Doing the Thing You Do Best

By John T. Elson

"What is there in the terminology of dance that implies a ballerina and a danseur noble must be white?" asks Arthur Mitchell. The answer is "Nothing." As living and moving proof there is the career of Mitchell himself, the first (and only) black soloist with George Balanchine's New York City Ballet. Now there is also the Harlem Dance Theater, founded by Mitchell scarcely two years ago.

Last week Mitchell's new company gave its more or less official New York debut at Broadway's ANTA Theater. It was not so much a debut as a revelation. Traditionally, black American dance students have been consistently steered away from classical ballet and toward the supposedly more "suitable" fields of modern, ethnic or Broadway-chorus dancing. The Harlem Dance Theater performances showed beyond doubt that the practice was based not on rhyme but on prejudiced unreason.

Affecting Awkwardness. Considering Mitchell's own background, it was no surprise that the troupe sometimes looked a bit like a beige and sepia training school for the New York City Ballet. A trifle raw and stiff, Mitchell's young dancers nevertheless brought to the stage a springlike vitality and joy very much their own. Their version of Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun, a staple of the City Ballet Repertory, did not have the studied, languid ease customarily provided by Balanchine's company, but it did project an affecting awkwardness and feeling entirely appropriate to a story about young dancers. Especially entrancing as the girl who stirs a narcissistic ballet student (Clover Mathis) from his daydreams was Lydia Abarca, 19, a native New Yorker who has been dancing for less than two years. Lithe and feathery, she exuded a quality of virginal nubility--and she displayed the eye-commanding presence that is the mark of a potential star.

To help his company along, Arthur Mitchell was forced to turn choreographer; almost by accident he has thus established himself as the most promising dance creator to emerge from the Balanchine ranks in recent years. Fete Noire, based on a Shostakovitch score, is a neoclassic Russian romp set in some imaginary imperial salon. At once crisp and buoyant, it demonstrates how well Mitchell has grasped the real secret of Balanchine's genius--the mastery of the logic and geometry of bodies in motion. By contrast, Mitchell's Rhythmetron is a throbbing, stylized Afro-Latin tribal ritual set to a score for 33 percussion instruments by Brazilian Composer Marlos Nobre--a perfect vehicle for the company's restless, half-tamed energy.

The birth of the Harlem Dance Theater stems indirectly from the death of Martin Luther King. At the time, Mitchell was directing the National Company of Brazil. King's assassination prompted him to ask himself what he could do for his own people back home. The answer: "Pay homage to the thing you do best." With the help of a Ford Foundation grant and the teaching skills of Karel Shook, the American-born ballet master of The Netherlands National Ballet, Mitchell was able to launch the Harlem company in the fall of 1969.

The troupe was--and is--small. Of the 24 members, only six have had any prior training to speak of outside the company--notably Walter Raines, 27, a muscular middleweight who had performed with the Stuttgart Ballet, and Virginia Johnson, 21, out of the Washington School of Ballet, a willowy beauty with the poses and proportions of a princess. The rest have been drawn from the ranks of some 800 black students who study at the Dance Theater's school, set up in a Harlem church.

At 36, Mitchell should be at the peak of his own career as a soloist. Yet he has virtually abandoned dancing to supervise the growth of the Theater. "I'm not building a monument to myself," he says, "but I know that little black kids from the slums in this country love ballet. It's often the first order and beauty to come into their lives. And I believe there are black dancers with the physique, temperament, stamina and everything else it takes to make what we call a 'born' ballet dancer. We are making dancers in much less time than the book tells you it takes."

And making them very well indeed. After suffering through a shambles-filled rehearsal that preceded the successful ANTA premiere, Mitchell wryly observed: "Let's call it instant theater." An aide more kindly suggested that "instant magic" was the phrase. Right on. . John T. Elson

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