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A Black ballet company? An "oddity" is the simplest way to define the fusion of two distinct cultures. There had never been a successful one, and some critics thought that there should never be one-the two just didn't jive together.1
[T]he materialist concept of hybridity conveys that the histories of forced labor migrations, racial segregation, economic displacement, and internment are left in the material traces of the "hybrid" cultural identities.2
In 1984, Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH), America's first successful African American ballet company, undertook its first full-length production of the nineteenth-century ballet classic Giselle. Engaging in such a production meant a direct encounter with the very emblem of ballet's iconic whiteness: the ballerina as unearthily pale ghost, sylph, or fairy who (de)materialized on the stage of the Paris Opera in the mid-nineteenth century. By taking on Giselle, DTH extended its legacy of challenging the implicit racial coding of ballet. Even in today's ballet world the African American dancer-and especially the African American ballerina-remains an anomaly, as any glance at the roster of most major American ballet companies demonstrates.3 Yet DTH faced an additional, and more subtle, difficulty in producing Giselle: the need to demonstrate ballet's cultural relevance to black Americans in the face of skepticism from both white and black critics over the appropriateness of African Americans participating in what was perceived as a white, and possibly elitist, cultural institution.
In order to instantiate the relevance of its production of Giselle, Dance Theatre of Harlem chose to relocate the ballet from its feudal German Rhineland setting to the farms and plantations of 1841 Louisiana's free people of color. With the help of his designer, Carl Michel, DTH's artistic director and founder Arthur Mitchell crafted new biographies for the characters of the 1841 Paris production (what I will term the Rhine Giselle) based on the lives of free people of color in two parishes, the famous Cane River Colony of Nachitoches Parish and the wealthy, slave-owning black planters of Plaquemines Parish. The class-conflict tragedy of the Rhine Giselle translated effortlessly to its new setting: Giselle Lanaux, a free black peasant girl, goes mad and dies when she is betrayed by an aristocratic lover (Albert, a wealthy plantation owner and a free man of color)...