Bringing his kind of activism to ballet

By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Staff Writer

•	Dance lecture tonight Arthur Mitchell is in Hawai'i to teach a master class for invited dancers, and to give a free public lecture at 7:30 tonight at Wo International Center's Luke Auditorium on the Punahou School campus. Call 944-5829 to reserve a seat. Mitchell's three-day Punahou Dance School residency is sponsored by Kent and Sharon Lucien and administered by Charlys Ing.

Now he's trying to put together the financial backing to take the revamped hit that made Pearl Bailey famous to Broadway — and make it the first Dance Theater of Harlem offering on the Great White Way.

Mitchell, 69, is in Hawai'i for a three-day dance residency, which includes a free public lecture at 7:30 tonight about his career as the first black dancer in a major American ballet company and founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem. He calls the latter his own brand of "political activism."

In breaking a color barrier, he also broke a culture barrier. In the 34 years since he took classical dance to New York's poorest neighborhood, he has trained

thousands of dancers who have joined dance companies around the world. He also has built a uniquely American company.

"I started the school and the company evolved because there was no reason for me to be training people if there was no place for them to go," he says. Now, "just about every company in America has minority dancers — maybe black, Asian or Hispanic — and that's where dance has really changed."

There are subtle changes, too. Instead of pink tights and toe shoes, his dancers wear tights and toe-shoes dyed to match their skin. "So it's really changing a look that was always pink tights and toe shoes for 200 years."

With 175 ballets in the company's repertoire, Mitchell has re-staged classics especially for his dancers. "I put 'Giselle' in the bayous of Louisiana," he says, "and took 'Firebird' out of Russia and put it on a mythical island in the Caribbean, and then it becomes natural for us to be dancing it." In doing so, Mitchell created what's been called Afro-Russian dance. For example, in a recent work dancers were doing the Harlem shake with their torsos and classical ballet with their legs.

In first working in Harlem, Mitchell emphasized not ballet, but athletics. Boys were able to wear jeans instead of tights, and dance to drums, not classical music. Within two months, the first 30 students had swelled to 400; in two more months to 800. Today more than 1,000 students a year enroll, some as young as three. Eighty-five percent have scholarships.

"I try to instill a sense of pride, a sense of worth," he says. "And they learn from the very first lesson that they're only going to get out of it what they put into it. So I give them the skills to be successful throughout life."

He still goes into schools where many children have never seen a ballet "or a black girl dance on her toes," he says.

"Once they're exposed to it, we've got them," he adds. "Once I've gotten their minds, I've got them for life. It's wonderful to see that you can actually change people's lives, that you're actually making history.

"By nature I never stop dreaming. I always like everything bigger and better. I'd like a company called Noah's Art with representation from every race, class, creed and color, and show people it's the quality of what you do that's important rather than who or what you came from."

Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8013.