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KAREN BROWN, now 20 years with Dance Theater of Harlem and one of the troupe's leading ballerinas, was a teenage ballet student from Augusta, Ga., when she went to Atlanta and saw a performance that changed her life.
It was by the new ballet company known as Dance Theater of Harlem. Arthur Mitchell, the former New York City Ballet principal dancer, who was its founder, and Lydia Abarca were dancing a pas de deux. Brown was astonished. "I'd never seen a black male dance classical ballet." In fact, in the hometown troupe Brown danced with, the Augusta Ballet Company, any male dancers at all were a rarity.
Then Brown won a scholarship to the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, where she learned the Dance Theater of Harlem repertory: "Forces of Rhythm," "Ancient Voices," "Haiku." To her, the dancers "all seemed six-feet tall, gods and goddesses. They wore brown tights and point shoes, and the wonderful thing was that their arms and legs and feet were all the same color."
A high-ranking academic student at her integrated parochial high school, Brown found that she got "a high" from mastering the repertory. Before, she said, "I had been so in control of my mind. Ballet creates a balance between what you're able to do physically, philosophically, dramatically, intellectually."
This season, which opens on Friday, Brown is dancing Blanche in "A Streetcar Named Desire." She's also cast in "Equus" and in "Dialogues."
She's at the top of her career and making plans for the rest of her life as well; she designs jewelry, she teaches dance in Washington, D.C., and she wants, eventually, to go back to college for a master's degree to continue her dance-teaching career. And some day, she'd like to raise a child.
But there are some times when everything is not in place, when something happens and the balance goes awry.
Last week, Karen Brown was sitting in an empty studio at Dance Theater of Harlem's newly renovated headquarters, a symbol of the company's growth and progress. And on this day, a week before the opening of the company's 25th anniversary season at the Lincoln Center's New York State Theater, Karen Brown was crying.
She was talking about when she was invited last month...