Mitchell, Arthur

March 27, 1934

Born in New York City, the oldest son of five children, dancer and choreographer Arthur Adams Mitchell Jr. began tap-dance lessons at the age of ten, sang in the Police Athletic League Glee Club, and attended the High School of Performing Arts, where he progressed quickly through a modern dance major. He began his professional career while still a senior in high school when he appeared in the 1952 Paris revival of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Upon graduation from high school he was the first male to receive the school's prestigious Dance Award.

Mitchell was accepted as a scholarship student at the School of American Ballet in 1952. Determined to overcome a late start in classical ballet technique, he also studied with ballet master Karel Shook at the Studio of Dance Arts in New York. His vibrant, agile performance style made him highly sought by contemporary modern dance choreographers; and during this period he performed with the Donald McKayle Company, Sophie Maslow and the New Dance Group, Louis Johnson, and Anna Sokolow. In 1955, after only three years of concentrated ballet study, Mitchell joined the John Butler Company for a brief European tour. He returned to New York to join the New York City Ballet (NYCB) in November 1955.

Within his first week with NYCB, Mitchell danced a featured role in George Balanchine's Western Symphony. He became the first African-American principal dancer permanently associated with that company but asked that there be no publicity about breaking a color barrier. In 1957 Balanchine created the centerpiece pas de deux of Agon for Mitchell and ballerina Diana Adams. Performances of this technically demanding, modernist work gained Mitchell international recognition as a principal dancer imbued with supple control and precise partnering skills. Mitchell stayed with the NYCB for fifteen years, dancing a range of leading roles that included spare, sensual works (Jerome Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun ), neoclassic works (Balanchine's Four Temperaments ), and pure classical ballets (Balanchine's Allegro Brillante ). In 1962 Mitchell created the role of Puck in Balanchine's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, winning critical and audience praise for his dramatic abilities and charismatic warmth.

Mitchell also performed in the Broadway productions of House of Flowers (1954), Shinbone Alley (1957), and Noel Coward's Sweet Potato (1968). He choreographed for Eartha Kitt at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957 and appeared at the 1960 and 1961 Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. He danced as a guest artist with the Metropolitan Opera (1962), the Munich Ballet Festival (1963), the Stuttgart Opera Ballet (1963), and the National Ballet of Canada (1964). In 1967, at the invitation of the U.S. government, he helped organize the National Ballet Company of Brazil.

Well aware of his role as a trailblazer, Mitchell encouraged others to follow his example of excellence in classical ballet. He taught at the Katherine Dunham School, the Karel Shook Studio, and the Harlem School of the Arts, as well as the Jones-Hayward School in Washington, D.C. In 1968 Mitchell and Shook reacted to the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., by forming the school that became the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH), although Mitchell "never actually started out to have a company. I wanted to start a school to get kids off the streets. But I couldn't tell the young people in the school to be the best they could when they had no place to go." DTH was cofounded in February 1969 by Mitchell and Shook to "prove that there is no difference, except color, between a black ballet dancer and a white ballet dancer."

Mitchell has received numerous honors and awards, including the 1975 Capezio Dance Award, the New York Public Library "Lion of the Performing Arts" Award for outstanding contributions to the performing arts, the NAACP's Image Award of Fame, and numerous honorary doctorates, including ones from Harvard, Princeton, and Williams College. In 1993 he was honored by David Dinkins, mayor of New York City, with a Handel Medallion Award and by President Bill Clinton at the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime contribution to American culture. In June 1994 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1998 Mitchell choreographed South African Suite in collaboration with two South African dancers. In 1999 he was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, New York.

See also Ballet; Dance Theater of Harlem; Dinkins, David; Kitt, Eartha Mae

Bibliography

"Arthur Mitchell." In Current Biography Yearbook. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1966, pp. 278–280.

Goodman, Saul. "Brief Biographies: Arthur Mitchell." Dance Magazine (December 1957): 47.

Gruen, John. People Who Dance: Twenty-two Dancers Tell Their Own Stories. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Book Company, 1988.

Latham, Jacqueline Quinn. "A Biographical Study of the Lives and Contributions of Two Selected Contemporary Black Male Dance Artists—Arthur Mitchell and Alvin Ailey—in the Idioms of Ballet and Modern Dance, Respectively." Ph.D. diss., Texas Woman's University, Denton, Texas, 1973.

Maynard, Olga. "Arthur Mitchell and the Dance Theater of Harlem." Dance Magazine (March 1970): 52–62.

thomas f. defrantz (1996)
Updated by author 2005