Where are the black ballerinas? (Washington Post - 5/5/14) #Harlem/#ArtsEducation News: Dance Theatre of Harlem EXCERPT: When was the last time you saw three black ballerinas on a magazine cover? I can save you some time. You’ve never seen that — unless you’ve already spotted Pointe magazine’s June/July 2014 cover. For its annual career issue, Pointe enlists Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Ashley Murphy, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s Ebony Williams and the American Ballet Theater’s Misty Copeland to discuss an ongoing problem in ballet communities: lack of diversity. This isn’t a new situation and neither are attempts to call greater attention to it. In 2011, Sierra Leonean phenom Michaela DePrince was featured in the award-winning documentary First Position, which discussed the challenges she’s faced while ascending through the rarefied ranks of dance as a dark-skinned ballerina. At 19, DePrince currently dances with the Dutch National Ballet’s junior company, but she still experiences institutional racism in the artform. In a 2013 interview with DanceTabs, she astutely noted, “As a black ballerina racism is less about what happens to you and more about what doesn’t happen to you.” An illuminating piece in The Guardian last year titled, “Where are the black ballet dancers?” reifies DePrince’s claim, interviewing a number of world-class black dancers, including the New York City Ballet’s Aesha Ash: Black women are often perceived as rude, ostentatious and aggressive. In ballet, the meek, humble, innocent young girl roles are rarely given to black women. But we are all those things and then some. We don’t always have to be exotic – all fire, athleticism. The images we don’t see of black women as princesses: that speaks volumes. Ash is speaking to the power of visual representation. Ballerinas have long been avatars of possibility for little girls. Watching them work is a real-life reminder that, with talent, drive and intense practice, it is possible for to become the closest thing our world has to a real-life fairy or a princess without royal pedigree. When black and brown girls don’t see black ballerinas in the world’s most prestigious troupes, the absence intimates diminished possibility. A career in professional ballet is already a long shot for most girls, but the odds seem even longer for black girls who rarely, if ever, see prima ballerinas of color succeed. To counter that, social media campaigns like Brown Girls Do Ballet on Instagram and Tumblr blogs like Black Ballerinas have been created to heighten their visibility. These social media spaces and others are also making Pointe’s new magazine cover a virally shared image. But establishing the presence of black dancers is only a fraction of the battle. Black and brown people cannot stop at proving that we do, indeed, exist in spaces where we are still — in 2014 — unexpected (or worse, unwelcome). It’s past time for diverse representation to deepen.
Posted on: Mon, 05 May 2014 18:11:28 +0000
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