Mitchell, Arthur

Impact on the world

Became the first African American dancer with the New York City Ballet in 1955 and the company's first Black principal dancer the following year, with choreographer George Balanchine personally creating featured roles for him in works including 'Agon'; after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which he learned of while in Brazil establishing that country's national ballet, Mitchell returned to Harlem determined to create opportunities for Black dancers in classical ballet, founding the Dance Theatre of Harlem with his own teacher Karel Shook in 1969 using $25,000 of his personal savings, a school that grew from 30 children meeting in a church basement to over 400 students within two months and became the first major African American classical ballet company in U.S. history.

Life & background

Born in Harlem in 1934 to a building superintendent father who later left the family, leaving his mother to raise five children alone, Mitchell discovered dance through tap classes at the Police Athletic League before a guidance counselor encouraged him to audition for New York's High School of Performing Arts, where his talent earned him a scholarship to the School of American Ballet, the official training ground of the New York City Ballet; there he caught the attention of company co-founder George Balanchine, who became his lasting mentor. Mitchell rose from corps member to principal dancer at NYCB within roughly seven years, performing major roles across the company's repertoire even as the broader ballet world offered little comparable opportunity to dancers of color, a disparity made starkly visible decades later when a forgotten predecessor, dancer Arthur Bell, who had performed with NYCB in the late 1940s before building a career in Europe, was found by a reporter in 1994 living destitute in a homeless shelter, his own pioneering role in the company's history having gone almost entirely unrecorded. Spurred to action by King's assassination, Mitchell deliberately built Dance Theatre of Harlem as a theatrical dance company grounded in classical ballet technique rather than a separate, lesser tradition, relaxing dress codes to encourage participation from boys who preferred jeans and T-shirts to traditional dancewear and converting a garage into the company's home using his personal savings; the company toured internationally, became the last American dance company to perform in the Soviet Union in 1988, and developed outreach programs replicated by institutions including England's Royal Ballet. He received the National Medal of Arts, was named a MacArthur Fellow, and stepped down as the school's artistic director in 2009; he died in 2018, having directly opened the door that later allowed dancers including Misty Copeland to become the first Black female principal at American Ballet Theatre.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; Dance Theatre of Harlem official history; National Endowment for the Arts; MOBBallet.org; EBSCO Research Starters