The Brooklyn Rail

Lydia Abarca was born in New York in 1951. She studied ballet at the Juilliard School and the Harkness School before attending Fordham University, where she was discovered by Arthur Mitchell and was invited to join his Dance Theatre of Harlem as one of its founding members. By nineteen, she was dancing principal roles in the company—her signature part was the central pas de deux in George Balanchine’s Agon—and serving as its unofficial spokeswoman. Her beauty, determination, and outstanding classical technique made her a star, yet the story of her career has often been left off the pages of dance history books.

Karen Valby, a writer living in Austin, Texas, befriended Abarca—and five of her fellow DTH members (and friends), Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Karlya Shelton-Benjamin, and Marcia Sells—and listened as they recounted their incredible time spent at DTH and beyond. The result is The Swans of Harlem, a group biography that tells the story of these pioneering Black ballerinas and their fifty-year sisterhood. In advance of the book’s publication on April 30, 2024, Rail contributor Phoebe Roberts spoke to Lydia Abarca and Karen Valby over Zoom, with Karen calling in from Austin, Lydia from Atlanta, and Phoebe from London. Their conversation was edited and condensed for clarity.

Phoebe Roberts (Rail): Could you speak a bit about the origins of the book and how you both became involved?

Karen Valby: The literary agent Barbara Jones lives on the same Harlem block as one of the Swans, Marcia Sells. They were talking and Marcia mentioned that she had joined the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council, which is a group formed by the five Swans to preserve their history. Barbara was moved by the idea of these women who lived such fantastical lives coming together later in life to reclaim their history, and she thought there was something there. She knows me and my daughters; I’m a transracial adoptive mom, and my daughters have been in ballet every week since they were two. Barbara thought, maybe there’s some magic that can be made together.

Lydia Abarca: We were really excited to have somebody listen to our stories and then be inspired by them. Some of what we went through was pretty funny, some of it was pretty sad. Only we could understand what we had gone through together; we could talk to each other and cry and give each other comfort because it was hard. It was very hard, but it was fulfilling. We were pioneers. We were doing something that everybody said we couldn’t. But we were good—Arthur Mitchell made sure of that. Then Karen came on and just made us feel so comfortable. I mean, she’s like one of the Swans as well. She could pull things out of us.

Rail: Karen, how did you negotiate handling the narratives of these Black women and their contributions to the cultural history of New York and dance?

Valby: The short answer is just with the utmost humility and respect and a knowledge that I was being led into a space where I could potentially do harm. I had fifteen years of training not centering myself in a room, as the white mother of Black daughters whom I look to to tell me about their experience and not project my sense of the world onto my girls. I think that sort of humility and genuine curiosity helped me with the Swans, because pretty soon in our conversations, they were revealing their very true selves and experiences. So, at every step I just was conscious of the gift the women were giving me, and I really didn’t want to screw it up. Lydia, was it wild to be talking to a white woman at the beginning?

Abarca: No. Growing up, it might’ve been, but I looked at your soul. It was like you’re a sister, and I have sisters that are all different colors, you know? It was the soul and the heart that you brought to us that made us want to share.

Rail: Lydia, you were on the cover of Dance Magazine and the undisputed star of Dance Theatre of Harlem, yet as Swans details, your name has often been excluded from popular dance histories. What does this kind of recognition mean to you now?

Abarca: It’s great. I did attempt to write a memoir several times when I left the company, but it was really hard. I hope it’s recognized now that I had something to do with the creation of Dance Theatre of Harlem. When I was in my heyday in the seventies, we didn’t have social media, we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have cell phones, so I want to believe that I was just overlooked. You know, there are very few pictures, there are very few videos. It’s a shame it’s gone. But this is our time right now—this is our time to let people know what it was like.

Valby: Lydia, I’m so glad to hear you say directly “this is our time now,” because sometimes I think you still struggle to deprogram how much humility was drilled into you as a founding company member of Dance Theatre of Harlem. You always had to be conscious of the greater mission and that you were ambassadors and represented something. That is beautiful and powerful, but that was drilled into you so much that I think it can be a little uncomfortable to feel like you have a right to be recognized.

Rail: I wanted to ask you both about the importance of constructing alternative dance histories. The history of ballet as we know it is as a white, patriarchal art derived from the imperial courts of fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe. In 2024, the relevancy of this form and its continued tradition of whiteness and elitism is often called into question. Do you feel that by recentering the narratives of the Swans and going back and uncovering these moments when ballet was not as exclusionary, you are potentially providing grounds for its survival?

Abarca: I’d like to believe that it would, but DTH has been around for fifty-five years, and progress with diversity is very slow. It’s just slow. I think one of the things that made DTH so special was our fresh take on ballet. We had a new look. We had energy and love for each other and a joy to be finally doing what we love to do.

Valby: Parents of young children of color need to believe that ballet belongs to them, too, and that it is a viable path to follow. You don’t have to be a unicorn like Misty Copeland and be the only one in the room. My hope would be that this book is a door knock to people who need to know what they don’t know, which is that it’s not just Misty Copeland, and it’s not just the five Swans, but that the list of Black ballerinas is long. If my daughters choose to pursue classical dance further, they need to know that there’s a huge community that they belong to. There is a huge tradition that surrounds Black ballet.

During the reporting of this book, I had a casual conversation with a woman who asked, “What’s your book about?”, and I said, the founding and first generation of ballerinas at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. And she goes—this was a white woman—“Oh, you don’t really see a lot of Black ballerinas, I guess because of their body type, the muscles.” It was like, wow, that is exactly what the Swans were told and raised to believe in the sixties and the seventies. It felt very important for me to say, yes, that is a racist notion that was common in the sixties that the Swans had to overcome, and that racist notion lives today. My hope is that she buys the book and is okay learning about what she doesn’t know.

Rail: Speaking of Misty Copeland, Swans doesn’t shy away from expressing frustration with recent media coverage surrounding her, particularly her being labeled as “the first Black prima ballerina.” How do you both understand the privileging of her story over those of the great ballerinas who came before her?

Abarca: American Ballet Theatre (ABT) finally, after seventy-five years, has a Black female principal dancer? Okay, great. But that word “first” keeps sticking, and it’s misconstrued because of all of the other dancers who made it possible to look at a Black ballerina. I wish Misty the best; we met her and had a panel with her. She’s a lovely person and is probably caught in this media storm about herself. She’s also trying to correct the history, but it’s still not correct.

Valby: On the subject of Misty, I want to point out the disservice and the crime that was done to her by that privileging and positioning because it sounds so isolating and often so lonely-making at ABT. She, too, was denied this sense of community that preceded her and has done work to try to educate and elevate. It’s just important to correct tragedies, I think, and to avail oneself of as wide and warm a community as one can. Dating back to your earlier question, the history of ballet is richer and more layered than we have allowed, and so is all of history. Let this be a joyful corrective to that.

Rail: Arthur Mitchell is also somewhat of a polarizing figure throughout the book. He was obviously a champion of Black dancers and created opportunity for them where there was previously lack, yet as we learn, he also exhibited blatant colorism and preferred to cast lighter dancers over darker members of the company. How do you negotiate this favoring of the lighter dancers?

Abarca: I was so busy being a principal dancer and learning the leads in all the ballets that it often escaped my attention. But it was occasionally brought to my attention, especially when we did Swan Lake. That, to me, was blatant. You know, you would hear, “Well, it’s the lighting; this lighting looks better on this color skin.” I have no idea what Mr. Mitchell was thinking. He was a human being, he makes mistakes. My husband and I were talking and he was saying, “Well, what Mitchell did was revolutionary. He was going to change the face of ballet, but maybe deep down inside, he didn’t want to change it too fast.” I want to believe that he put out his best dancers to get us through that initial trial period of, “Can they really do ballet?”

Valby: I think it’s really important to understand that cultural heroes like Arthur Mitchell, who was a visionary and changed an art form through sheer force of will and courage and self-determination, can also be flawed. As much as he uplifted his people, he also drank from the well of white supremacy. He also had his own tumult of biases and traumas that he was trying to manage. But God, he made something beautiful and enduring through his energy and charisma and will, and it was messy in the doing of it, and human in the doing of it, and flawed in the doing of it, but he still managed to do it. If anything, I hope the book presents a portrait of a man who was also vulnerable, who was also hustling as hard as he could, who also had the weight of the world on him, and who at heart, I believe, loved these dancers and would have taken a bullet for them.

Abarca: I think he listened, because when I went back to see the company years later, it was much more color representative. But he wasn’t perfect, and I think that’s what made the sisterhood so tight, because he could really put us through it. We needed somebody that would understand how much we wanted to punch him in the face sometimes. But what he was doing was too important, and so whatever problems you had with it, you either got over it or you left.

Rail: I was also touched that the book focused on what happened to the Swans in the aftermath of their dancing careers. We often hear about a dancer’s training and their experiences performing, but rarely about their life post-retirement. It was particularly moving to learn about your struggles with alcoholism, Lydia, and how you overcame that.

Abarca: Ballet was taken away from me. I had a career-ending knee injury and spent a lot of time trying to get back on the stage. I decided to get married, have kids. My husband worked for IBM and they transferred him down to Atlanta, so we moved. I taught myself medical transcription because I had to have some kind of income. I did that for twenty-something years and then was let go. Fortunately, I met a woman who said, “You have to come teach. You have all this knowledge, come share it.” Now my relationship with ballet is good because I’m working with Ballethnic, a dance company in Atlanta, and passing on what I learned. That is probably what triggered my turn around; I’ve been sober for six years now.

Valby: That second act and settling into middle age is especially challenging if you’ve been an artist or a performer. Dancers have short careers. Afterward, what do you do with all that training and struggle for perfection and spotlight and adrenaline? How that lives in a body during a second act is so moving to me. How do you then cobble together an average, satisfying, enriching life when your whole life has been in rehearsals and tours? That’s hard, and it was hard for each of the five women.

Hearing them as grown women sharing their experiences of that time off stage is to me the most valuable part of the book because they’re sharing their experience of getting by in this world and looking for peace. Our whole selves are valuable, not just our performances. That’s a lesson I think we need to remind ourselves of, and especially ballerinas need to remind themselves of, because you’re raised in a tradition that values perfection. Well, who are you when you’re imperfect? Are you still valuable? Are you still lovable? Are you still worthy of attention? We cannot be perfect. We are not meant to be perfect. And so, who loves you when you are not perfect?