Dance Theater of Harlem Comes to Overture Hall

Company photo by Rachel Neville

Dance Theater of Harlem, the venerable ballet company founded in the aftermath of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by former New York City Ballet principal Arthur Mitchell, takes the stage at Overture Hall on May 8.  The company’s mission has always been to show that ballet, despite its origins in the lily-white royal courts of the European Renaissance, is not limited to people with hides of light-toned pigmentation. 

You need to know two things about DTH. First, Balanchine crossed the color line choreographically in the 1950s, when NYCB was new. In 1955 Mitchell partnered Balanchine’s fourth wife, the very white Tanaquil LeClercq, in Western Symphony. In 1957, Balanchine, breaking free of the aesthetics of European ballet, created the daring, starkly modernist, Stravinsky-scored
Agon pas de deux on Mitchell and another of his great, fair-complected muses, Diana Adams.  Later, he  made the role of Puck for Mitchell in his Midsummer Night’s Dream.  

And second, while ballet companies face financial roadblocks all too often, DTH is a marvel of survival. The company went under in 2004 (though its school stayed open).  But a decade later it roared back to life, under the artistic direction of Virginia Johnson, a DTH principal in its earlier incarnation and the founding editor of Pointe Magazine. 

DTH’s active repertory, like its dancers, is very diverse. On the bill are Balanchine’s Valse Fantaisie and Christopher Wheeldon’s This Bitter Earth pas de deux; Madison Ballet performed Valse and a similar Wheeldon pas in its Rise program early in April, making for serendipitous comparison.  Also on DTH’s program is Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven: Odes to Love and Loss, by the late Ulysses Dove, who studied at the UW-Madison Dance Department decades ago with my old teacher Xenia Chlistowa; Dove became an Ailey principal and then a reknowned choreographer, with works in the repertories of ABT and NYCB.  And we’ll see Vessels, by the eclectic choreographer and Harlem native Darrell Grand Moultrie, who’s created works for Beyoncé and Savion Glover, just to toss out a couple of names, and whose ballets have been set on major companies far and wide.

Harlem-born Christopher McDaniel, 27, who came up throuth the ranks of the DTH School, left during the company’s hiatus, and just recently returned, took an interview call from me last week.

CulturalOyster: These days all companies have to take the DTH model seriously, for two reasons – diversity is the key to the future of ballet, both financially and artistically, and also, the survival of the artform depends on figuring out how ballet organizations can survive over the long haul.  So let me start by asking you a little about your own long history with DTH.  According to your website you trained at DTH School under Mitchell, and then you became a company member on season contract through 2010.  After that you danced with Los Angeles Ballet, then Ballet San Antonio.  And now you’re back at DTH. How are your personal history and DTH’s history entwined?

McDaniel:  I first saw ballet I was eight and my school went on a fieldtrip to see DTH.  I’d been doing some praise dancing in church with my cousin and when I saw ballet for the first time I thought wow, that’s what I want to do. The assistant principal at my school set up an audition for me a few years later and I got into the DTH school in 2001, when I was eleven.  I trained with Arthur Mitchell and others and then in 2004 a financial crisis hit the company.  I got off bus to go to studio one day and we were told it as closed and there were no more classes.  I went back home. I was heartbroken.

That year they reopened the school and I went back, but it was a struggle. A lot of the students had gone to Ailey or [NYCB’s] School of American Ballet, but at that point I was only thirteen and I didn’t know you could do that.  I didn’t know enough about the dance world outside of DTH – I thought I had to wait.  But the school it was only closed for six months or so because there was a huge outcry in the city and people pulled funds together to get the school back up. But by then a lot of really strong teachers had left so it was a huge shift.

DTH was all I really wanted but I left the school for a while, I got into LaGuardia High School for the Arts as a dance major when I was a sophomore and I did Boston Ballet’s summer program.  But in 2008 I came back.  I was asked to join the DTH Ensemble that was created to stand in the gap for the company.  It was sort of like a studio company – it was a professional touring ensemble but not at the level of the old company – we had some of the old repertory but we didn’t have a New York season, it was all done on the road at smaller theaters and it was just a small group of us. 

