Louis Johnson - Black History Month, 2021

24. For Black History Month, let’s commemorate Louis Johnson (1930-2020), dancer and choreographer. Like so many African American dancers, his training and career spanned more dance genres than one. He trained both with the School of American Ballet and with the internationally influential black choreographer Katherine Dunham.

While at “the School” (as it used to be known; the acronym “S.A.B.” became common much later), Johnson created a role in New York City Ballet repertory in the world premiere of Jerome Robbins’s “Ballade” (1952, Debussy), in a cast including Nora Kaye, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Janet Reed, and Robert Barnett. This almost certainly makes Johnson - after Arthur Bell (see 23 in this series) - the second African American dancer to appear with New York City Ballet, and among prestigious colleagues. What’s more, Robbins - widely known as passionately anti-racialist (to use the term of the day) - began choreography for his “Afternoon of a Faun” (1953) with Johnson and Le Clercq; but for one rehearsal alone, since the male role required a company member rather than a guest from the school, and City Ballet would not admit Johnson into its ranks.

Fortunately for Johnson, his stylistic diversity meant that, where one door closed, another opened. He had already appeared on Broadway in a 1952 revival of “Four Saints in Three Acts” and in “My Darling Aida” (a 1952 adaptation of Verdi‘s opera); now he went on to dance on Broadway in the shows “House of Flowers” (1954, with Carmen de Lavallade - according to Alvin Ailey, George Balanchine, thought insufficiently commercial in style, was replaced as its choreographer by Herbert Ross), “Damn Yankees” (1955, with Bob Fosse choreography), and “Hallelujah Baby” (1967), among others.

He also became a Broadway choreographer and formed his own company, Louis Johnson Dance Theatre, which appeared in the 1975 revival of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha”. He first choreographed, in 1953, the work “Lament”, for the New York Ballet Club; in 1985, he revived it for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. In 1970, his dances for “Purlie” earned him a Tony nomination. In 1972, he choreographed one of the signature hits of the young Dance Theatre of Harlem, “Forces of Rhythm”; in 1975, he choreographed the dances for John Dexter’s major revival of the Metropolitan Opera production of “La Gioconda” (the ballet starred Allegra Kent) and in 1976 for Dexter’s new Met production of “Aida”. And in 1980 he made the dances for the film of “The Wiz”. Talk about diversity....

I remember seeing him in 2018 in his late eighties at the Columbia University opening of the exhibition of his old colleague Arthur Mitchell’s career. (They and de Lavallade” had all been in the 1954 “House of Flowers”.) He was in a wheelchair then, but I had no idea that he would die within two years, any more than Mitchell would die later that same year. I love this photograph of him in arabesque penchée, probably from his School of American Ballet period.

Friday 5 February

Louis Johnson, probably while at School of American Ballet