Marina Harss at the Hudson Review:
The successful return of an important ballet is more than an artistic triumph; it is a marker of ambition, energy, hope, and, with any luck, financial health. Dance Theatre of Harlem, the ballet company founded by Arthur Mitchell in 1969, has always been a company of great ambition. (Its mission of opening doors to Black dancers, who had been excluded from classical ballet, ensured that.) But the company’s trajectory has had its highs and lows. At its peak, in the eighties and early nineties, DTH toured widely, and to great acclaim, not only in the US, but to Europe, the Soviet Union, and South America. Its repertory included large-scale story ballets, like its remarkable Creole Giselle—the action translated to a community of free Blacks in pre–Civil War Louisiana. The company’s lowest low, from which it almost did not return, came in the early 2000s. Crippled by debt, the company was forced to close its doors for several years. It returned only in 2012 in a much leaner form.
Almost miraculously, under the guidance of Virginia Johnson, a former DTH star, the company fought its way back, increasing its numbers year after year. A company of over forty dancers returned at under twenty, a number that in the last decade has grown to 28.
more here.
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