Johnson, Virginia 1950–

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Virginia Johnson 1950–

Dancer and choreographer

Virginia Johnson is the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s emotive prima ballerina. She has been with this historic and major ballet company since it was started in 1969. For more than two decades Johnson has served as a role model for younger black dancers and has exemplified American classical dancing. Not only has she exploded the myth that black women can’t be classical ballerinas, she has one of the broadest repertoires in dance. She has excelled as a romantic ballerina and has been described as a lyrical performer.

Johnson also has been noted for her ability to dance both dramatic and contemporary roles. Her dancing, for the Dance Theatre of Harlem and for other established companies as a guest artist, has taken her around the world to countries like the former Soviet Union and South Africa. Johnson has danced throughout the United States, including performing for U.S. presidents Carter and Reagan; Europe; Australia; Israel; and Japan. During the late 1980s, Johnson was one of the first American ballerinas to visit what was then the Soviet Union, where she performed at the Kirov State Theater of Ballet and Opera in Leningrad.

Johnson has appeared on television, dancing in the Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) Dance in America series, and performed in Creole Giselle for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Multitalented, she danced in and choreographed the television film Ancient Voices of Children and even produced a solo concert at Marymount College, in New York City.

Over the years Johnson has performed in a variety of dances, including George Balanchine’s neoclassical Serenade and Allegro Brilliante; Glen Tetley’s modern Voluntaries; Louis Johnson’s Forces of Rhythm; and John Taras’s Designs With Strings. She danced the title role in the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s unique revival of the classic Giselle, the girl in blue in Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches, the Accused in Agnes de Mille’s dramatic Fall River Legend, Blanche in Valerie Bettis’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and other roles.

Johnson has danced as a guest artist with the Washington and Capitol Ballets, in Washington, DC; the Chicago Opera Ballet; the Baltimore Civic Youth Ballet; the Detroit Symphony; and the Cleveland Ballet. She has gone on tour to Australia with Stars of the World Ballet in 1979; danced the main part in Giselle with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in 1988; and appeared with the Royal Ballet, in 1992.

At a Glance…

Born Virginia Alma Fairfax Johnson, January 25, 1950, in Washington, DC. Education: Attended Washington School of Ballet; New York University’s School of the Arts; Fordham University; and the School of Visual Arts. Studied with Therrell Smith and Mary Day at the Washington School of Ballet, from 1953; later took classes with Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook, in New York City.

Dancer, Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH), New York City, 1969—; soloist and company’s prima ballerina; danced roles in ballets, including A Streetcar Named Desire, Les Biches, Giselle, Serenade, Allegro Brillante, Swan Lake (Act II), Othello, Greening, Footprints Dressed in Red, Toccata E Due Canzoni, Forces of Rhythm, Voluntaries, Designs With Strings, and Fall River Legend.

Performed for U.S. presidents Carter and Reagan. Toured abroad with DTH, including Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, Italy, 1971; London, 1974—; the Soviet Union, 1988; served as a Community Outreach Instructor during DTH’s South African tour, 1992. Guest artist for companies, including Washington Ballet, The Nutcracker; Alicia Alonso’s Ballet de Cuba, Giselle; the Chicago Opera Ballet, 1975; the Stars of the World Ballet Australian tour, 1979; the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, 1988; the Baltimore Civic Youth Ballet, Detroit Symphony, and Cleveland Ballet, all in 1991; the Royal Ballet, Giselle, 1992; and Festival of Dance, Havana, Cuba. Appeared with the National Symphony at Lincoln Center’s Fisher Hall, New York, NY. Television credits include the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Dance in America series’ A Street Car Named Desire; a National Broadcasting Company (NBC) airing of DTH’s Giselle; and as a dancer in and choreographer of the television film Ancient Voices of Children.

Awards: Young Achiever Award, National Council of Women; Outstanding Young Woman of America, National Council of Women, 1985; Dance Magazine Award, 1991.

Addresses: Office —Dance Theatre of Harlem, 466 W. 152nd St., New York, New York 10031–1896.

Virginia Johnson was born on January 25, 1950, in Washington, DC. She began studying ballet in 1953, when she was just three years old, with Therrell Smith and Mary Day at the Washington School of Ballet. She continued studying on scholarship there as a teenager, and completed high school in the ballet school’s academic division, graduating at the top of her class. In an interview in Dance Magazine in 1990, Johnson recalled that she “was the only black kid” in the school, but also observed, “I never felt from anyone… that I was in any way different.” As she told Harper’s Bazaar, “Growing up in Washington, you don’t think of blacks as a minority.”

Joined Revolutionary Troupe

Even as a teenager Johnson was performing. She danced in opera productions put on by the American Light Opera Company; acted in children’s theater performances; and appeared in the Washington Ballet’s yearly performance of The Nutcracker Suite. Though she had doubts about becoming a ballerina because African American ballet dancers were rare, she nevertheless majored in dance at New York University’s School of the Arts, where she received another scholarship. She was advised to consider contemporary and ethnic dance—the genres then considered open to talented young black people.

Johnson found that New York University (NYU) stressed modern dance too much for her taste. During her first year there she became interested in a ballet school in Harlem being run out of a church basement by the former New York City Ballet dancer Arthur Mitchell and became a charter member, first serving as a lecture-demonstrator to raise funds for the school’s fledgling company and later, as a 19-year-old dancer for that company. “I don’t want to keep going to school,” she wrote in her journal in 1969, excerpts of which were later published in The New York Times. “I want to discover what it is to just be a dancer, to live dance. I wonder if I can do it.”

