Classic Dance and Race: A Story Still Unfolding

The dancers are ranged along ballet barres set up on a ship's promenade. Dressed in practice clothes, their bodies are elegantly erect, feet pointed in the classic ballet curve and eyes staring solemnly into the camera. They might be any American troupe embarking on some slightly exotic tour except that, unlike the stereotype, these dancers are black.

The photograph, taken on the Flandres in 1957 as the New York Negro Ballet crossed the Atlantic to perform in London, is one of the first images to be seen in "Classic Black," an exhibition on view through April 27 at the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. A national tour for the show is being planned, and there is a symposium on Monday at the library. Put together by Dawn Lille Horwitz, whose oral histories were the inspiration for the show, and Jonnie Greene, who designed it, "Classic Black" examines the careers of black ballet dancers from the late 1930's through the 60's.

The photographs, programs, posters and reviews ranged along the walls and a corridor of the third-floor space explore a history that has been largely lost, and they suggest a world of possibilities that for the most part was and still is closed to black dancers, robbing ballet audiences of the chance to see them perform. They trained for ballet, primarily at noted black academies like Marion Cuyjet's Judimar school in Philadelphia and the Jones-Haywood School in Washington. Some found jobs briefly in Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Society and in the New York City Ballet. Ballet Theater had a Negro Unit for a year, in 1940.

"I've been a guest artist with Joffrey, American Ballet Theater, with Agnes de Mille," Cleo Quitman says in a quotation on one of the photographic panels in the show. "And still it's just for that one little sequence, like lighting a candle and blowing it out."

A few all-black ballet troupes performed for short periods through the late 1950's, starting with Eugene von Grona's American Negro Ballet in 1937. Those companies will be discussed in a free symposium, with films, on Monday at 4 P.M. at the library's Bruno Walter Auditorium (111 Amsterdam Avenue, at 65th Street). One of the speakers will be Delores Brown Abelson. Ms. Abelson may be found in the shipboard photograph of the New York Negro Ballet along with Gene Hill Sagan, Anthony Bassae, Sylvester Campbell and Ted Crum, who as a teen-ager lived near Alvin Ailey in Los Angeles and pushed him to take his first dance classes.

"We were young, we were excited, we were going to Europe," Ms. Abelson, who now teaches ballet at the Philadanco school in Philadelphia, said of the trans-Atlantic adventure. She and Bernard Johnson danced the Bluebird Pas de Deux from "The Sleeping Beauty." But the company, founded with money from New England philanthropists and directed by Ward Flemyng, a visionary black dancer, faltered not long after the tour.

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