Vaulted Ambitions

Re-Discovering The First Negro Classic Ballet

By Mindy Farabee

In 1951, New York’s Metropolitan Opera hired a former Angeleno named Janet Collins on as a full-time dancer, making her the black person to earn that honor, and thus ensuring her a visible legacy that still resonates today. “Janet Collins is often referred to as the first African-American prima ballerina,” said cultural historian Kenneth Marcus. “Bernice Harrison beat her by six years.”

FNCB wasn’t the country’s first black ballet troupe — in the 1930s, a few such companies fleetingly sprang up in New York, Chicago and elsewhere — but the L.A. collective distinguishes itself as by far the era’s most successful, for a decade (1946 to 1956) performing to much acclaim around the West Coast, and even internationally. Determined to claim their place in a rarefied world still conspicuous for its lack of diversity, the collection of individuals who formed the FNCB show us something about how ordinary people grapple with the arc of history.

“It’s one of those human stories in my line of work that makes it more fulfilling,” said Sue Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts at the Huntington Library, which houses the troupe’s archive.

The FNCB was founded by the choreographer Joseph Rickard in 1946, when Los Angeles had no permanent ballet company at all — a situation in which the city has often found itself.

At the time, Los Angeles did have an established history of innovative modern dance, however, according to Marcus. A mini-Gold Rush of artistic talent had been spawned by the film industry. “So already in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, the city has a serious dance culture in place,” Marcus said.

An experimental thread ran through this culture, and it was in this climate that one of those Hollywood choreographers — Lester Horton — created here one of the country’s first multi-racial modern dance companies in 1932. (Another aspect of the climate of the day: The 1993 documentary on Horton is called Genius on the Wrong Coast, after a 1967 article by New York Times dance critic Clive Barnes discussed why Horton wasn’t better celebrated in his lifetime.)

It was into this milieu that, in 1938, Rickard came west from Ann Arbor, Michigan, also intrigued by the idea of breaking into Hollywood. What he actually got was a gig at the Paramount Pictures mailroom, but that same year, Bronislava Nijinska, sister to ballet legend Valslav Nijinsky, arrived in town and set up shop as a ballet teacher. Rickard, who had never studied ballet up to that point, signed up for classes. By 1943, he mastered the art well enough for Nijinska to help him land a stint dancing professionally with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. But like so many Angelenos, what he really wanted to do was direct.

Many ballet troupes of the time danced to pre-recorded accompaniment. Rickard felt he had a better idea, and when he went down to Central Avenue, famous at the time as a mecca for musicians, looking for someone who could play live for his troupe, he met Claudius Wilson, a young classically trained pianist from New Orleans. Wilson came to LA from New Orleans, a southern immigrant also lured by the promise of the movie industry but just as much looking to escape a stifling legacy.

Between the 1890s and the 1960s, the U.S.’s black population engaged in a Great Migration, during which six million people left the rural South for urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest and Western United States. From the 1940s on, L.A. became a major destination for many, who were attracted by the region’s booming economy and were floated largely by $11 billion in defense contracts. Southern California also had a reputation for having a relatively less racist environment than many parts of the country. Relatively — From the 1920s, restrictive housing covenants legally segregated neighborhoods in Los Angeles, until the U.S. Supreme Court struck them down in 1948. Still, in 1910, prior to the covenants, black Americans in Los Angeles enjoyed the highest rates of home ownership in the country, and by 1930 half of the state’s black population called L.A. home. As a consequence, in the first half of the 20^th century, the city enjoyed a flourishing culture akin to the artistic outpouring of the Harlem Renaissance.  Thus, there were suddenly a good deal more potential ballet dancers on the scene. And there was also no shortage of stereotypes against those of color.

Marcus, a history professor at the University of La Verne who has published several articles on FNCB, interviewed three of the company’s dancers prior to their deaths as well as various surviving members of Rickard’s family. He’s written of how one of the dancers, Marion Spencer, reported being informed early on that “black women were not built for ballet.” Rickard himself was well aware of the prejudices—he got the idea to form his company while at a Beverly Hills ballet studio on the day a black woman brought her young daughter in to inquire about lessons. She was firmly redirected to a nearby tap dance school.

That woman was Bernice Harrison, and when Rickard tracked her down and offered to enroll her daughter in the school he had just decided to form, he soon learned that Harrison herself harbored dreams of learning to dance ballet. As someone who had also stepped up late to the bar, he discovered in himself a talent for teaching adults, and so the FNCB was born.

