When the corps de ballet of the Dance Theatre of Harlem dances its way through George Balanchine's Serenade, a new aesthetic immediately imposes itself upon the ballet. The dark bodies of the Harlem ballerinas against the powder-blue tunics and tulle of Karinska's costumes make us look at the work in a new way. For example, the S-shapes on the lower backs of the ballerinas make for a different line than white ballerinas can naturally manage.
When Arthur Mitchell, a former principal dancer with Balanchine's company, New York City Ballet, founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969, he knew intuitively that Balanchine's radicalization of ballet--for example, that the human body itself had language of its own, beyond narrative-- had opened doors for the creation of a black ballet company.
Serendade, one of Balanchine's earliest works (from 1934), was among the first to combine modernism with the plush, expressive quality of the old Russian white ballets, which were created for the enjoyment of the aristocracy. The music itself--Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings, with its overblown yet undeniably effective romantic cadences--seems to emanate from a patrician source.
Visual Irony
To watch the Harlem troupe dance Serenade, as they did during their short season this past summer as part of the First International Festival of the Arts, was an exercise in historical, as well as visual, irony. The least aristocratic of America's people (in fact many of them descended from former slaves) go through the paces once reserved--on both sides of the footlights--for the courtly and refined.
The company is young, still in its infancy. And if it has not yet found its own unique voice, it is hardly surprising. Yet a new ballet by Mitchell, his first in thirteen years, John Henry, is ample proof that the company can forge its own completely distinctive place in American dance.
John Henry, according to Mitchell, is conceived as a homage to the famous black signer Paul Robeson, who was closely identified with the song about the folk hero. Working with a sledgehammer and steel bit, John Henry outdoes a steam engine but pays the price; he cannot halt the speed of progress. He is, perhaps, to blacks what Paul Bunyan is to whites.
Figure Of Legend
There is a human core to John Henry as a figure of legend. It is to this that Mitchell responds.
The ballet is short (a little more than twenty minutes) and a burst--it's more like a sunburst--of energy. The steam engine itself, a large cutout at the back of center stage, works, I think, without being labored at all, as a symbol of all those things blacks have had to compete with in this country.
John Henry (danced with a marvelous athleticism by Eddie J. Shellman) uses the sledgehammer as his center of gravity--it becomes the ballet's visual center of gravity as well--swinging it over his head as he leaps exultantly into the air. After so much exertion, his body cannot follow where his spirit wants to take him, and he
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