Arthur Mitchell dies at 84, he showed the way for black dancers

Arthur Mitchell, a charismatic dancer with New York City Ballet in the 1950s and ‘60s and the founding director of the ground-breaking Dance Theatre of Harlem, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 84.

His death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of heart failure, said Juli Mills-Ross, a niece. He lived in Manhattan.

Mitchell, the first black ballet dancer to achieve international stardom, was one of the most popular dancers with New York City Ballet, where he danced from 1956 to 1968 and displayed a dazzling presence, superlative artistry and powerful sense of self.

That charisma served him well as the director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, the nation’s first major black classical company, as it navigated its way through severe financial problems in recent decades and complex aesthetic questions about the relationship of black contemporary dancers to an 18th-century European art form.

When asked in an interview with The New York Times in January what he considered his greatest achievement, he said, “That I actually bucked society, and an art form that was three, four hundred years old, and brought black people into it.”

His dancing in just two roles created for him by George Balanchine ensured him a place in American ballet history.

Arthur Mitchell, the founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, holds a photo of himself, in New York, May 11, 2015. The New York Times

In the first, in “Agon,” a trailblazing masterwork of 20th-century ballet that had its premiere in 1957, Mitchell embodied the edgy energy of the piece in a difficult, central pas de deux that Balanchine choreographed for him and Diana Adams.

In this duet, “Balanchine explored most fully the possibilities of linear design in two extraordinary supple and beautifully trained human bodies,” dance historian and critic Lillian Moore wrote.

In the January interview, Mitchell described Balanchine’s challenge.

“Can you imagine the audacity to take an African-American and Diana Adams, the essence and purity of Caucasian dance, and to put them together on the stage?” he said. “Everybody was against him. He knew what he was going against, and he said, ‘You know my dear, this has got to be perfect.'”

Five years after “Agon,” Balanchine created the role of a lifetime for Mitchell as the high-flying, hard-dancing, naughty Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He danced the part, Walter Terry wrote, “as if he were Mercury subjected to a hotfoot.”

Mitchell would forever be identified with the role.

One of the last ballets Mitchell performed with City Ballet was Balanchine’s “Requiem Canticles,” a tribute to the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr created shortly after he was killed in 1968. Profoundly affected by the King assassination, Mitchell began to work toward establishing a school that would provide the children of Harlem with the kinds of opportunities he had had.

He founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem the next year with Karel Shook, a friend and long-time mentor. In the early 2000s, the company, along with its dance school, faced mounting debt, and it was forced to go on hiatus in 2004. But it returned to performance in reduced form in 2012 and now tours regularly and performs at City Centre. The school today has more than 300 students.

Mitchell became artistic director emeritus of Dance Theatre in 2011.

Arthur Mitchell, the founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, holds a photo of himself, in New York, May 11, 2015. The New York Times

He returned to the company in August to oversee a production of “Tones II,” a restaging of one of his older ballets. It is to be performed in April, to commemorate Dance Theatre’s 50th anniversary.

Arthur Adam Mitchell Jr was born in Harlem on March 27, 1934, one of five children. His father was a building superintendent, and his mother, Willie Mae (Hearns) Mitchell, was a homemaker.

As a child he sang in a Police Athletic League glee club and in the Convent Avenue Baptist Church choir, and he took rudimentary tap classes in neighbourhood schools.

An avid social dancer all his life, Mitchell had his first exposure to formal training when a junior high school guidance counsellor saw him dancing at a class party and suggested that he audition for the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan.

Mitchell worked so hard there that in stretching he tore his stomach muscles and was hospitalised. But he was soon performing with the school’s modern-dance ensemble and experimenting with his own choreography. He also performed in Europe and the United States with Donald McKayle (who died in April), Louis Johnson, Sophie Maslow and Anna Sokolow, and he played an angel in a 1952 revival of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” in New York and Paris.

Mitchell was 18 when he began studying with Shook, a demanding ballet teacher who encouraged black dancers to train in classical dance. On his graduation from the High School of Performing Arts he was offered a modern-dance scholarship at Bennington College in Vermont and a ballet scholarship at the School of American Ballet in New York. He chose to study ballet, although there were almost no performing outlets for black dancers in the field.

