Grace Under Fire - dancer Raven Wilkinson

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2001 by Heather Wisner

All Raven Wilkinson wanted to do was dance. But as one of the relatively few black American ballerinas of her era, she found it wasn't always easy.

The time their tour bus pulled into Montgomery, Alabama, during a Ku Klux Klan rally, the dancers of Serge Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo had good reason to fear that this wouldn't be an ordinary one-night stand. It was the mid-'50s, and Jim Crow segregation was in effect throughout the South. After a Klansman boarded the bus and began throwing around the dancers' bags, the company decided that Raven Wilkinson shouldn't perform that night. Wilkinson, the only black dancer in the company's half-century history, had been warned by her parents about racism long before, but nothing quite prepared her for that evening's dinner in the hotel, where the dancers shared the dining room with a group of white men and their families. Wilkinson came to the startling realization that the men were Klansmen and the formless white sheets piled onto nearby chairs were their gowns and hoods. "The company told me, `Stay here, lock the door and don't come out' while they went to perform," she said. "I did, and from my window, I saw a cross burning outside."

Besides the usual stresses of a touring dancer's life--the injuries, the rootlessness, the professional competition and financial uncertainty--much of Wilkinson's work, and life, was disrupted by racism. That harrowing and lonely night in Montgomery was not an isolated incident, and threats of theater closures, canceled bookings and even violence meant that she had to leave Southern segments of the tours and rejoin the company in the North. After six years, she left the Ballet Russe and worked in retail and in an arts educational program; she even briefly joined a convent, where she had an epiphany. "You haven't exhausted the life you had," she remembered thinking. "You worked hard. You have to fight for it." Eventually, she did what many of the relatively few black American ballet dancers at the time had to do to save their careers: She left the country. After seven years with Holland's Dutch National Ballet, she came home to dance with the New York City Opera, where, at age 65, she still does character roles. Though the odds against her becoming a professional dancer were more daunting than for most young people, Wilkinson made herself a career and remembers much of it with fondness and considerable grace. But it's hard not to wonder how deeply the cultural climate affected her trajectory. "This woman should have been an American ballerina," insisted fellow Ballet Russe dancer Rochelle Zide-Booth. "She was that good."

Though racial tension had begun to flare in America when Wilkinson joined the Ballet Russe in 1954, a black ballerina was unremarkable in a company that regularly moved seventeen different nationalities across borders, as dancer Frederic Franklin once described it. Wilkinson, already considered a young talent at the dance school that Denham bought for the Ballet Russe, auditioned for the company twice, despite the advice of another student who told her, "Don't take the audition again--they can't take you because of your race."

At her father's insistence, she enrolled at Columbia University after high school, but she yearned to dance professionally. "It's a hard thing when your child wants to do something and there may be dangers and disappointments," she said. "But my parents were very supportive. They could see I wanted ballet so very much." After her third audition, the 19-year-old Wilkinson was called into a room full of people, including Franklin; her teacher, Madame Maria Svoboda; and Denham, who asked her, "How would you like to be a member of the Ballet Russe?" Said Wilkinson, "It's my dearest dream."

She began with corps de ballet roles (Swan Lake, Graduation Ball, Coppelia) and, in her second year, Denham gave her more solo work, including the waltz in Les Sylphides. A lyrical dancer, she enjoyed watching and learning from the others, particularly Alicia Alonso, whom the others called "The Cuban Cobra." Wilkinson, said Zide-Booth, was one of those dancers "who stand onstage and move and you cry, because she's so beautiful. She drained every last drop out of her dancing." Wilkinson's former roommate, Eleanor D'Antuono, agreed. "She had an exquisite artistic quality," she said. "Very refined, very elegant. There was depth to her work."

Wilkinson passed her first tour without incident, performing on Southern stages and staying in Southern hotels with the other dancers. Former Dance Theatre of Harlem member Joselli Audain Deans, a Temple University graduate student researching Wilkinson's career as part of her thesis on black ballet dancers, said she found original Ballet Russe contracts indicating that Wilkinson's pay was comparable to that of the other dancers.

It wasn't until the South began feeling the effects of Brown vs. the Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating public schools, that, she said, the South became volatile and "people began questioning me." Sometimes she was confronted directly, and not only by whites--she sometimes felt that Southern blacks thought she was trying to `pass' and resented her for it. "I was brought up to be the best person you could be, to do the best you could," she said. "I didn't think of myself as black, but when I was asked, I had to answer." In Atlanta, Wilkinson was barred from a hotel she'd stayed at two years before, because the manager was afraid it would be bombed. She was forced to stay at a "colored" hotel, then go back to New York. Worse still were the indirect affronts, like the time she tried to order coffee in a Florida airport coffee shop. Though the place was empty, she never got her coffee, and when she queried the waitress, she was told she had to go to another room. "I told her, `The coffee's not worth it,' and left," she said.