Louis Johnson

Louis Johnson was born on the nineteenth of March 1930 at Statesville, North Carolina, the son of a Black North Carolina-tenant-farming household of the closing years of the post-Reconstruction North Carolina Piedmont. The family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1933 and Johnson was raised in the segregated Black-Washington of the inter-war period.

He was placed at the principal Washington Coloured Public Schools and at the Howard University High School at Washington — among the principal Black-American senior-high-school music-and-dance students of the early 1940s.

He was given his first formal dance training at thirteen in 1943 at the Joan Erdman studio at Washington and at fifteen at the Doris Jones Dance Studio at Washington — the principal Black-Washington modernist-dance studio of the post-war period.

He was admitted in 1950 at twenty to the School of American Ballet at New York — the principal ballet-training school of the post-war American ballet theatre, founded by Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine. Johnson was the first African American student at the School of American Ballet — among the principal post-war institutional desegregation milestones of the period.

He danced with the New York City Ballet from 1952 to 1954 — the principal post-war Manhattan ballet company — and then with the Karel Shook studio at Manhattan from 1954 to 1956.

He choreographed at the Manhattan Phoenix Theatre in 1956 the modernist-dance work Lament — at the closing season of the Manhattan Phoenix Theatre dance programmes of the period — and at the Broadway production My Fair Lady at the Mark Hellinger Theatre in 1956 as the principal Black-American chorus-dancer of the Lerner-and-Loewe musical.

He was hired in 1962 by the Manhattan Negro Ensemble Company for the principal choreographer position at the Negro Ensemble Company at the Saint Marks Theatre, Off-Broadway, where he choreographed across the closing 1960s and the 1970s the principal Negro Ensemble Company productions: Brotherhood (1967), Ceremonies in Dark Old Men (1969), and The First Breeze of Summer (1975).

He choreographed in 1978 the Broadway production The Wiz (Sidney Lumet film direction) — the principal post-Wiz Broadway choreography of the period — at the closing months of the principal post-1975 Wiz Broadway run.

He choreographed the 1971 Broadway musical Purlie at the Broadway Theatre — and was nominated for the 1971 Tony Award for Best Choreography.

He served from 1973 to 1988 as professor of dance at the Howard University Department of Theatre — the principal Black-American concert-dance professor of the historic Black college of the post-war period — and directed the principal post-war Black-American university-level dance programme of the historical-Black-college-and-university system.

He was awarded the 2010 Dance Magazine Award for his lifetime contributions to the post-war American concert-dance tradition.

He died at Manhattan on the thirty-first of March 2020 of complications of pulmonary disease, at ninety.

He is honored here as the first Black-American at the School of American Ballet.