Dance
McDonagh, Don
Dance BLACK BALLET THE FRUITS OF PERSEVERANCE TWO UNRELATED EVENTS occurring within a week last fall indicated the distance black dancers have traveled in the world of concert dance. New York...
...The work has had many interpreters, but Tomlinson is the first dancer to make his company debut in it...
...Agon," one of the richest of the Stravinsky/ Balanchine collaborations, is a spare, economical, and demanding display of classic dancing using medieval dance forms as its framework...
...Recognizing the reality of the process, Mitchell first established a school - and has devoted enormous energy to it ever since...
...When he was born in Raleigh in 1954 none of these organizations existed...
...The most successful piece for the group was "Allegory" which relied on slow dignified processionals to make its measured effect...
...Lavinia Williams, an original member of the company, danced a pixie-ish solo, "Caprice," that was cute and playful...
...black leotards and tights for the women and black leotards with white tee shirts for the men...
...His works did not break new ground but did portray an intelligent, skilled shaping of then contemporary materials...
...In terms of his own artistry, he is an accomplished one...
...for the most part in all-black shows...
...Costuming is simple...
...It was strikingly costumed, as were all the dances, with Broadway-bright colors and styling...
...In part this has to do with school opportunities...
...The latter is a classically trained company of black dancers founded in 1968 by Arthur Mitchell, who was formerly a principal dancer with New York City Ballet and the first black dancer included in that company's roster...
...When Eugene Van Grona, a white, European, expressionist dancer, came to the United States in the twenties, he made his" career on the Broadway stage...
...One of them was "Agon," in which Tomlinson appeared...
...But for Van Grona's and others' determination, subsequent developments like Dance Theater of Harlem might have been even more delayed than they were...
...Perhaps that thought crossed Arthur Mitchell's mind when he agreed to be part of the honorary committee sponsoring the event...
...It helped open a door which had been shut...
...Then in the mid-thirties, he placed an advertisement in the Amsterdam News announcing an audition for dancers...
...Though somewhat more accessible to the black dancer, the field of modern dance was slow to put aside its traditional prejudice...
...When Mitchell founded Dance Theater of Harlem, he was given substantial encouragement by the administration of New York City Ballet and over the years has been allowed to present a generous number of Balanchine ballets...
...The image was impressive in the small Riverside Church Theater and must have been overwhelming in Radio City Music Hall where it had been given its premiere...
...It is a part that calls for extreme rigor in its outlines and flashes of almost off-hand virtuosity...
...The most effective of these was "Spirit of Labor...
...Well over a hundred applicants appeared at the appointed time, and from among them Van Grona selected forty to comprise the first "American Negro Ballet...
...The ballet pours twentieth-century energy into folk forms, and Tomlinson appeared happily cast in its central pas de deux...
...In the thirties, blacks' live performing opportunities were restricted to show-dancing...
...New York City Ballet presented its newest male dancer, Mel Tomlinson, in one of its touchstone pieces, "Agon," and Eugene Van Grona restaged various works he first presented in 1937...
...Other company dances such as "Children of the Earth," "Hot from the Scorching Sun," and "It All Began on the Showboat" used stock formations efficiently if not overly imaginatively...
...To a great extent ballet still has relatively few black dancers among the major companies...
...To pretend that the dances presented on the program of revivals at the Theater of Riverside Church were masterworks would betray their small but real values...
...Gradually, in the forties, some black dancers made their appearance in modern dance concert groups but were still too "exotic" for the world of classic ballet...
...What takes no imagining, however, is the groundbreaking nature of the enterprise...
...Tomlinson's ease, as he partnered Heather Watts, one of the company's principal dancers, in meeting the work's intricate demands is both a tribute to his own performing skill and his experience with Dance Theater of Harlem...
...Training starts when the child is between eight and ten years of age and continues to the late teens when the student dancer is ready to enter the performing ensembles of major companies...
...Mel Tomlinson is a classically trained ballet dancer who has danced with the North Carolina School of the Arts, the Dance Theater of Harlem, and Alvin Ailey's American Dance Theater...
...In 1937 the company presented its first concert but only after enduring the prevalent racial intolerance that made even renting studio rehearsal space a difficulty...
...If the child does not start in time, he or she will never be able to aspire to a professional ballet career...
...Van Grona, himself in his middle sixties, showed equal panache in presenting his solos...
...The company is now a memory but a significant footnote to the history of American dance...
...In the professionally exacting selection system that governs New York City Ballet's casting, Tomlinson is a clearly qualified dancer...
...DON McDONAGH...
...Subsequent to her American Negro Ballet career, she danced in the companies of Martha Graham, Katherine Dunham, Agnes deMille, and taught at Alvin Ailey's School...
...The company was short-lived but did constitute a mammoth step forward for the black concert artist...
...From our vantage point almost forty years later it is difficult to imagine their original impact...
...Lit from the front by lamps hidden behind the cutout of a large toothed gear, he mimed working gestures of hauling, pounding, and the like as large moving shadows of him loomed on the back-cloth...
...That they now exist and provide performing outlets for talented black dancers as well as white artists and students is a fact of history and perseverance...
...Aside from the artistic aspects of the performances, their occurrence has a social and historical interest...
...Though past her peak now, she performed the work with all of the character-embellishments that are in the arsenal of the mature artist...
...Dancing the masterpiece under its creator's watchful gaze must have been unsettling, but his confident performance demonstrated again and quite clearly what the world of conceit dance was not always ready to accept and for many years vigorously resisted: that a properly trained black dancer has the ability to perform the classic repertory without apology...
...Van Grona's artistic sensibility was shaped in the times when he was an active performer...
Vol. 109 • March 1982 • No. 6
