INTERVIEW
Black British Ballet – finding the past
Dancer turned academic Dr Sandie Bourne, says the existence of black dancers in British ballet has been “wilfully ignored, downplayed and actively contested” and disappears as dancers die. Here Sandie and Marsha Lowe, Directors at Oxygen Arts, discuss chronicling this disappearing past and how to use it in an activist present.
EXCAVATING what is left of the history of black dancers in British ballet has relied on real human resources – the dancers them- selves. But at times it has also relied on the memories of archivists whose institutions have lost track of, or never kept their black histories.
“It’s important to make clear here that the pres- ence of black dancers in British ballet was often wilfully ignored, downplayed and actively con- tested until relatively recently. So we know we’ve lost a lot of that history already”, says Dr Sandie Bourne, a dancer, choreographer and academic specialising in the historic under-representation of black artists in British ballet institutions. Marsha is working with Sandie on The Black British Ballet project (
https://blackbritishballet.com/) which now has exhibitions and events running in public libraries across the UK.
She said: “One of the driving forces behind our sense of urgency in this project is that many of the dancers are getting older and we wanted to record their experiences while we still had the chance. We managed to get Marie Kamara, who danced with Les Ballet Nègres in the 1940s, on film just a few months before she died. But danc- ers like Johaar Mosaval who was in the Royal Ballet in the 50s, Henderson Williams and Jay Skeete who were at Dance Theatre of Harlem, and Richard Majewski who performed around Europe, all sadly passed before we got the chance to interview them.”
22 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL
Rob Mackinlay (
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is a journalist at Information Professional.
Human search engines
Sometimes information about these dancers exists in institutions but can’t be found. When this has happened, Sandie said that “human search engines” stepped in. “Often, we found that we were being referred to one or two people (with memories of steel!) who had worked there over many years and amassed a huge amount of institutional knowledge. However, outside of these human search engines, cataloguing and maintaining accurate, accessible records remains hugely resource intensive and so, beyond the means of many arts organisations.” Examples included Jane Pitchard at the V&A who offered to escort them around the English National Ballet archives “because she knew precisely how complicated these could be to
December 2024
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