I entered a dance studio in my town when I was seven years old and my studio consisted of mainly Hispanic and black individuals. I thought this was the norm in all of the dance studios around but I received a shocking surprise when I started to attend competitions. My dance studio would often be the only school that had minorities and the rest only consisted of white people and it did make me feel uncomfortable. I started developing a love for classical ballet and I trained really hard that I had the opportunity to audition for the American Ballet Summer Program when I was thirteen years old, within the first week of the program I noticed that I was the only Hispanic girl in the program along with another Latina girl and a black boy. We were outnumbered by the outstanding amount of white people in the program, and this should not be the case. This bothered me for quite awhile because it kept reoccurring and now I have a pretty good idea as to why. Lets talk about money, in general minorities are either on the lower end of the economy or middle class but it is not common for them to be at the top 1%. The parents of the white students in other dance studios most likely have a better economic standing than the parents in my studio who were almost always struggling to pay the tuition on time and sometimes had to work two to three jobs to keep their daughters in the studio. Often times there were some girls who were not able to compete because their parents cant afford the cost of traveling to the competition or paying for costumes which are so expensive.
The only reason I was able to attend the program is because I received a full scholarship, but if that was not the case my parents would never be able to afford it, and I would not have gone. There is also the problem of not hiring dancers to dance lead roles because they don't "fit" the image that the directors want. This is the reason why it is not common to see a black woman dancing the lead for Odile/Odette in Swan Lake, or seeing a Hispanic Woman dance the lead of the Sugar Plum fairy. There are many artists who have tried to break these norms like Alvin Ailey, Misty Copeland and Katherine Dunham. Alvin Ailey tried to include black dancers in his pieces because other dance companies would often reject them and he formed his own technique by incorporating classical ballet and contemporary. Misty Copeland is a professional ballet dancer with the New York City ballet and she danced many lead roles as a principal dancer that no other colored woman before her has done. Katherine Dunham is a world renowned dancer and choreographer who held the only black troupe of dancers at her time in the 1950's. She added her own African Cultural roots to her work and also incorporated Carribean Movement as well. For my project, I am going to choreograph my own piece called "Change" with other minority dancers with the incorporations of Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham technique.
Misty Copeland with James Whiteside during an American Ballet Theater performance of “Swan Lake.” Ms. Copeland reprises this role on June 15.CreditCreditJulieta Cervantes for The New York Times
https://youtu.be/sjqYqhWZmDI
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