Arthur Mitchell: Breaking through American Ballet
In 1957, while the US Government was managing perceptions abroad about its severe racial injustices at the apex of the Civil Rights movement, a tall handsome Black man skillfully guided a white woman around, over, and onto his Black body. The Neoclassical ballet entitled, “AGON,” choreographed by George Balanchine, presented the reality that Black people had entered the professional ballet stage. Arthur Mitchell said in a New York Times interview, “I actually bucked society, and an art form that was three, four hundred years old, and brought Black people into it.”
Arthur Mitchell was the first African American professional ballet dancer in America. Born in 1934, in Harlem, he tap-danced & enjoyed social dancing before being accepted into the High School for the Performing Arts. After his father was incarcerated when he was 12 years old, he continued his dance studies in High School despite discouragement from his friends and family.
“…But did anyone ever say you just can’t dance that because you’re Black?”
“Yes.They kept saying, ‘Why you studying Ballet?’ The minute they told me I could not become a dancer that’s when something inside me said, ‘Oh really! I’ll show you.”
He went on to study in the School of American Ballet. After performing in several Broadway musicals with notable dancers such as Diahann Carroll, Geoffrey Holder, Alvin Ailey, Carmen de Lavallade, and Pearl Bailey, Mitchell was invited, in 1955, to join the New York City Ballet.
Mitchell defied the “laws” of racists in America by performing in ballet’s traditional setting of the pas de deux in Balanchine’s canonical masterpiece, “AGON.” A piece choreographed specifically for Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams. Mitchell achieved international recognition and cemented his placement in dance history in his performance with Adams, a Southern white woman. Despite racists complaints and comments about the pairing of a Black man and white woman in a ballet, Balanchine refused to recast the role for his piece. One of the primary motivating values of the Ku Klux Klan throughout the 20th century and other white supremacists organizations was to protect the “purity” of white women and to keep them separated from non-white men. Mitchell relentlessly challenged the racist idea that Blacks were inferior to whites throughout his career. He said in an interview,
“1957, to take a Black man and Diana who was very Patrice and long legs very white skin...to put them together in this intricate pax de Deux that involves serious partnering...and the whole secret of it is that the woman must let me do everything to her. She can’t do anything herself. That’s one of the very first things that Balanchine taught me. It was very intimate. He used our skin tones as part of the choreography.”
Mitchell went on to become the Principle dancer in the New York City Ballet until the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. After which he left the New York City Ballet to create the Arthur Mitchell Dance Theater of Harlem. With $25,000 of his own money, he started the first all-Black ballet dance school in an old garage in the center of Harlem. Within two months the organization grew from 30 participants to 400 new African American students. In conversation with his friend, Cicely Tyson, Mitchell 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.”