Before I dedicated my time to visual art, I was a committed dance student for most of my life. My mom took adult ballet classes to get in shape after having me in 1985. She would leave the house with her bag and unitard and I would be curious about where she was going and what she was doing. I was placed in a ballet class at three years old inspired by my mom’s love of the Black dance revolution of the 1970s.
She saw beautiful Black dancers in NYC and in her home town of Tulsa. Their muscular legs, posture, and grace impressed her and she knew that when she had a daughter, that little girl would be a dancer. My mom told me about Judith Jamison, Debbie Allen, Paula Abdul, and the Alvin Ailey troupe among others. In my bedroom, there was an autographed glamour shot of Debbie Turner, the third Black Miss America, because my mom took me to meet her when she came to town. I remember watching reruns on television of Eartha Kitt as Cat Woman. I recall the Original Aunt Viv in a pink unitard. We read Black picture books before bed. In other words, Black excellence was all around me.
When we moved states, I stopped dancing for a while and asked, ‘Why don’t I go to dance anymore?’ It’s not that I wanted to, I was just wondering! I continued to study dance, specifically ballet, tap, and modern, from about 8 until I was 23. I trained with Ballet Conservatory for my entire youth where they had a giant poster of Judith Jamison suspended in a grand battement, a la seconde from Alvin Ailey’s Revelations in the iconic swooping white dress. Everyday it was my ritual to stop and look at this poster.
I want the world to know that for every Misty Copeland, there were hundreds more Black ballerinas that were working just as hard.
As a teen, I went to a summer intensive at The Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia. One day, my mom gave me her old dance bag filled with unitards, vintage t-shirts, and wool wraps. I was cast as Clara, or Marie as some might call her, in Lake Cities Ballet Theater’s The Nutcracker when I was seventeen years old. Julie Kent was my Sugar Plum Fairy and Damian Woetzel was her Cavalier. She kissed me on the cheek and he picked me up in the air. I never went to prom or homecoming or a high school dance, so this was all very magical for me.
I used to keep a binder filled with Black dancers and their bios along with an index of addresses and phone numbers to Black ballet companies. Lauren Anderson, Mary Hinkson, Arthur Mitchell, Carlos Acosta, Ashley Murphy, and more. I would flip through it all the time because it was comforting to know I was not alone in my journey way out here in the suburbs. Later, I danced in the second company of Dallas Black Dance Theater and sent an audition tape to Dance Theater of Harlem in NYC after finding them in my research. By this time, the school and company were on hiatus due to financial constraints.
In college, I went to Southern Methodist University where I secured a BFA in Dance and a BA in Art History. I studied Martha Graham technique, ballet, and discovered Russian Pointe shoes. Yuriko Kikuchi, survivor of Japanese internment camps, set a piece on our college. There, I was a student consultant for Dance Theater of Harlem in a year long program where I trained with the newly invigorated school in the summer and conducted parent interviews of the students along with recommending best practice for their archives. I met Arthur Mitchell and Mary Hinkson, snapping their photo with my disposable camera.
Once I completed college, I knew my time with dance had come to an end and I was excited to begin a career in the arts as an administrator. I want the world to know that for every Misty Copeland, there were hundreds more Black ballerinas that were working just as hard. None of this is new. I was never going to be ‘The One’ Black dancer to change history because I was never the best. We can’t all make it to the big leagues, but we showed up. Everyday. We were sweating, aching, fighting back tears, and popping blisters all the same. We dedicated our youth to ballet before the current cultural revival knowing we would go back to being ordinary people after it was all over. Knowing our stories would fade into nothing.
There were some terrible incidents resulting in bad memories from my lifetime in the studio because of racial bias, bullying, and the romanticized suffering that typically accompanies classical ballet training (I will note that I was never afflicted by an eating disorder and I have always been grateful for the food the Earth provides for me). But, I’m trying not to focus on the negativity right now. I need to believe I didn’t waste my life surrounded by people who hated me and what I represented. Today, I am celebrating the small part I played in the history of Black ballet in this country.
Have a Pleasant Day
-Rae Pleasant