Dancer Arthur Mitchell created the Dance Theatre of Harlem as a commitment to the Harlem community after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. His aim was to establish a company of black dancers and add a new style to contemporary classical ballet. For Johnson, “The timing was perfect,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “Dance Theatre of Harlem has eliminated all the old ideas about ballet and blacks, though I never said I was going to become a ballerina so that every little black girl in America could be one. I did it in the sense that, if you have a dream, whatever it is, if you put the discipline, and the commitment, and the love into it, you can achieve it.”

Though she still encountered prejudice, such as when southern stagehands “refused to raise the curtain on a bunch of blacks,” according to her diary, Johnson also has said that race has played a primary role in her reaching her goals. “A lot of things happened to me because I am black,” she said in Life magazine. “The scholarships, the special treatment, the extra breaks. Today I tell kids that if ballet is what they want to do, it makes no difference what color skin they have. The issues are whether they have the discipline, the consistency, the love of dance.”

Became Troupe’s Leading Ballerina

In 1974, Johnson danced her first solo role for the Dance Theatre of Harlem and gradually became its star ballerina, garnering international acclaim and illustrating for modern viewers the emotional meaning of Romanticism during the 19th century. Measuring 5’8”, with unusually long limbs, Johnson was a natural for legendary choreographer George Balanchine’s dances, performing them clearly and smoothly. Later, she began dancing new roles, challenging herself technically to meet their demands.

From the start Johnson was forced to rely on her will and stamina to get through her hectic performance schedule. During 1974 she wrote in her journal, “Tomorrow starts the second week of our first New York season. We’re just carrying the fatigue from week to week. To fight it is like a wrestling match against a much stronger opponent. It must be conquerable but not with brute force. It requires clever deception and most of all belief.”

For Johnson, practicing and then performing and hearing the applause afterwards was reward enough. As she wrote in separate journal entries during 1980 and 1981, “The applause was incredible, cheering and clapping, whistles. It’s too much, being a part of this…. Is there really a better life out there for me? Isn’t this just what I wanted? Suddenly I begin to see how wonderful this life is. Walking into [an] empty [s]tudio… sunlight slanting across the gray floor. Is there a more beautiful place than an empty ballet studio?”

In the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s ballet Giselle, which was reset in Louisiana’s bayou country, Johnson blended romanticism with the Creole identity of the heroine. Of this historical and reportedly risky endeavor, which later proved very successful, Johnson wrote in her journal during 1984, “I love the production, the sets, the costumes, but most of all I love the idea that we have learned something new and now get the chance to tell more people about it—the free blacks in Louisiana whose lives we are reliving by way of a ballet called Creole Giselle. It takes some of the scariness out of doing [it] and makes it something that I can feel connected to.”

Of her 1987 performance in Giselle, Dance Magazine wrote, “Virginia Johnson’s evenly fluid and gracious phrasing tends, in Act 2, to swamp the steps in mood. Yet she is glorious elsewhere and so subtle an actress….” Two years later that magazine praised her performance in the same dance as “touching and authoritative.” In 1989, when Johnson was performed in Les Biches in New York, Dance Magazine described her as “scintillating as the femme fatale, slicing her way in arabesque into a liaison with the choicest male.”

Danced Around the World

In the early 1990s Johnson traveled to the politically charged post-apartheid country of South Africa with the Dance Theatre of Harlem to perform at the Johannesburg Civic Theater and received positive public response. In her journal during 1992, she commented, “I believe our visit has helped people understand what place art has in their lives: It can bring together disparate groups, it can create the energy to change, and it can create the space for change.”

When Johnson danced in Fall River Legend as a guest artist for the Cleveland Ballet in Cleveland during 1991, Dance Magazine wrote that she “created a complete woman, capable of love and joy as well as rage and violence.” Among the many prizes Johnson has won throughout her career, Dance Magazine went on to bestow upon her an award honoring her contribution to dance and her distinguished career.

In 1994, when Johnson danced the role of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s 25th anniversary season at Lincoln Center, in New York City, the New York Post described her performance of Blanche as “fiercely conceived and delicately executed,” as well as “tightly controlled, piteous and ultimately tragic.” The New York Times praised her “astonishing power” in the role and added, “Ms. Johnson, surrounded by flashback characters that recall the heroine’s traumas, could easily make her role passive. Yet her performance embodies a full emotional range; by the end, the cringing woman in pink chiffon becomes a grand dame, albeit an insane one, on parade.”

Johnson has been described as “a discreetly private single woman” who has spoken frankly about what it means to be a professional dancer. “It entails sacrifice,” she said in Harper’s Bazaar. “But it’s not like we’re surviving on denial. We’re not nuns. We’re living off the pleasure of it. It’s fun.” She has also spoken about growing older. “It’s a surprise,” she said, “but maturity has only made me realize how much more there is to do. I think the more you do something the greater your knowledge of what there is to be done. The two feed one another—the search and the achievement—like a giant fireball. I find I have more energy and motivation than ever.”

Though the Dance Theatre of Harlem has experienced its share of economic and social problems, including “layoffs” and “disharmony,” those committed to it have kept it going. Johnson has remained one of the brightest flames in a “fireball” that may never burn out. During 1994 and 1995 Johnson was performing and touring around the country with the Dance Theatre of Harlem on a 10-city tour.

Sources

Books

International Dictionary of Ballet, volume 1, 1993, pp. 729–32.

Periodicals

Ballet News, January 1983.

Business Day, September 2, 1992.

Dance Magazine, April 1981; October 1987, pp. 90–4; June 1989; November 1989, pp. 69–70, 72; October 1990; April 1991, pp. 14–15; March 1992, p. 72.