Sheila Rohan, a member of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy in New York, June 4, 2021.
A provided image shows, from left: Sheila Rohan, Yvonne Hall, Melva Murray-White and Gayle McKinney-Griffith in Walter Raines’ “Haiku,” in New York in 1973.
Gayle McKinney-Griffith, a member of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy in New York, June 4, 2021.
Karlya Shelton-Benjamin, a member of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy in New York, June 4, 2021.
Lydia Abarca-Mitchell, a member of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy in New York, June 4, 2021.
Marcia Sells, a member of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy in New York, June 4, 2021.
These early Dance Theater of Harlem stars met weekly on Zoom – to survive the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic and to reclaim their role in dance history.
These early Dance Theater of Harlem stars met weekly on Zoom – to survive the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic and to reclaim their role in dance history.
These early Dance Theater of Harlem stars met weekly on Zoom- to survive the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic and to reclaim their role in dance history.
These early Dance Theater of Harlem stars met weekly on Zoom -to survive the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic and to reclaim their role in dance history.
Last May, adrift in a suddenly untethered world, five former ballerinas came together to form the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy.
Life as a pioneer, life in a pandemic: They have been friends for over half a century, and have held each other up through far harder times than this last disorienting year.
They wanted to re-inscribe the struggles and feats of those early years at Dance Theater of Harlem into a cultural narrative that seems so often to cast Black excellence aside.
Mitchell, the first Black principal dancer at the New York City Ballet and a protégé of the choreographer George Balanchine, had a mission: to create a home for Black dancers to achieve heights of excellence unencumbered by ignorance or tradition.
Lydia Abarca-Mitchell, Gayle McKinney-Griffith and Sheila Rohan were founding dancers of his new company with McKinney-Griffith, 71, soon taking on the role of its first ballet mistress.
“I’ll never forget what Arthur did onstage” she said of his Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at New York City Ballet during a Tuesday session in January.
Marcia Sells, 61, remembered being 9 and watching with mouth agape when Abarca-Mitchell, McKinney-Griffith and Rohan performed with Dance Theater in her hometown, Cincinnati.
Shelton-Benjamin left her Denver ballet company, where she was the only Black dancer, turning down invitations from the Joffrey Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, after reading a story about Dance Theater of Harlem in Dance magazine.
Finding one another back then, at the height of the civil rights movement, allowed them to have careers while challenging a ballet culture that had been claimed by white people.
In 1979, a review in The Washington Post declared their dancing to be a “purer realization of the Balanchinean ideal than anyone else’s.” Their adventures offstage were similarly electric, like the night in Manchester when Mick Jagger invited them out on the town.
In an April Zoom session she said she first realized how left out of history she was when her daughter went online to prove to a friend that her mother was the first Black prima ballerina.
While Abarca-Mitchell paused to wipe her eyes, Shelton-Banjamin stepped in: “I want to echo what Lydia said.
Sells went on to a career that included serving as the dean of Harvard Law School, until she left this year to become the Metropolitan Opera’s first chief diversity officer.
The work was so hard, the expectations so high, the mission so urgent, that those early days demanded a familial support system among the dancers.
They are rarely brought in for workshops or consultations on the ballets they were taught by Mitchell.
I’ve probably missed some chances but it’s not like I haven’t thought about the value of what they bring to the company.
They traveled from Denver, Atlanta, Connecticut, South Jersey and, in Sells’ case, five blocks north of Dance Theater of Harlem for a joyful reunion.
In Studio 3, all Shelton-Benjamin had to do was hum a few notes of Balanchine’s “Serenade” and say “and” for the women to grandly sweep their right arms up.
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