Denzil Bailey. Photo © Arena Pal photography by Simon Rae Scott What’s happening now?
The Black British Ballet project is both preserving history and campaigning for an equal present. It follows in the footsteps of pioneering examples like the Black Dance Archive project (2014-2018), which highlighted both the urgency to record and the importance of making the history accessible, which it did through black dance companies, individual artists, and academic institutions.
But Marsha said: “This type of cross agency collaboration is rare” and projects like Black British Ballet create archive resources from the sources they have available. “For us that meant interview- ing the dancers themselves and allowing them to share not just their experiences in ballet but also how their views on the art form have evolved over the years. But we’re not the only ones,” she says, pointing to Theresa Ruth Howard’s international digital archives of Black dancers in ballet (
https://mobballet.org/), Leon Robinson’s Positive Steps and Serendipity in Leicester, which have worked to archive black British dancers and artists in general.
Personal history
Enjoying the arts and campaigning to make them more accessible were closely bound into Marsha and Sandie’s own expe- riences of being inspired but also excluded by the arts.
Sandie said: “I was interested in taking dance classes because my neighbour who was black, and then my sister, started dance classes. I became aware of my race at secondary school in Essex, when the Alex Haley series, Roots, was televised and the children at school called me Kizzy, the daughter of the slave. At dance school the teacher would ask me why I wasn’t good at tap dancing, and I did not realise until later that she only assumed I would be because I was black.”
Marsha said: “Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I always enjoyed reading and writing but the idea of becoming a writer had simply never occurred or ever been presented to me. However, my real awak- ening to the impact that race has on my understanding of the world came when I studied at a US university. It was that first
time that history had been presented to me from the perspective of the formally colonised rather than the coloniser, and it was a revelation.”
And while documenting black ballet his- tory Marsha said: “The clearer it became that we needed to do more.” The first addition to the project was a children’s book aimed at ages beginning their ballet training. The ballet show, Island Movements followed which Marsha said: “We created to push the boundaries of what a contemporary, diverse ballet could be, and root it squarely in the black British experience.”
Public libraries
The show “would not have been possible without the involvement of libraries, who responded so positively to our call for venues to host the show, before we had a penny of funding in place.”, Marsha said, adding: “Working with public libraries on this project is a complete no-brainer. Their spaces extend across the country, their staff understand the importance of telling these types of stories and immediately grasp the impact on communities that these could have.”
She said: “More and more though, people are beginning to realise that black history is something that should be studied year- round and, in libraries, we already see the impact of that” particularly seeing black British history engaged with, rather than the US-dominated stories. But she said the change is happening far slower in other British institutions like schools and colleges.
Island Movements. Photo © Oxygen Arts 24 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL DIGITAL
Into the Light: Pioneers of Black British Ballet exhibition (
https://blackbritishballet.com/ articles/new-exhibition-celebrates-ballets-black-pio- neers) by Libraries Connected and Oxygen Arts is touring libraries until November 2025, funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. IP
December 2024
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