Virginia Johnson: a critic's farewell - ballerina retires - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1997 by Elizabeth Kendall

NEW YORK CITY--On September 21, one of the great American ballerinas, Virginia Johnson, retired from the stage at age forty-seven in a ceremony strangely devoid of fanfare or conviction. It was the last day of Dance Theatre of Harlem's two-week season. Johnson danced two of the three ballets. Then the houselights at Harlem's Aaron Davis Hall came up; director Arthur Mitchell said some predictable words; Johnson emerged in an aqua velvet sheath; a four-couple ballet--Unforgettable--was performed as a tribute while slides of Johnson flashed overhead; a stage full of former colleagues applauded--and the moment ended, It was a letdown. The emotions stirring under the surface didn't get whipped up or unleashed.

Such inattention is not new in Johnson's career, Between Mitchell's insistence on himself as DTH's sole guiding light and the general public's sentimental-liberal support and neglect, Johnson has gotten more or less lumped together with her company. She was there at the beginning, 1969, when civil rights hopes and fears gave birth to DTH and its mission to prove--and prove and prove again--that black dancers could do classical ballet. Of all the brilliant individuals who passed in and out of DTH, who quarreled with Mitchell and left, who succumbed to the lure of Broadway or real life, Johnson was the one who stayed. Perhaps she was more fatalistic than her colleagues (having started her training when there was no hope for performing). Light-skinned, high-cheekboned, a model of dignity offstage, a consummate professional onstage, she became an icon of the company's intended mix of high-class hauteur and edgy drama.

That constancy was misleading. To really see Johnson, you had to watch her as a child watches dancers, leaving race and politics aside. What you saw was a mesmerizing theatrical concentration. The more demure and remote she seemed off the stage, the more pure and wild and in touch with the deep forces she seemed on it. Who can forget the moment in Agnes de Mille's Fall River Legend when Johnson's Lizzie Borden first touched the handle of the ax? Who can forget her transfigured face in Giselle when dawn breaks and her Albrecht is still alive? Or her riveting, priestesslike motions in Garth Fagan's Footprints Dressed in Red? The press labeled her a dramatic ballerina, but she didn't emote the way dramatic ballerinas are thought to do. She did something simpler and rarer. She matched the arc of the dance phrase to the arc of emotion. She moved through dance phrases so unobtrusively and yet so voluptuously that she seemed to travel in her own aura of starry wonder.

At her swan song, Johnson was in top form. As a white-gowned Desdemona in Jose Limon's The Moor's Pavane, she shimmered with a mute and ecstatic submission--but without extra pathos. The 1949 classic is a stark quartet--Othello, Desdemona, lago, Emilia--fitted to a background of Purcell airs. It requires the four characters to keep each other's histrionics in balance, inside the pattern of formal dance figures. As Desdemona, Johnson provided the story's secret grief. She signaled the young woman's puzzlement even as she swept through the dance figures--letting go only in climactic moments of woe, such as a low dip in the arms of Ronald Perry's masterful Othello, when one felt her throat being exultantly offered.

More surprising, because unexpected, was Johnson's "scene" in Alonzo King's Signs and Wonders, This is a nice version of a new-wave work that sets random ballet phrases, in speeded-up time or slow motion, against African chants. It's handsomely mounted, with gold lighting from the wings, and black net shorts-unitards complementing the dancers' various skin shades of coffee and cream. Johnson appeared in the middle of the ballet with a partner, who alternately raised her high or enfolded her in a ball. It was an almost passive portrait of a ballerina. But Johnson managed to leave a slow-motion trail of grief in the audience's memory.

Abstract works are the real test of a dramatic ballerina. Can she animate steps that were conceived as only steps? Can she give them a flow, a shape, an urgency? Johnson always has, by means of her uncanny physical imagination. This quality is all the more remarkable given her family background. By her own account, she comes from the old, upstanding black bourgeoisie. Two sets of grandparents were model citizens of Virginia; her aunt was a lawyer before there were black women lawyers. Her childhood was pointed toward social perfection: "How you dressed, what purse you carried mattered immensely," Johnson once told me. Her paradoxical accomplishment is to have carried out that family mandate in the externals of her career, knowing all the while that this was the price for inner freedom. She herself arranged the priorities so that her stage was a sacred space, a space of daring and even violence.

The dancers understand the subtlety of that accomplishment; their part of the tribute reflected it. Tyrone Brooks's Unforgettable, choreographed for the occasion, exuded the mischievous camaraderie that is palpable in the DTH ranks. The applause of former colleagues was full of genuine tears. Karen Brown, another undersung DTH ballerina, left the stage at one point and returned with tissue, which she passed down the line to weeping colleagues. That was, for this writer, the high point of the ceremony.