12 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 9, 2020On May 29, four days after George Floyd
was killed by the Minneapolis police, The-
resa Ruth Howard posted a call to action on
Instagram:
Demonstrate your outrage
Demonstrate your allyship
Demonstrate your authenticity
We don’t need shadow heroes, step into
the light...Ms. Howard, a former ballet dancer who
founded the digital platform Memoirs of
Blacks in Ballet (or MoBBallet), was ad-
dressing the institutions she has worked
with for the past few years, in a role she
sums up as “diversity strategist and con-
sultant.” Those institutions, which include
prestigious ballet companies and schools,
are predominantly white, onstage and be-
hind the scenes. They know they need to
evolve, and she is helping them.
So when protests against systemic rac-
ism and police brutality began sweeping the
country, she found their silence disconcert-
ing. “You can’t say you want us and, when
we are in peril, not be there for us,” Ms.
Howard, 49, said in an interview.
Over the next few days, companies re-
sponded, posting statements of support
with a hashtag she had started: #ballet-
relevesforblacklives. (Relevé, a ballet term,
is a way of saying “rise up.”) Their mes-
sages drew appreciation and criticism;
many commenters demanded action. In an
opinion piece for Dance Magazine, Ms.
Howard expanded on her thoughts about
what leadership should look like in this mo-
ment, under the headline “Where Is Your
Outrage? Where Is Your Support?”
On Friday, leaders from more than a doz-
en ballet companies and schools will join an
online discussion titled “#balletrelevesfor-
blacklives... or Does It?,” a chance to re-
flect on the Black Lives Matter movement
and its effect on their institutions. The pub-
lic event is part of Ms. Howard’s second an-
nual MoBBallet symposium, a series of con-
versations and lectures that, in her words,
“centers Blackness but welcomes all.”
The multiweekend symposium will ex-
plore topics like colorism in ballet and im-
plicit bias in teaching dance history, and
hold a session for dancers on “how to acti-
vate your activism.” These issues have long
been pressing to Ms. Howard, even as oth-
ers are just beginning to feel their urgency.
A former member of Dance Theater of
Harlem — the company founded 51 years
ago, by the visionary Arthur Mitchell, as a
space for African-American dancers in clas-
sical ballet — she established MoBBallet in
2015 to highlight the often overlooked histo-
ries of Black ballet artists.
Virginia Johnson, Dance Theater’s artis-
tic director, said that Ms. Howard has been
“a force of change” for years: “She’s done
her research, she knows her methods, and
she is relentless in not letting people off the
hook. And that’s what’s needed.”
“Now that people are ready,” Ms. Johnson
added, “she is flying, and they can join her.”
As a writer, public speaker and social-me-
dia presence, Ms. Howard is one of the most
vocal proponents for racial equity in ballet.
But she’s not alone in shaping a more inclu-
sive field. In addition to her independent
work as a diversity strategist, she was part
of a team of consultants for the Equity
Project, a three-year initiative led by Dance
Theater of Harlem, Dance/USA and the In-
ternational Association of Blacks in Dance.
The project, which involved directors from
21 North American ballet organizations,
ended in June.
While some ballet schools have devel-
oped internal diversity initiatives, the Equi-
ty Project had more holistic aims. Ms. John-
son described it as “focused on bringing Af-
rican-Americans to the field of ballet in all
aspects — onstage and behind the stage, in
the wings, in the administrative offices, in
the schools.” It sought to ensure “that these
organizations are not bastions of white-
ness,” she said. “Or if they are, they’ve de-
cided that is what they want, and they are
not just ignorantly moving forward.”
Through the Equity Project, Ms. Howard
met some of the people with whom she now
works closely, like Barry Hughson, the ex-
ecutive director of the National Ballet of
Canada in Toronto. He appreciates Ms.
Howard’s directness.
“I need someone to be brutally honest
with me, and to do that in a way that in-
spires us all to keep pushing forward,” he
said. “That’s her spirit.”
Their conversations, he added, have
helped him to think more deeply about equi-
ty in all dimensions of the National Ballet,
not just in hiring dancers.
“For a while we were focused on repre-
sentation, on the company looking more ra-
cially diverse, and it does look more racially
diverse,” he said. “But now it’s like turning
inward and saying: What do these artists
need to feel support and safety, and to see
themselves on a path through and up the
ranks? That’s the work at hand, and that’s
where Theresa’s been standing by our side
as we imagine the future.”
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic,
the future can be hard to imagine. Ellen
Walker, the executive director of Pacific
Northwest Ballet in Seattle, said that de-
spite the challenges facing the company,
there is also opportunity in this break from
business as usual.
“I talk to Theresa a lot about this: Who do
we want to be on the other side?” she said.
