Arthur Mitchell

Arthur Adams Mitchell Jr. was born on the twenty-seventh of March 1934 at Harlem, the second of five children of Arthur Mitchell Sr. — a Black-Harlem building superintendent — and Willie Mae Mitchell, a domestic. He was raised in the working-class Black-Harlem of the inter-war period.

He was placed at the Harlem Public Schools and at the High School of Performing Arts at Manhattan — the principal post-war Manhattan performing-arts public secondary school — where he was admitted at twelve in 1946 on the strength of his audition for the Hubie Blake-Will Marion Cook tap-dance scholarship.

He trained at the High School of Performing Arts from 1946 to 1952 under the principal post-war Manhattan modernist-dance choreographers — including Karel Shook, who became his principal long-term ballet teacher across the following four decades.

He joined in 1952 at eighteen the John Butler Dance Theatre at Manhattan — the principal post-war Manhattan modernist-and-jazz-dance company. He danced under Butler from 1952 to 1955.

He was hired on the recommendation of George Balanchine on the fourteenth of November 1955 by the New York City Ballet as a member of the corps de ballet — the first African American member of the New York City Ballet corps. He rose to soloist by 1956 and to principal dancer by 1959.

He was the principal Black-American partner of the New York City Ballet across the closing years of the 1950s and the 1960s — danced principal roles at the New York City Ballet for the next sixteen years.

He danced the principal role of Puck in the New York City Ballet 1962 premiere production of Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the City Center on the seventeenth of January 1962 — a principal role that became identified with him for the remainder of his New York City Ballet tenure.

He co-founded on the second of August 1969 with Karel Shook the Dance Theatre of Harlem at the basement of the Saint James Presbyterian Church on West 138th Street, Harlem — initially as a Black-American children’s ballet school in response to the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive). The school grew into a professional ballet company by 1971.

The Dance Theatre of Harlem opened its first professional season on the eighth of January 1971 at the Manhattan Guggenheim Museum — the first sustained professional Black-American classical ballet company in the history of the period.

The Dance Theatre of Harlem toured the principal American and European stages of the closing years of the 1970s and the 1980s — including the principal Royal Opera House Covent Garden 1981 tour, the principal La Scala Milan 1983 tour, and the principal Soviet Union 1988 tour as the first American ballet company to perform at the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre at Moscow in over thirty years.

He directed the Dance Theatre of Harlem for forty years through to 2009.

He was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors on the seventh of December 1993.

He died at Manhattan on the nineteenth of September 2018 of complications of kidney failure, at eighty-four.

He is honored here as the founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem.