"Black Faces in the Company": Dancing Racialized Understandings of American Womanhood

In 1972, the all-white New York City Ballet (NYCB), headed by choreographer George Balanchine, toured Europe under the auspices of the federal Cold War cultural diplomacy program.  That year, the burgeoning all-black Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH), headed by former NYCB dancer Arthur Mitchell, performed at the Dubrovnik Festival under the same program.   Both companies featured artistic celebrations of idealized womanhood, yet the DTH tour was the first to exclusively showcase black ballerinas.  In the white-dominated world of classical ballet, Balanchine infantilized NYCB ballerinas.  Working within this world, the DTH provocatively presented black ballerinas as delicate muses, a role far removed from popular images of black womanhood in the early 1970s.

I propose to consider the intersecting and contrasting conceptions of American womanhood that the NYCB and DTH tours reflected, resisted, embodied, and produced.  Drawing from written, visual, and filmed company and governmental records, I interpret the balletic themes, the movement of the dancers, and the planning and execution of these tours as making up extended performances of gendered Americanness.  Although scholars have bridged treatments of midcentury visual arts with cultural understandings of the Cold War and have recently begun to explore federally-funded dance tours, the relationship of these dance tours to broader understandings of American gender, race, and identity has yet to be analyzed.  Arguing that Cold War dance tours were powerful expressions of Americanness, I seek to investigate the rich relationship between a gendered Cold War Americanness and the complicated performativity of NYCB and DTH womanhood.