Black-owned ballet school extends reach
New studio could teach hundreds more
Kevin Thomas took his first ballet class at 7 years old. He didn’t see his first black principal ballerina perform in a dance company until 19.
And it would another decade before he saw a stage full of black classical ballet dancers while working as a principal dancer for the Dance Theater of Harlem.
“When I came to Dance Theater of Harlem and saw that color all around me and saw that stage of color, it just was very reaffirming,” said Thomas, artistic director for Memphis’ Collage Dance Collective. “It’s something that you don’t get as a young person growing up in dance, at least back in my time.
“You knew that if you were black, you weren’t the right color for ballet, you had to try be something else. When I went to Dance Theater of Harlem, it was like ‘I am the right color. I am beautiful.’ That’s when I quickly
knew we needed more Dance Theater of Harlems.”
That was the inspiration that launched the earliest iteration of the Collage Dance Collective in 2004 in New York. Back then, it was known casually as Friends of Dance Theater of Harlem.
Today, Collage Dance Collective trains 235 students between ages 2 and 18 every week while maintaining a touring dance company that has performed across the world.
By Fall 2020, they will leave their 2,000-square-foot Broad Avenue studio for a 22,000-square-foot studio to be built in Binghampton near the corner of Sam Cooper Boulevard and Tillman Street.
The move will make Collage the largest black-owned ballet school in the South and one of the largest in the nation, according to Collage’s Executive Director Marcellus Harper.
He said the additional space could mean doubling the number of students they reach within the next three years.
Choosing the arts
Harper never planned a life leading a dance school.
As a student at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, he was part of a rigorous scholarship program and had plans to become a surgeon, operating on patients’ hearts and lungs.
But the stage was always his backdrop.
“I had grown up with arts in my life all the time,” Harper said.
“I was in chorus and band, theater. I did it all. I was always on stage and loved that but always, arts were positioned as a hobby.”
Growing up with working class parents, education was everything.
While Thomas’ first dance class set him on a path toward the stage at 7, at the same age Harper’s path seemed to be leading toward medicine.
“Since I was 7, I was going to be a cardiothoracic surgeon and whenever I would say it, all of the black people around me would applaud and it just became what I was going to do,” he said.
“I loved that reaction and I knew that my parents wanted me to do something like that.”
For three years, he followed that plan. And for three years he was miserable, he said.
Finally, after taking every theater elective he could, Harper was told he couldn’t take any more classes in the department without declaring theater as his major and, at the risk of disappointing his parents, he made the switch.
Harper later moved to New York where he and Thomas met.
From 2004 to 2007, Thomas and Harper trained dancers and designed shows but the two felt that the New York market — “the Mecca of dance,” as Thomas calls it — was saturated. They felt that the program might have more success in another city.
In 2007, Harper was offered a position as the special projects coordinator at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Neither of them had any connection to Memphis but they thought it was worth a try and with Harper’s new job, they had a safety net.
Starting with one student
Two years after Harper and Thomas moved to Memphis, they relaunched Collage Dance Collective teaching a single child inside the Galloway United Methodist Church.
They later moved to First Congregational Church of Memphis then to a spot inside Overton High School before a donation from a parent finally gave them a shot at their current space off Broad Avenue.
With each move the dance school grew a little more. Now, with two studios, they are busting at the seams again.
While Harper talked about Collage’s growth in the shared office space, he lowered and raised his voice to be heard over the music as their dancers practiced the second act of Swan Lake, which will be included in the company’s fall show on Oct. 26 and 27.
It will be the first production of Swan Lake in Memphis with a stage filled with dancers of color in recent memory and possibly ever, Thomas said days later in the same office, this time surrounded by black and white tutus to be worn by his swans.
The new space will have a quiet office area, five studios — two of which will be larger than the entire space they currently have, two courtyards, two lounges, a costume shop and dressing rooms with showers.
“I see a very large future,” Thomas said.
“Definitely the school is going to grow. The company is going to grow... Just as when I moved from Overton (High School) to here (Broad Avenue), I was free to be more creative. I’m just imagining now how much more creative I can be with even more space and even more buy in from the community.”
The importance of place
While Harper and Thomas both say the process of planning their new studio is surreal, the vision for Collage Dance Collective was never small. Thomas said he always wanted it to be an internationally recognized dance company and he is still working toward that goal.
Their new building is part of that dream.
A huge amount of thought went into a space that dancers of color could be proud of. They are planning a range of flesh-toned paint as an abstract nod to inclusivity.
They want natural materials and an abundance of natural light to make the space beautiful to remind their dancers that they too deserve a studio that is beautiful to practice their crafts.
“We’re about to do something that is first for Memphis and, in a lot of ways, it has implications even nationally in terms of what’s being done in the black dance community,” Harper said.
“We don’t want to forget why we do this and who this is for. We don’t want to forget that we’ve been actively working to make ballet more accessible. We’ve been actively working to engage people who felt marginalized or (felt) that it’s elitist or stuffy or not for them.”
That’s how they chose to stay in Binghampton, a neighborhood with a large black and immigrant population and on Sam Cooper Boulevard, one of Memphis major thoroughfares.
“We’re an anchor institution now in a community that for too long has been under-resourced and underserved,” Harper added.
“We’re excited about it. We’re excited that our kids in Binghampton can walk to the new facility that we can potentially engage more kids in that facility but then also be visible.”
Desiree Stennett covers economic development and business at The Commercial Appeal. She can be reached at desiree.stennett@commercialappeal. com, 901-529-2738 or on Twitter: @de si_stennett.