According to Marcus, the company was regularly lauded for its creativity, its humor and its grace, as well as for its dramatic ability. Originality quickly became another of its signatures. For rather than stage one more version of Giselle or endless The Nutcrackers, FNCB early on began to create entirely new ballets, with strong story-lines and high production values, provided pro bono, courtesy of Rickard’s Hollywood connections (for instance, Paramount Pictures’ art director pulled double duty as FNCB’s primary set designer). Known as a particularly gentle and easygoing man, the musician from New Orleans, Claudius Wilson, forged a working relationship with Rickard that formed the basis of the company’s success. In hiring him, Rickard had unwittingly gotten a budding composer as part of the deal. Together, they developed works like Harlot House, based on an Oscar Wilde poem; and Rasin’ Cane, a story about Southern sugar-cane farmers that integrated the romance of classical music with jazz elements, and a style that incorporated African-American themes. “There wasn’t a lot of precedent for black ballet composers,” said Marcus. “There’s no question Wilson was a path-breaker and one of the unsung heroes in LA music history.”

During the company’s heyday between 1951 and 1954, the troupe performed frequently at high profile venues such as the Redlands Bowl, the Ramona Bowl and Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theater, for audiences black, white and racially mixed—sometimes as the first African-American artists known to grace those stages. They traveled to Bakersfield, to San Francisco, and the UK, financially by the skin of their teeth.

“The dancers brought incredible energy and commitment and skill,” Hodson said. “Most of them worked all day as train conductors, porters, housecleaners. They would come after work, and dance and learn techniques and choreography for the love of it.”

Lacking significant financial backing throughout their existence, the company survived by living nearly hand-to-mouth. Rickard himself not only at times drove an ice-cream truck to make the rent, but also economized by living in the ballroom. Harrison, the company’s prima ballerina, sometimes had to tow her children along to rehearsal in lieu of paying a babysitter.

Tucked away inside the Huntington’s vaults sits a copy of one of Wilson’s scores, bound in corrugated cardboard and held together by tape. “That one got to me,” Hodson said. “They had no resources, and they danced to critical acclaim.”

One particularly high point came with a 1950 performance at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium. “One cannot overemphasize that 1950 concert,” Marcus said. Twenty-five hundred people packed the house. Igor Stravinsky, Paul Henried and the conductor Bruno Walter all attended. Famed screenwriter Ben Hecht, also on hand that night, wrote Rickard a glowing (albeit a bit dated) letter after the performance, which the troupe parlayed into promo material. “That recognition puts them on the cultural map,” Marcus said.

Hecht, who would later be blacklisted in Europe for his fervent support of Jewish militants, had been an active campaigner for civil rights since the 1920s. Many progressives saw in FNCB a glimmer of the future that millions would soon take to the streets clamoring for, as the arts were seen as a powerful venue for manifesting equality. “It speaks to a hopefulness of the age,” said Marcus. “There was this idea that we can draw from the talents of anyone in this city. It was a golden age in LA arts.”

FNCB’s status as pioneers did little to shield them from a wearying barrage of indignities, such as on a trip to Santa Barbara when no hotel would take them in, necessitating city residents put them up for the night. And when the end came, it came swiftly and callously: In 1956, the company moved to New York after being asked to merge with the New York Negro Ballet, a well-funded troupe in need of talent. Almost immediately upon their arrival, NYNB’s primary backer died suddenly, and both organizations disbanded.

Company member James Truitt went on to dance with Lester Horton’s company and helped co-found the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company.  Diane Gordon, the troupe’s one white ballerina, was invited to join the MET.

By all accounts an unassuming man, Rickard continued to dance and to teach, but with little fanfare. “Unlike Balanchine, he shunned the spotlight. He did not call it the Joseph Rickard Dance Company,” said Marcus. “If he had, I think his life would have been very different.”

Passed over consistently in dance histories, Rickard made the gift of his papers to the Huntington just days before his death in 1994. Hodson’s letter of acknowledgement was read out to him in his hospital bed.

Wilson, meanwhile, remained in New York, where he lived until his 60s, last seen working at the Roosevelt Hospital in Hell’s Kitchen. He died, possibly by his own hand, without ever having been interviewed.

Dancer Ardie Allison also went to New York, where he became a nurse. Company star Graham Johnson, fed up with American racism, moved first to France and then to Spain. “From there, I heard he became a monk in Asia,” Marcus said. “Who knows.”

Harrison, the prima ballerina who inadvertently sparked the whole project by walking in to that Beverly Hills studio, entirely and abruptly faded from view after the company folded. “She basically disappeared,” Marcus said. “That’s a tragedy in this story.”