine enlisted his help in the choreography for the Hoofer in Slaughter on 10th Avenue, a 1968 restaging of the ballet from the Broadway musical On Your Toes which no-one in the original cast remembered.

“OK, you have 16 bars,” Balanchine supposedly told him. “I’ll be back in an hour, and you have something.”

Mitchell said he viewed himself as an African-american man with the formation of a Russian aristocrat because of his connection to the Russianborn George Balanchine.

“My relationship with him was totally different than with the other dancers,” he said. “It wasn’t about, ‘What role am I going to dance?’ But ‘What would you like me to do? Use me.’ And he did.”

JENNIFER DUNNING

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