'Dance will never be the same' – celebrating the legacy of Arthur Mitchell
Arthur Mitchell and Cicely Tyson didn’t have much to say as they walked together the day Martin Luther King Jr was killed. But when the now famous actor reached her apartment, her phone rang. Mitchell was on the line.
“He said: ‘I want to do something. We have to do something. We can’t let his life go like this,’” Tyson remembered.
The next evening, Mitchell phoned again. He told Tyson he had decided to form his own ballet company, and at 1.30am, she got dressed and climbed into a cab. On the floor of Mitchell’s flat with actor Brock Peters by their side, the two friends brainstormed for hours until Dance Theatre of Harlem was born.
“Finally he said: ‘I’m just going to try to find the best black dancers I could find, make the best ballet dancers of them, and we will have for the first time a black ballet dance company,” recalled Tyson.
Her story describes one of the most influential moments in dance history, when Mitchell – New York City Ballet’s first African American principal dancer – decided that privileging white, European bodies onstage was wrong and set out to create a platform for black dancers who had been historically excluded from ballet. This season, members of Dance Theatre of Harlem will celebrate their company’s 50th anniversary. But its leader, who died in September, won’t be there for the milestone.
At a memorial service for Mitchell on 3 December at Manhattan’s Riverside Church – where King delivered a speech in 1967 – Tyson’s anecdote resonated. It was one of many remembrances shared by colleagues of a man who literally changed the demographic makeup of his profession.
The chapel was packed with entire generations influenced by Mitchell: students and alumni, family, peers, former and current company members. Ballet superstar Misty Copeland inconspicuously tucked herself in a pew, and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton sent notes to be read aloud during the ceremony.
Two themes recurred as people spoke about Mitchell: excellence and generosity. He was excellent because he demanded no less of himself or his dancers, they explained. And as he strove for excellence, he gave of himself fully.
Born feet first, Mitchell once joked that he was destined to be a dancer. As a principal with one of America’s foremost ballet companies, he enjoyed global acclaim. Though there were other black ballet dancers, he was the one who “broke the barrier most visibly”, Sylvia Waters, a former dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ailey II artistic director emerita, told the Guardian. Edward Villella, a colleague at City Ballet, said Mitchell was always the favorite on tour.
“What Arthur Mitchell did was open the floodgates to the beginning of an awareness for the need of cultural diversity in dance,” said Eduardo Vilaro, artistic director and CEO of Ballet Hispánico. A Cuban American who grew up in the Bronx, Vilaro told the Guardian that Mitchell was one of his heroes because he challenged the notion that dancers had to assimilate into a Eurocentric ideal.
“These mavericks of dance really gave us the opportunity to see ourselves and a reflection of who we are as people of color in a very different light,” Vilaro said.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when Mitchell danced for City Ballet, the country was still widely segregated. And being the Jackie Robinson of ballet did not protect him from racism or prejudice.
Villella remembers when he and Mitchell were on tour in Baltimore, Maryland, and decided to grab a bite. The restaurant they went to refused to serve them. Villella was outraged. Mitchell took a deep breath and said they should leave.
It was in that America that Mitchell founded Dance Theatre of Harlem. Waters remembers early conversations with Mitchell about what he wanted to achieve through the company. He planned to find dancers who could respond to ballet’s rigors and recruit the finest teachers to train them, so that black ballerinas would finally earn the respect they deserved.
“He wanted to build this company that would show the world that they were wrong,” Waters said. “I think that dance will never be the same. We cannot go back to what it was.”
“Because of him, ballet could not exclude us,” said Virginia Johnson, one of Mitchell’s first dancers and the current artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem. “We were his army, united in the love of an art form.”
Dance Theatre of Harlem’s entrepreneurship and success became “the impetus for what we know as culturally specific dance companies” today, Vilaro said. “We’re not told that we have the right to build, the right to form. And so his leadership of doing that, he broke the ceiling.”
At Riverside Church, the man who cast off convention was remembered unconventionally – his memorial lasted three hours, though no one in the crowd seemed to mind. During the eulogy, mourners stood up and choreographed to the Our Father prayer. Some people did classical arm gestures as though they were in the studio, feigning an elegantly partnered dip with their seatmate. Others found space in the church’s aisles, where they moved freely.
But the most excellent dancing took place when professional ballerinas at some of the country’s finest companies – including Dance Theatre of Harlem – graced the chapel platform. Among the performers was Alicia Graf Mack, who credits Mitchell for turning her dreams into a reality. Mack is now the director of Juilliard’s dance division, but she returned to the stage to perform a role Mitchell requested she reprise at his memorial. He had choreographed the solo for her when she was 18 years old.
Titled Balm in Gilead, Mitchell created the piece to express how dance and music can heal pain. Mack said she thought it was fitting for the memorial. She stretched long and contracted, reaching up to the heavens as though her body were an instrument of prayer.
“I think that he was present,” Mack later said. “I know that he was present. You could feel him in the room.”