I was in the Ensemble for two years and during that time Arthur Mitchell retired and Virginia Johnson came on as artistic director.  The idea was to reinvent the company within a few years.  But at that point I was ready to go somewhere where they were doing a bigger repertory.  I was very into Balanchine.  Historically DTH did a lot of Balanchine, but the Ensemble did none.  So I reached out to Los Angeles Ballet and got an audition.  I danced there five seasons and then I was at Ballet San Antonio for two seasons and then I went to a company in Charleston, South Carolina [the fledgeling American National Ballet].  But that company didn’t make it so I went back to DTH in October, 2017, and right away we went on tour to Eastern Europe.

CulturalOyster: What brought you back to DTH?  

McDaniel: I always wanted to be a part of DTH.  Dancing in Los Angeles I developed a huge, eclectic repertory – I got to dance a lot of amazing roles. It was the same in San Antonio.  But I felt like I was missing home  My dream was to be a leading dancer at DTH.  So I’m definitely excited about returning.

At first it was nervewracking.  Virginia is one of the most intelligent women I know.  She didn’t say we’ve known you for years, come on back.  She had me come in and do the cattle call audition with over twenty-five other dancers. It was scary, I’m not gonna lie.  It was like im 27 years old, I can’t do a cattle call!  Some of the dancers have been in the company since it was reestablished.  I was afraid I wouldn’t fit in – I thought maybe I’d developed a different style of movement.  I had to start back from ground zero and prove I deserved to be part of the company.  But it worked out the way it was supposed to.  I feel like I’ve earned the right to proclaim that I’m a DTH dancer.

CulturalOyster: Your bio says you’ve been an SAB fellow in the diversity program.  You know a lot about the history of diversity I ballet, so you’re a great person to ask – how has Mitchell’s original mission for DTH been carried through, and how has it changed?

McDaniel: the other day Virginia said something really brilliant that I wrote down – she said ballet is about the human spirit rising to excellence and that belongs to everyone.  That resonated with me because most young  people – well, not always, it’s mainly girls – want to be a ballerina, and then even now there’s this moment when they don’t see one who looks like them. 

There’s definitely a new wave of diversity all across the country, but people forget that DTH has been doing it for almost fifty years.  It’s a phase now, everyone’s on the diversity bandwagon and it’s great and we’re grateful.  But people need to understand the history before diversity became the best new hashtag.  I think the fact that diversity seems new is due to the long hiatus we had.  For ten years DTH wasn’t seen on major stages so there was the thought that there were no black dancers.  So it’s easy to misconstrue the history or give someone else credit for being the first and that’s just not OK.  DTH has always had dancers of all ethnicities and body types – Mr. Mitchell made it a point to diversify the company.  

In terms of the mission its still mostly the same, but what’s different is that we no longer have to prove that the African American body can do ballet, that fallacy has been put to rest.  Now what Virginia wants to do is show that ballet can be seen in a different way, it can be a present-day artform that supports the diversity mission.  If you want to promote diversity you have to have diversity in the repertory.  You can’t have all works that were choreographed for black bodies or done to black music.  Some if it has to be not specific, some of it has to be contemporary, some has to be neoclassical – we want to show that ballet belongs to all people.

CulturalOyster: What will we see you do in this program?

McDaniel: We haven’t gotten our casting yet so I don’t know, but I’m normall in Moultrie’s Vessels.  It has an amazing contemporary sensibility.  Moultrie grew up in Harlem and a lot of his approach calls on being human.  He’ll stop in the middle of a rehearsal and say “don’t do it like a dancer, do it like a human!”  It’s a very, very musical piece in four movements, and it has gorgeous costumes. 

           __________________________________________________ interview by SK