A Dance of Survival

By LEWIS SEGAL

Jan. 8, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES DANCE CRITIC

Thirty years ago, Arthur Mitchell was a leading dancer in New York City Ballet with major, wide-ranging roles created for him by George Balanchine in such works as the full-evening story ballet “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1962), the severely neoclassical “Agon” (1967) and the jazzy “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” (1968).

However, the death that year of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. inspired Mitchell to form Dance Theatre of Harlem, a company that confronted and overturned the old prejudices about African Americans being physically and temperamentally unsuited to classical dance--as well as offering people of color training and performing opportunities previously denied them.

Today, at 63, Mitchell has nothing left to prove, having built DTH into an internationally respected and influential institution--as well as picking up armloads of awards along the way: He has been named a Kennedy Center honoree and received the National Medal of Arts, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, the NAACP Image Award plus a dozen honorary doctorates. On Feb. 13 and 14, his company dances mixed rep at El Camino College in Torrance.

Question: As the century ends, race relations remains the eternal, essential issue dominating American society--but you wouldn’t know it from most of the professional dance companies in this country. Indeed, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey Ballet look just as lily-white today as they did before Dance Theatre of Harlem came into existence. Are there other factors to discuss besides institutionalized racism?

Answer: To begin with, you don’t have the same number of minority kids studying ballet. For every 100 Caucasian kids in dance, only 10 are going to make it. So if you’ve got only 10 minority kids studying, only one is going to make it. Also there aren’t that many black ballet teachers, so there’s nobody for black students to identify with.

At the same time, the companies need to take a more proactive strategy to encompass more people of color--not just blacks but Asians and Hispanics too. It’s got to be a concerted effort of the field. The artistic directors must do more than just say, “This is what I want.” They have to go into those communities and get those kids.

It’s hard to make that a mandate, however. In today’s climate of bare survival, it doesn’t become a high priority. But I look back over the past 30 years and throughout the country, there are many more minority kids studying classical ballet now. You don’t yet see them in the [major national] companies but at least there’s a pool to choose from. At least now there are choices where before there weren’t any.

Q: Surveying the field as a whole, was 1997 a good year for dance?

A: Not at all. Not that we’re not producing wonderful dancers, but there’s no work, there’s no touring, there are no presenters--not enough presenters anyway. The economics of dance have changed so drastically with the demise or downsizing of the National Endowment for the Arts. The seed money isn’t there any longer. There isn’t support for taking risks and being experimental.

The thought processes of a company artistic director touring in these times have had to change because you often must help the presenters identify new constituencies--work with them to market your engagement and go with them into other communities, which they have not traditionally done and which they feel nervous about doing.

Q: Why is audience development suddenly such a crucial issue in American dance?

A: Because the last two or three generations have grown up looking at television. Only that. They’ve never had the experience of going to see the ballet. They’ve never been exposed to it. So that is one of the things we’re doing. That’s part of our mandate.

People are still asking me, “Can my daughter or son earn a living as a dancer?” And when I sit with the children in the audience, I hear them ask with wonder, “Are they live?” And they just go crazy because they’ve never seen anything like it.

Americans have always been very physical, very active, very doing, and that’s why we get excited by dance. Look at the craze for aerobics and how every street corner now has a gym. Everyone seems to be doing step dancing or ballroom dancing--there’s some kind of movement involved. But how do we blend all that together and come up with the popularization of the fine arts--something for all of us? How do we do that and not lose quality? We cannot go backward or lower our standards.

Q: What’s the greatest challenge for you right now?

A: As always, to develop the best dance artists that there are. And the broader pool that we have to choose from, the easier it’s going to be.

The companies that are most successful today are those with a home base: a theater with a subscription series. But if you don’t have a home base, you have to travel because the main thing is to keep the dancers dancing. So you tour, but you cannot go into a city and threaten the local company there. So there’s got to be a partnership, a sharing that hasn’t happened before. And that’s good for everyone.

As dancers and artists, we are committing ourselves to the moment and at the same time giving ourselves to history. We’re the mirror and the soul of this culture and we record it. We are athletes in the true sense of the word but we don’t get the recognition or the pay that an athlete gets because it’s just beginning to be accepted in our society that the arts and particularly dance are necessary. So we just have to hang in there during this difficult period because we know we are right.

Q: You’ve always said that DTH isn’t a black dance company but rather a company of dancers who happen to be black. Is there such a thing as black dance?

A: No. I think dance is dance. Our subject matter can relate to blackness. But in the final analysis, we have to deal with universal common denominators. Subjectively speaking, we may want to relate a work to the culture of Africa or the Caribbean or Latin America, but, ultimately, we either do the jump or we don’t do the jump. Either we do the turn or we don’t do the turn. Our blackness is beside the point. We must be respected as artists first.

Q: And there’s no such thing as a black turn?

A: I have no idea what that would be. [Laughs.] OK, guys, I want you to do a black pirouette, then do a white pirouette. No, that’s another perception that has to be broken down. If you gave me children from any culture and I had them from birth and I started singing spirituals and put that pulse and rhythm into them, trust me, they would grow up with rhythm. And you can also take someone from a black community and put them in another part of society that doesn’t have that and they’ll lose it--it’s educated out of them. So if it can be educated out of them it can be educated into them.

Most of the success of DTH is due to the fact that we come as dance artists who want to make magic when we hit the stage and that magic is universal. In the process, more is accomplished for people of color by just doing it rather than preaching about it.

It’s just beginning to be accepted in our society that the arts and particularly dance are necessary. So we just have to hang in there during this difficult period.

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CROSSROADS

The daily Calendar section today concludes its series of interviews, which began Dec. 29, with arts and entertainment leaders. This was the schedule:

Dec. 29

Film: Harvey Weinstein

Dec. 30

Architecture: Zaha Hadid

Dec. 31

Television: Martha Williamson

Jan. 1

Restaurants: Nancy Silverton

Jan. 2