Classical Ballet with Soul

Taut and slender in black hiphuggers, Arthur Mitchell surveys rehearsals through rose-tinted rimless glasses. There is nothing rose-colored about his attitude, however. "Allen, you should be horsewhipped. We've done this step a thousand times. Virginia, you are dreaming. Establish what you want--you are the lead." To a male dancer in mid-pirouette, he shouts: "What's this, greasing your hair? I'm not having that grease onstage."

Yet no matter how cross or tough Mitchell becomes, there is not a murmur of complaint. "Mr. Mitchell is a tyrant," concedes Dancer William Scott, "but he is a good kind of tyrant. What we've come here to do, we couldn't do anyplace else."

Less than seven years ago, Arthur Mitchell was performing with New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, the first black principal dancer in an American company. His fame grew as he partnered all of Balanchine's great ballerinas, from Maria Tallchief to Suzanne Farrell. Then in April 1968, after the shock of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, he decided that it was time to do something for black people. His first move was to approach the eminent American dance teacher Karel Shook, then ballet master of the Netherlands National Ballet.

In a tiny church basement, the two men created the Dance Theater of Harlem, the nation's first major black ballet company. Two hundred pupils arrived the first day; within a year enrollment had swelled to 800. Some of the kids had attended jazz and tap classes, but hardly any had ever seen a toe shoe. Today D.T.H. is an internationally known company with year-round employment for 27 dancers, a school with a student body of 1,300 and a home of its own in Harlem. "We broke all the rules," Mitchell says proudly, "because we had to. We had to make dancers in less time than the book tells you it takes."

When D.T.H. opened its five-week New York season at Broadway's Uris Theater last week, the audience saw a troupe whose accomplishments belie its youth: the average age is 20. Tall torsos, high arms and limbs stretched toward infinity--the two dozen young dancers burst with vitality. "It's a marriage of the nobility of the Watusi with the aristocracy of Louis XIV," says Shook.

Manifestations, Arthur Mitchell's first new ballet in five years, was the choreographic focal point on opening night. Under a canopy of stars in a silver Eden, Eve sprang from the stomach of Adam, reclining on aluminum mounds. The audience gasped with pleasure as tiny Susan Lovelle unfolded on point while Homer Bryant turned her around slowly on one leg like a potter molding clay on his wheel. But it was willowy Lydia Abarca, a dancer of pristine lyricism, and Paul Russell, all crackling magnetic energy, who were the undisputed stars of the evening. In William Dollar's Combat they achieved what some others are not yet quite up to: the melting intuitive linking of movements that occurs as dancers move beyond the science of ballet nearer to art.

No Giselle. The company's repertory combines the classical tradition and ethnic dance styles. Balanchine's neoclassic ballet Agon floats serenely alongside Geoffrey Holder's mysterious, pulsating Dougla and the virtuoso Russian display pas de deux from Le Corsaire. There is, however, no Giselle. "You'd be surprised how many people feel that because we're not doing Swan Lake that we are not a classical company," Mitchell told TIME'S Rosemarie Tauris. "We don't have enough people or finances to do big 19th century ballets. D.T.H. is not about to do an anemic, rundown Swan Lake; anyway, it's a contemporary company."

Strains of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky filter through the windows of the three-story brick building on 152nd Street. Inside rehearsal pianos thump in the three studios, trumpet blasts pierce the music room, and sewing machines buzz in the basement costume department. A nine-year-old pastes sequins on a ballerina's tutu. Dancers study acting, music, dance notation. D.T.H. builds its own scenery, and company members help the technical crew put up the show. They even know how to make costumes. If a dancer's costume pulls or sags in the crotch, he can tell the seamstress that he has to have a gusset. Eventually, Mitchell hopes to add a full-scale drama department, art-history classes, a theater and dormitories. Yet even now, D.T.H. comes closer than any other American dance institution to a Russian conservatory like the Bolshoi or the Kirov.

Lydia Abarca, 25, grew up only a few blocks away. At 13, she went downtown on a scholarship to the Harkness School of Ballet. Two years later she was told that she could not dance. When she showed up at a Mitchell audition, she recalls, "he grabbed me and told me to take my clothes off because he wanted to see my feet. I thought he was crazy." Another principal dancer, Virginia Johnson, 24, was being steered into modern dance until she learned about D.T.H. Is there any reason for such a waste of black classical talent?

"Ballet people sometimes say that black people's backs are built wrong or that their behinds are too big," says Shook. "So blacks do have behinds and the girls do have bosoms." Scoffs Mitchell, "It is talent and training that make a ballet dancer." That is not to say that he does not have his own special outlook. He maintains there is something distinctive about a black dancer. "It is not that black people have more rhythm, as is generally believed, it's that their rhythm is built on the pulse and the heartbeat. Black people are loose. They let their bodies flow naturally." Adds Shook: "Black dancers are temperamentally very close to the Russians. Blacks use the word soul just as the Russians use the word dusha." Exactly, adds Mitchell. "That's what Dance Theater of Harlem is: classical ballet with soul."

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