Beneath Mitchell’s gleaming smile and sunny charm was a tenacity of belief and purpose that could be almost frightening. In Lincoln Kirstein, a founder with Balanchine of the City Ballet school and company, Mitchell found a similarly stubborn friend. To get into the company’s corps de ballet, Kirstein told him, he must dance like a principal.

Arthur Mitchell, the founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, holds a photo of himself, in New York, May 11, 2015. The New York Times

During his student years, Mitchell performed in modern dance and on Broadway in “House of Flowers,” and he was on tour in Europe with the John Butler Dance Theatre when the invitation came to join City Ballet for the 1955-56 season.

He made his debut that season in a lead male role in Balanchine’s “Western Symphony,” replacing Jacques d’Amboise, who was making a film. Years later, Mitchell recalled hearing gasps and at least one racist comment from the audience when he entered the stage that night.

A quick learner, he was often asked to take on major roles and fill in for unavailable principal dancers while he was still in the corps de ballet. In his 15 years with City Ballet, he also created roles in ballets by John Taras and John Butler and in others by Balanchine.

In the haunting second half of Balanchine’s “Metastaseis and Pithoprakta,” Mitchell and Suzanne Farrell moved like loose-bodied rag dolls whom Balanchine seemed to be flinging about the stage. And Mitchell drew on his early tap lessons when Balanchine enlisted his help in the choreography for the Hoofer in “Slaughter on 10th Avenue,” a 1968 restaging of the ballet from the Broadway musical “On Your Toes,” which no one in the original cast remembered.

“OK, you have 16 bars,” Balanchine supposedly told him. “I’ll be back in an hour, and you have something.”

Between seasons, Mitchell performed in Broadway musicals and on television. He created his first professional dances while assisting choreographer Rod Alexander in the 1957 Broadway musical “Shinbone Alley,” in which he also danced. Mitchell also worked as a choreographer and dancer at the Newport Jazz Festival that year and at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, in 1960 and 1961.

Some of his greatest triumphs occurred when City Ballet performed in the Soviet Union in 1962 and, three years later, in Paris, where he won over initially chilly audiences to the company’s unfamiliar kind of ballet.

He was asked to organise the American Negro Dance Company to represent the United States at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal in 1966. The project fell through because of a lack of money, but in 1967 the United States Information Agency invited him to form the National Ballet Company of Brazil.

Mitchell also taught ballet at studios, including the Katherine Dunham School in New York and the Jones-Heywood School of Ballet in Washington, both important centres for black dancers. At Jones-Heywood, dance critic Jean Battey wrote in The Washington Post, Mitchell “goes at the boys like a tough drill sergeant.”

That approach served him well in the earliest days of Dance Theatre of Harlem, which started with classes in a remodeled garage and made its official debut in 1971 with a programme of three ballets by Mitchell at the Guggenheim Museum.

Balanchine and Jerome Robbins contributed works to the repertoire, and later that year the company performed at the Spoleto Festival and in the Netherlands. The company had its first regular seasons in New York and London in 1974. In 1988 it visited the Soviet Union, and performances sold out in Moscow, Tblisi and Leningrad.

The troupe toured South Africa in 1992, offering its educational programmes wherever it performed. As the company grew, Mitchell gave up choreography and concentrated on putting together a wide-ranging repertoire of classics and contemporary work.

Classical productions were tailored to his black dancers, with costumes designed to flatter a variety of skin tones. His restaging of “Giselle” transferred the ballet to 19th-century Louisiana, with Creole characters, and the forest setting of “Firebird” became a lush jungle.

Mitchell also revived long-ignored ballets like Fokine’s “Scheherazade” and Valerie Bettis’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and he encouraged black choreographers like Louis Johnson and Billy Wilson to create work for his dancers. Mitchell’s honours include the 1971 Capezio Award, the 1975 Dance Magazine Award and, in 1993, a Kennedy Centre Honour and a Handel Medallion from New York City.

No immediate family members survive.

Mitchell said he viewed himself as an African-American man with the formation of a Russian aristocrat because of his connection to the Russian-born George Balanchine.

“My relationship with him was totally different than with the other dancers,” he said. “It wasn’t about, ‘What role am I going to dance?’ But ‘What would you like me to do? Use me.’ And he did.”

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