“So that we are not in an academic or theo-
retical or workshop-y place with our work
around diversification of our company and
school and institution, but that we are abso-
lutely making real change, and the action
steps we’ve taken are showing up.”
Ms. Howard would probably be pleased
to hear this. As a diversity strategist, she
strives to bring directors “from their head
space, which is that organizational lens, into
their heart space, that more empathetic hu-
man lens,” she said. She wants them to un-
derstand, as much as possible, how it feels
to be Black in ballet’s white spaces, “the
added pressure the brown body takes on.”
For a Black ballet dancer, “It’s not just an
arabesque, it’s not just a pirouette,” she
said. “You’re the Black girl doing the ara-
besque, you’re the Black girl doing the pir-
ouette. Which says that either Black people
can do this, and they’re capable, or they’re
not. That’s something white dancers, whitestudents, don’t carry with them.”
Ms. Howard speaks from firsthand expe-
rience. Growing up in Philadelphia, she was
one of few students of color at the School of
Pennsylvania Ballet. She remembers feel-
ing entirely welcome there until the year
she was cast in “The Nutcracker” in a cov-
eted party-scene role — or so she thought.
She’d seen her name on the cast list next to
the “Bootmaker’s Daughter,” but when the
time came for children to pick up their cos-
tumes, hers went instead to a white girl,
someone who looked more like the rest of
the fictional family onstage.
She recalls breaking into tears as she told
her father what had happened. (“I had a
dance father, who did the driving, sewed the
point shoes,” she said.) He spoke with the
company’s artistic director, and she ended
up splitting the role with the white student.
“I don’t know if that changed me,” she
said, “but it might have solidified my desire
to dance with Dance Theater of Harlem.”
(She had seen the company perform a few
years before, when she was 8.) “In my mind,
that would never happen in a place like
that.”
After performing with Dance Theater
from 1989 to ’92, Ms. Howard danced with
choreographers including Karole Armitage
and Donald Byrd. Mr. Byrd, now her close
friend, said that about five years ago, he no-
ticed that she “was in a real funk.” Around
that time, the idea for MoBBallet came to
her, springing from a blog post she had writ-
ten on Misty Copeland, the American Ballet
Theater star, and lesser-known Black bal-
lerinas who came before her.
Suddenly, Ms. Howard was reinvigo-
rated, Mr. Byrd said. “It seemed like she felt
that she was definitely on the right track,that she had discovered the thing that she
could do, and that she needed to do, and it
just kind of took over.”
While Ms. Howard said that lately she
feels like a “very former” dancer, her ballet
roots deeply inform her work, even some-
thing as simple as the way she walks into a
room. In 2017, she gave a rousing and eye-
opening keynote address at Positioning
Ballet, a convening of 40 international com-
pany directors in Amsterdam.
“The moment she enters a stage, you can
see and feel that she understands ballet,”
said Peggy Olislaegers, an artistic consult-
ant for Dutch National Ballet, which hosted
the conference. “She has this embodied
knowledge. She loves ballet, and that gives
her a clear authority within the field of bal-
let directors.”
These days Ms. Howard is as much a re-
source for ballet dancers as she is for com-
pany directors, though she stresses that she
is “still learning and evolving” in her work.
Sebastian Villarini-Velez, a New York City
Ballet soloist, said that when he recently
met with Ms. Howard, seeking her guidance
about organizing a group of dancers of color
at City Ballet, he was struck by how atten-
tively she listened.
“I know it sounds cliché,” he said, “but I
felt heard, for one of the first times.”
Chyrstyn Fentroy, a Boston Ballet soloist,
has enjoyed popping into Ms. Howard’s In-
stagram Live sessions, which invite candid
discussions. Ballet, Ms. Fentroy said, tends
to train dancers not to speak up. “You take
the correction, and it doesn’t matter if it
hurts your feelings, you just nod your head
and keep dancing.” But Ms. Howard is help-
ing to change that: “I think she’s allowing
people to learn where their voices are.”A Force for Change Stays in Motion
Through the digital platform
Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet,
a former dancer takes the lead.
By SIOBHAN BURKEELIAS WILLIAMS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESLeft, Theresa Ruth
Howard in Marcus
Garvey Park in Harlem.
Below left, Megumi Eda
and Ms. Howard in the
Armitage Gone! Dance
production of “In this
dream that dogs me,” in- Below, Ms. Howard
and William Isaac in
Karole Armitage’s “Time
is the echo of an axe
within a wood,” in 2006.
‘Now that people are
ready, she is flying, and
they can join her.’
STEFANIE MOTTA, VIA JACOB’S PILLOW DANCE FESTIVAL ARCHIVESSARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMESDance
ji-xian-sheng