People, Locations, Episodes

Arthur Mitchell, Choreographer born

Arthur Mitchell

*Arthur Mitchell was born on this date in 1934. He was a Black dancer, choreographer, and director of the Dance Theater of Harlem.

From New York, Mitchell attended the High School for the Performing Arts in New York City and began performing in Broadway musicals and with the companies of Donald McKayle and John Butler.  In 1956, Mitchell became the only Black dancer in the New York City Ballet. He soon became a principal with the company, and George Balanchine created several roles for him, notably those in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1962) and Agon (1967). Mitchell was sensitive to the prejudice against Blacks in ballet and determined to form an all-Black ballet company.  In 1968, he and Karel Shook founded an integrated school, whose associated company debuted in 1971 in New York City and at the Spoleto Festival in Italy.

Mitchell choreographed several ballets for the Dance Theater of Harlem. In 1973, Arthur Mitchell and his company presented the prize-winning television special Rythmetron, which Mitchell had choreographed himself in 1968. After two European and three National tours, the company had its first full season in New York in 1974. In 1981, Dance Theater of Harlem performed at Covent Garden, and in 1982, it had its first season at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, in New York.  Mitchell's 1984 Creole Giselle, set in 19th century Louisiana, where Giselle is the favorite mistress of the plantation owner, was the first American ballet to win England's Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production.

Dance Theater of Harlem then toured Russia for five weeks in 1988 and segregated South Africa in 1992.  Mitchell established the Dancing Through Barriers outreach program, an ongoing "traveling university" of lectures, classes, and workshops for inner-city children in the U.S.A. and England. In 1993, Arthur Mitchell received the Kennedy Center Honors Award and was given Living Landmark status by the New York Landmark Conservancy.  1994 was a very difficult year for the company because it had to be downsized from 52 to 36 dancers because of a lack of funds.  Mitchell received the National Medal of Arts in 1995. In 1997, Mitchell’s dancers went on strike, demanding better wages.

In 1998, he was inducted into the National Museum of Dance's Hall of Fame. In 2004, the school and the company were temporarily shut down. The school is once again operational, with over a thousand students enrolling yearly, but Mitchell still has plans and dreams for the future. He would like to have an International School of the Allied Arts. "I'd bring children from around the world and call it Noah's Art. I'd put together a company with these young people and tour the world to show that the quality of what you do is important regardless of race, class, creed, or color."  Over the years, Arthur Mitchell has received Honorary Doctorates from Harvard, Princeton, and 11 other institutions. He is also featured in the 2004 documentary Balanchine.  We can say that Arthur Mitchell has "done for ballet what Jackie Robinson did for baseball."

In 2006, President Bush hosted a White House performance and social dinner honoring the School of the Dance Theater of Harlem, its resident company. He also honored the school's outreach programs, which allow children all over the world to study dance.

The Arthur Mitchell Collection is held at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Arthur Mitchell: Harlem's Ballet Trailblazer, an exhibition celebrating his life and career, opened at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia on January 12, 2018. The exhibition website contains numerous images and documents from the collection, a timeline of Mitchell's career, a repertory list for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and original essays. Arthur Mitchell died on September 19, 2018.

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