Arthur Mitchell, Karel Shook and a basement studio, 1969.

Dance Theatre of Harlem started as a school. The company’s history page, adapted from an article in Kinfolk, says that in 1969, at the height of the civil rights movement, Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook founded Dance Theatre of Harlem. It says Mitchell, who had joined New York City Ballet as a principal dancer in 1955 and was a protégé of George Balanchine, was working in Brazil on a US government commission to help found the National Ballet of Brazil when the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 moved him to come home and teach ballet in his native Harlem. Andscape, in a profile by Candice Thompson published on 19 April 2023, gives the same account: after King’s assassination, Mitchell and Shook decided to return to Harlem to start a school, and that school gave rise to a professional company.

English Wikipedia tells the founding slightly differently. It says the organisation was founded in 1969 under the directorship of Mitchell, Brock Peters and Cicely Tyson, and that Shook, a former ballet master at Dutch National Ballet, partnered with Mitchell afterwards. The company itself calls Shook a co-founder and captions a 1971 photograph of the two men as “DTH Co-founders.”

The early rooms were modest. Andscape quotes Virginia Johnson, who left New York University in 1969 to become a founding member, recalling the company’s early days in the basement of St. James Presbyterian Church. The company says Mitchell began teaching in a converted garage in Harlem and left the doors open so passers-by could see what was going on, and that he relaxed the dress code so that boys could come to class in jean shorts and T-shirts. Wikipedia says early classes were held at the Church of the Master before Mitchell bought a disused garage and converted it into the headquarters the company still uses.

The performing company followed from the school. Wikipedia says Dance Theatre of Harlem made its official debut on 8 January 1971 at the Guggenheim Museum with three chamber ballets by Mitchell, that Balanchine gave Mitchell access to his ballets, and that the company made its European debut at the Spoleto Festival the same year. The company dates its premiere of Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco to 1970.

Repertoire, a hiatus and a smaller, touring company.

The repertoire grew in two directions at once: the Balanchine canon and new ballets set in Black American history. Wikipedia says the company appeared at Sadler’s Wells in London in 1974, and that in 1984 it premiered Creole Giselle, restaged by Frederic Franklin and set in the Louisiana bayou of the 1840s. Andscape recalls Johnson in the title role of that Giselle and notes that her farewell performance came in 1997.

In 2004 the professional company stopped performing. Andscape says the organisation went on hiatus that year and was reduced to a school and a small pre-professional ensemble at its home in the Sugar Hill neighbourhood, and the company’s September 2022 announcement says the company had not performed since its disbandment for budgetary reasons in 2004. The company says Mitchell personally chose Johnson as his successor and its second artistic director in 2009; Andscape also dates his call to her to 2009, while Wikipedia gives 2011 as the year she was named artistic director, with Mitchell becoming artistic director emeritus.

Johnson came back with experience outside the studio. Andscape says that after retiring she studied communications at Fordham University and became the founding editor-in-chief of Pointe magazine. It reports that she spent two years planning the return with then-executive director Laveen Naidu and consultants from the Ford, Mellon and Rockefeller foundations, aiming for a leaner company with a repertoire that could be performed by fewer dancers and toured more easily. The new dancers, found through a national audition tour and the pre-professional ensemble, arrived in May 2012, with performances that autumn.

The new company leaned on commissions. Andscape highlights Passage, choreographed by Claudia Schreier to a score by Jessie Montgomery, and Tiffany Rea-Fisher’s Sounds of Hazel, inspired by the jazz musician Hazel Scott. Wikipedia says the company has also presented ballets by Balanchine, Nacho Duato, Ulysses Dove and Alvin Ailey. Andscape says Johnson and executive director Anna Glass led The Equity Project from 2017, convening American artistic and executive directors to discuss diversity in ballet.

A school name, a tagline and a home in Harlem.

Many dance companies carry a person’s name, and that name does different work once the person is gone. While a founder is alive, the name on the poster promises new pieces from a particular hand; afterwards it becomes a promise about care, that the existing works will be staged, rehearsed and credited properly. Programmes start to list who taught a role and in which years, and the company’s initials turn up in dancers’ biographies like a school crest. Posters lean heavily on a single photographed body caught mid-leap or mid-fall, cropped tight and set against a plain field, with the company name small and the dates large. The image carries the energy, so the type is usually kept quiet, a sans or a restrained serif that will sit over skin, fabric or shadow without fighting it.

Circus identity travels on vehicles and canvas as much as on paper. A touring show arrives as a convoy of trucks and a tent, and the colours of that tent, seen from a road or a car park, can stand in for a logo before anyone reads a word. Season brochures pull in the other direction, gathering a year of programmes into one booklet with a shared grid, a shared palette and a calendar that has to work at a glance. Repertory companies brand the ensemble and let individual works change underneath it, while single-show producers give each production its own title, colour and typographic voice, held together only by the house name above it.

A third artistic director from inside the company.

The leadership change of 2023 kept the role inside the institution. In a press release dated 15 September 2022, Dance Theatre of Harlem announced that Virginia Johnson would retire at the close of the 2022–23 season, on 30 June 2023, and become artistic director emerita, and that Robert Garland would take over as artistic director on 1 July 2023. The release described Garland as the company’s resident choreographer and the director of its school, a role then passed to the former principal dancer Tai Jimenez. Andscape reported in April 2023 that Garland would become the ballet company’s third artistic director when Johnson stepped down that June, after a final New York season at New York City Center.

Garland’s history runs through the company. The release says he grew up in Philadelphia, graduated from The Juilliard School, danced two seasons with Ballet Hispanico and then joined Dance Theatre of Harlem, where he became a principal dancer. The release names Return, New Bach and Higher Ground, set to music by Stevie Wonder, among his ballets for the company.

The organisation presents itself through its history as much as through its stage work. Its history page carries the line “Raising the Barre Since 1969,” a play on the ballet barre,. Wikipedia says the archives, assembled with help from the Dance Heritage Coalition, include photographs, a handwritten score by Karel Shook and designs by Salvatore Ferragamo, and that a touring exhibition, Dance Theatre of Harlem: 40 Years of Firsts, opened at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles in April 2010.

For a design guide, Dance Theatre of Harlem shows how a ballet company can build its identity on a place and an origin story — a school with open doors in Harlem — and carry that story through a pause and a rebuilding without changing its name. Compare Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, another New York company whose repertoire it has danced, and Sadler’s Wells, the London theatre where it appeared in 1974. For this guide we use burgundy, gold and rose with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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