Dr Sandie Bourne.
navigate”. Similarly, at the Library of Birmingham, which houses the archives for Birmingham Royal Ballet, she says “Of the four dancers we knew with a connection to the company, they could only find assets for one, Evan Williams. They did inform us that this was because the collection wasn’t properly catalogued, and we encountered similar issues when approaching other major ballet institu- tions.”
Contemporary problem
The problem is not just a historical one and the project explores the historic challenges dancers faced but also looks at the current industry. According to Marsha: “Today, just three of the 233 dancers in the major ballet companies are black British,” meaning the findings of Sandie’s research were “too impor- tant to remain within a thesis and had to be communicated more widely to drive change within the industry”.
The key findings were:
1. Ballet remains institutionally racist, with outdated perceptions of the black body being unsuitable for ballet still prevalent;
2. Black dancers in ballet are poorly documented. Ballet institutions have limited documentation of former black students or performers;
3. Black people in ballet are represent- ed earlier historically than expected, with examples of blackface in the 16th and 17th century.
Performing arts in history Performing arts don’t feature heavily in mainstream art history, and within the history of performing arts, dance is not high in the pecking order. Marsha said: “You’d probably have to separate out the performing arts, as theatre and opera are quite well documented, but
December 2024 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL 23
then you have costumes, scripts and scores that you are able to preserve. Dance is harder because the choreography can only be recorded in Benesh or Laban notation for future artists, which is not a language that is universally understood outside, or even inside, the industry. Video has changed some of this but, like images, you then come up against issues around rights holders and privacy law, especially if you want to make such material available online.” Sandie adds: “In university libraries, dance of any kind usually occupies quite a small proportion of texts. Ballet tends to have the biggest selection of books, followed by modern/contemporary dance, international dance, then African and Car- ibbean dance and/or dance of the African diaspora. This is changing slowly as now there are more books on black dance and ballet. When I first started dance training in the 1980s there was one – Black Dance: From 1619 to Today by Lynne Fauley Emery (1972).”
She said the lack of material – and the lack of proof that any material even existed – made the tools of conventional research almost useless, and the discovery that it was “incredibly difficult to research the history unless you have a background in the industry.”
Human contact
That significant realisation, for both her dance and future academic career came in the 1980s when, during her dance train- ing, she attended an open day with Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem at the London Coliseum. She said: “Surrounded by 200 of my peers, for the first time I had confirmation that there were a signifi- cant number of Black dancers who were performing ballet. Without this certainty, and the personal contacts I made during my career, my research would have been almost impossible to get off the ground. The few dancers I knew, introduced me to other dancers they knew, and so on, until we reached the 30 who are now featured on the website.
Darren Panton. Photo © Tony Butcher
Marsha Lowe. US versus UK
Because of the establishment of Dance Theatre of Harlem in the 1960s, where so many black British dancers either trained or worked, we now know more about their experiences in the US than their earlier experiences in continental Europe and Sandie adds: “Our constant fear is that there are still dancers out there that we know nothing about.”
Examples include Dr Patrick Williams from Trinidad who was refused by the Royal Ballet School in 1965 because he was black but went to New York, joined the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, was headhunted by Rudolf Nureyev at Paris Opera, eventually returning to the UK, five years later, when all the major UK ballet companies wanted to work with him. Or Carol Straker who was the only black student at the Legat School of Russian Ballet and went on to train with Dance Theatre of Harlem. She had a long and varied career and after returning to the UK to find little had changed, she founded the Carol Straker Dance Foundation in 1987 to support more diversity in dance.
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