Dance Theatre of Harlem, a historical haven for African American dancers, returns to France

Laura Cappelle

Founded at the end of the civil rights movement in the United States, Dance Theatre of Harlem is a symbol: a company dedicated to African American ballet dancers, who have so often been excluded from major companies. At a time of heightened political tension over racial diversity in America, the company is returning to France under the direction of choreographer Robert Garland.

1969. Barely a year after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., followed by the Civil Rights Act that prohibited racial discrimination on a national level, Arthur Mitchell laid the first foundation stone for Dance Theater of Harlem. He was then one of the great names in American neoclassical ballet. A star of New York City Ballet, he had been the company’s first African American principal dancer since 1955 – and experienced firsthand the racial inequalities that permeated the dance world. Despite the unwavering support of George Balanchine, who created Agon with him in 1957, the central pas de deux that was created on him could not even be shown on television: his partnership with a white dancer was not tolerated.

Dance Theater of Harlem, located in the African American neighborhood of New York where Mitchell himself was born, became a form of resistance – leading by example. The company’s current director, Robert Garland, remembers the first time he saw DTH on stage in Philadelphia in the 1970s. “I must have been seven years old, and my mother got free tickets because she worked for the city,” he says. His experience of dance at the time was limited to Busby Berkeley films. “And then I watched this Black dance company, dancing to the words of Dr. King. It was just amazing to me.”

A few years later, still profoundly marked by the experience, Garland began taking classes at Judimar, a school in Philadelphia where John Hines, a former dancer with choreographer Katherine Dunham, taught. Although Black dancers had occasionally performed in ballets since the 19^th century, as the Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet project has shown, their professional prospects remained limited: “At that time, most aspired to join Alvin Ailey or Dance Theater of Harlem, but you had to have excellent ballet technique for Harlem,” explains Garland.

When he joined the company in the early 1980s, it was like a “wonderful cavalcade of the African diaspora,” he recalls. “There were up to 65 or 70 dancers, and about half of them came from other countries, from South America, Europe...” Balanchine’s support for his former protégé enabled the company to develop its repertoire and arouse curiosity. “Arthur Mitchell gave Balanchine at times a physical vocabulary that came from the African American diasporic experience,” Garland recalls. “When DTH did his ballets, there were jazz elements, for example, that people had never seen before.”

In addition to Balanchine’s works, the company’s repertoire included reinterpretations of ballet classics that have left a lasting impression. In 1984, Mitchell created a unique Creole version of Giselle, setting the Romantic ballet in 1840s Louisiana while remaining as faithful as possible to the choreography of Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot – as restaged by Frederic Franklin, a former star of the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo. In 1982, choreographer John Taras reinvented The Firebird, once performed by the Ballets Russes, in a Caribbean setting. French audiences will experience it for the first time as part of their four-city tour across the country this February and March. "This is actually Afrofuturism before Afrofuturism existed," adds Garland. "It is empowerment through speculative fiction. I think it happens whenever the African American culture collides with ballet culture."

Buoyed by the success of these pieces, DTH rose to international prominence in the early 1990s, performing in Russia shortly after the fall of the USSR and in South Africa at a time when the country was debating the end of apartheid. However, financial difficulties forced the troupe to take a long break from 2004 onward. “Historically, companies of color have been horrifically under-resourced,” Garland points out. “And the gentrification of Harlem was causing another kind of financial burden.” Thanks to financial support from the Ford Foundation and under the direction of Virginia Johnson, a star dancer under Mitchell, Dance Theatre of Harlem returned eight years later in a new form: the company now has only 20 dancers, with students from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts joining them for larger productions, like The Firebird. 

A longtime associate choreographer, Garland took over as artistic director in 2023, with a desire to “tighten up the legacy” of Mitchell, who died in 2018. For him, his predecessor’s vision is no less essential today than it was half a century ago. “During our hiatus, we ‘missed’ two or three generations of dancers. In predominantly white institutions, there might be one, two, hopefully three Black dancers in an evening of performances. But they'll never see ten or fifteen, and that alone is part of our process,” he says. “Representation isn’t everything, but it is something.”

The repertoire also remains aligned with the pillars established by DTH's founder: the Balanchine lineage, which French audiences will experience with his Donizetti Variations; works that hover between neoclassical and contemporary dance; and some that are rooted “in the African American diaspora experience,” as Garland describes them. He himself embodies this plurality and has struggled to gain recognition for his work outside the company, as racial barriers persist for Black choreographers who use the classical vocabulary. In 2020, a New York Times headline read: “The ballet world needs Robert Garland. Why isn’t it calling?”

France has the opportunity to make up for lost time with this tour. DTH will perform Garland's Return, which combines classical vocabulary with hits by James Brown and Aretha Franklin, as well as New Bach, a tribute to Balanchine, and 2022's Higher Ground, which draws parallels between the political climate of the 1970s and that of Donald Trump’s America.

 “I guess you can call it my protest ballet,” Garland says of this piece, which was inspired by Stevie Wonder’s anti-racist activism. Higher Ground also embodies the confrontation between the experiences of people of color and the culture of classical ballet, which has been very slow to change. “You're watching the collision,” Gerland says with a smile. “But you're also watching the resolve.” 

Laura Cappelle is a Paris-based journalist and scholar. In 2023, she was appointed associate professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She edited a French-language introduction to dance history, Nouvelle Histoire de la danse en Occident (Seuil, 2020), and her new book, Créer des ballets au XXIe siècle, was published with CNRS Éditions in May 2024. She has been the Financial Times’ Paris-based dance critic since 2010, and the New York Times’ French theater critic since 2017. She is also an editorial consultant for CN D Magazine.

Dance Theater of Harlem On Tour
February 19 to 21 at the Colisée in Roubaix
February 26 to 28 at the Palais des Congrès in Paris
March 5 to 7 at the Bourse du Travail in Lyon
learn more

Dance Theatre of Harlem. A History, A Movement, A Celebration
Judy Tyrus, Paul Novosel, Kensington publishing, 2021.