The Dance Card
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Published: March 16, 2008
To the Editor:
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Related
'The Race Card,' by Richard Thompson Ford: The Big Blind (February 10, 2008)
Orlando Patterson, in his review of “The Race Card” (Feb. 10), writes, “Consider this: The great choreographer George Balanchine held that a ballerina’s skin should be the color of a peeled apple, a view shared by many in ballet circles.” He then conflates this with “an artistic director’s refusal to hire a talented black ballerina because ballerinas are expected to be white, thin and flat everywhere.” A number of points need to be made to correct the misapprehensions here.
According to Arthur Mitchell, founding artistic director of Dance Theater of Harlem, Balanchine’s line about a ballerina’s skin ideally resembling a “peeled apple” applied to Suzanne Farrell alone. Certainly Balanchine — who had been years ahead of most artistic directors in ballet in hiring black male dancers (Mitchell was not the first of these) — assisted and encouraged Mitchell’s work with Dance Theater of Harlem in the 1970s, and he invited its ballerina Lydia Abarca to dance with the New York City Ballet. In the same decade, he promoted the black dancer Debra Austin in the New York City Ballet, both making a solo for her in his new “Ballo della Regina” (1978) and casting her as one of the four ballerinas in his white-tutu ballet “Symphony in C” (among other occasions, on the opening night of the company’s 1979 season at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden).
In earlier years, before he had a company of his own, Balanchine had worked with Katherine Dunham on the all-black musical “Cabin in the Sky,” and before that had worked closely with Josephine Baker in both Paris and New York. In the 1940s he used Betty Nichols at Ballet Society; in 1960 he used Mary Hinkson. Because of his use of Mitchell with the white ballerina Diana Adams in its pas de deux, his ballet “Agon” (1957) could not be performed in the South. It is hard to think of another white ballet choreographer of his generation so enlightened.
It seems likely that relatively few black parents choose to send their children to ballet school. (In 1933, Lincoln Kirstein and Balanchine planned to make their new American ballet company 50 percent white and 50 percent black. Such proportions, however, were never remotely achievable even at the student level.) One reason for this must be the considerable expense of ballet training.
It is sadly true that very few black female dancers currently appear in our foremost ballet companies. The reason, however, is unlikely to be color prejudice on the part of artistic directors: the presence of black dancers makes for good public relations. In the 1990s, City Ballet made a point of casting a black dancer as the first Snowflake onstage in “The Nutcracker”; and today it makes prominent use of Albert Evans in photographs promoting the company’s seasons.
Alastair MacaulayNew YorkThe writer is the chief dance critic of The New York Times.
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To the Editor:
What is Orlando Patterson’s evidence for his unqualified assertion that the idea that a female ballet dancer should be white is “a view shared by many in ballet circles”? It is my observation that the rarity of black principal dancers in American ballet companies is the result of a complicated set of interacting circumstances — the product, in turn, of a history of racism — but that current racism on the part of ballet directors and the audience plays a relatively small part in it. If Patterson has evidence to the contrary, he should please provide it.
Joan AcocellaNew YorkThe writer is The New Yorker’s dance critic.