Harlem Troupe Prepares for Act II
How long can a company remain on hiatus until it disappears for good? In 2004 Dance Theater of Harlem, facing debt of about $2.3 million, was forced to shutter its 44-member professional company. Months turned into years, and it seemed as if the vibrant group, formed in 1969 by Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would end up a footnote to dance history.
But with a new artistic director, Virginia Johnson — whose career at Dance Theater, where she was a founding member, lasted 28 years — the organization has a five-year plan that includes bringing the company back to life in 2013.
“Arthur Mitchell used to say, ‘It took us 15 years to become Dance Theater of Harlem,’ ” Ms. Johnson said at the organization’s Harlem headquarters, where there is still a school and studio space. “It takes time to get everybody to dance the same and to build a repertoire that says, ‘This is who we are.’ ” She shook her head. “We can’t wait another 15 years. It’s already been six.”
Ms. Johnson, 60, is well acquainted with the financial precariousness of the dance world. After retiring from the stage, she spent nine years as the editor of Pointe Magazine, at which she gained a breadth of knowledge about the economic, as well as the artistic, side of ballet. At Dance Theater she works in equal partnership with Laveen Naidu, its executive director, also a former company member. Together they are creating a new Dance Theater of Harlem that looks beyond its roots as the first major black ballet troupe to ask what ballet means in the 21st century.
“Ballet is a way of elevating the spirit,” Ms. Johnson said. “It’s about being the most that a human being can be. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t subscribe to the specifics of pointed feet and point shoes. I believe in point shoes wholeheartedly. I want to see more of them, and that’s going to continue to be a key part of what Dance Theater of Harlem does, but I also think: Frogs and fairies, no. We’re not going to do so much of that.”
The new Dance Theater will be substantially smaller — with 18 dancers to begin with — but will afford Ms. Johnson and Mr. Naidu a chance to reinvent. “We have a huge opportunity to do something that is of this moment,” Ms. Johnson said.
The trick is to make it sustainable. When the company comes back, Mr. Naidu, 42, said: “We want to level out at around a $5.5 million organization.”
Mr. Naidu has spent the last several years focused on reducing debt. (It is now, he said, under $1 million.) After Ms. Johnson became the artistic director in January, financing followed from, among others, the Mellon and Ford Foundations. While Dance Theater remains lean — there are 17 employees — money from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone made it possible for Mr. Naidu to hire a marketing associate and a major gifts officer. And the Empowerment Zone has provided a development consultant, Emma E. Dunch, who has “ballet in her soul,” Ms. Johnson said of Ms. Dunch, laughing. “She doesn’t let anything slide, but that’s exactly what we need.”
The five-year plan includes increasing the board to 30 members from 14. It also focuses on two crucial issues that Ms. Johnson sees as universal problems in ballet: audience and repertory. With a Rockefeller Foundation 2010 NYC Cultural Innovation grant, she has instituted Harlem Dance Works 2.0, a dance laboratory that is essentially about creating choreography for a company that doesn’t exist.
In “For Two,” the first installment, Ms. Johnson commissioned duets by Robert Garland, Helen Pickett and Darrell Grand Moultrie and hired professional dancers to perform them. This month Dance Theater hosted weekly showings of works in progress at its headquarters, followed by discussions with the choreographers and audience members. The final program is Thursday night, and in a new push by Dance Theater to embrace the Internet, Web casts will also be available.
In spring Dance Works will undertake two more projects. One will focus on setting the pas de deux from Alvin Ailey’s 1972 work “The Lark Ascending,” which Dance Theater was awarded an American Masterpieces grant to reconstruct. The second provides studio time for Thaddeus Davis, who will begin to choreograph a work for the company’s opening in 2013.
“Thaddeus understands that ballet is something that is broader, deeper, stronger than the currently understood notion of it,” Ms. Johnson said. “It’s a good time to be an African-American-based company talking about our role in this country beyond, O.K., jazz. There’s so much more material to explore. And that’s what I want Dance Theater of Harlem to do. To bring that to our stage — that we aren’t one subject, one story, but so many stories.”
Ms. Johnson said she also believes in resource sharing — or, as she put it, “how to make companies work in the modern world” — and has initiated a partnership with Karole Armitage. For the next several months Ms. Armitage will be in residence at Dance Theater, where she receives subsidized studio time. Her next ballet will include members of the Dance Theater of Harlem Ensemble, made up of students in the professional training and fellows programs at the Dance Theater’s school.
“She’s curious,” Ms. Johnson said. “I think that being curious is something that we don’t have a lot of in the ballet world.”
To foster more creative thinking, Ms. Johnson has instituted the Whole Dancer Curriculum, which at the moment is geared toward students enrolled in the professional training program. Along with nutrition, music and drama, the plan is to also instruct dancers on how to make the transition from student to professional. In other words, Ms. Johnson asked, “How do you prepare for not being told how to do every single thing?”
After a recent rehearsal with the ensemble, currently 15 dancers under the direction of Keith Saunders, these issues were on Ms. Johnson’s mind. She sees the ensemble, which is currently the performing entity of the organization, as the nucleus of her future company’s corps de ballet. (Once Dance Theater is re-formed, the ensemble will be disbanded.)
“You’re worried about getting all the steps right,” she told one dancer. “But your worry makes it so small that it’s not interesting to watch.” She also bluntly noted the group’s lack of musicality, saying, “You’re not going to prison,” and “I feel like you’re dancing the steps and the music is in another room.”
It was unexpected, yet entertaining. Ms. Johnson, ravishing as ever, possesses an aura of tranquillity that makes her criticism especially jarring. She doesn’t mess around, especially when it comes to what she wants to instill in her dancers: that they must learn how to think.
“The thing about being a 21st-century dancer is that we’re not just training bodies,” she said. “You have to be able to bring something to your work. There are so many more things about being an artist than, ‘Is your tendu crossed over?’ We’ve done a disservice to our dancers over these years: made them empty headed.”
And she wants Dance Theater to be the same beacon of possibility that it was in its early days. Her mission is to maintain a company that, while diverse, is more than half African-American. “The reason for Dance Theater of Harlem and the fire behind it has got to still be there,” she said. “Now it’s going to be hard to do. I’m not Arthur Mitchell, and I have a very different way of making things happen. But I believe it can happen because it’s in the work.” She smiled.
“We have to maintain our tradition and walk into the future,” she said. “That’s what it is.”