One of first black dancers to join major ballet company dies

Arthur Mitchell, who paved the way for other minority dancers by becoming one of the first black dancers to join a major ballet company and who helped start the acclaimed Dance Theatre of Harlem, has died. He was 84.

His death was announced on Twitter by the Dance The- atre of Harlem. Additional details were not immediately available.

Mitchell, who described himself as the Jackie Robinson of the ballet world, was hired by choreographer George Balanchine in 1955 to perform with the New York City Ballet and won over audiences and critics with his technical brilliance and charisma. Still, in an era when segregation was just beginning to crumble, his ascent to the upper eche- lon of dance met with many obstacles, from instructors who encouraged him to abandon ballet and take up other dance genres to shocked theatergoers who wrote letters expressing outrage about Mitchell being paired onstage with a white woman.

Balanchine refused to let the objections stifle Mitche ll’s talent and created numerous leading roles for him, including the principal male part in the 1957 classic “Agon” and the character of Puck in 1962’s “A Midsum- mer Night’s Dream.” When television programs invited the New York City Ballet to perform but requested that Mitchell sit out, Balanchine rebuffed them, saying the troupe would dance with Mitchell or not at all.

After nearly 15 years with Balanchine’s c o m p a n y, Mitchell struck out on his own and in 1969 co-founded an all-black dance school that eventually grew to include an all-black professional company. He said the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a year earlier filled him with a sense of urgency to start the school.

“When Dance Theatre of Harlem started, there was still a fallacy that black people could not do classical ballet,” Mitchell told the Toronto Star in 1995. “People said to me, ‘Arthur, you’re the exception.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I had the opportunity.’ “

Mitchell’s company has become one of the most sought-after dance ensembles in the world, performing everything from classical ballet to contemporary and jazz-inflected works.

Former Washington Post dance critic Alan Kriegsman once wrote, “Mr. Mitchell not only launched and empowered the careers of many excellent dancers but also changed forever the image of the African American dance professional.”

At the 1993 ceremony in which Mitchell received the Kennedy Center Honors, Johnson said: “We’d all been turned down, told that there was no place for us. He gave us our dream, a chance to be measured by our movement and grace, and not by the color of our skin.”

Mitchell was also recognized with a 1994 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, often called the “genius grant,” and with the National Medal of Arts in 1995.

Arthur Adams Mitchell Jr., whose father was a janitor, was born in New York on March 27, 1934. He was the oldest of five siblings and ran a paper route as a young boy to help his family make ends meet.