When Gayle McKinney-Griffith was an aspiring ballerina auditioning for Juilliard within the late Sixties, her pleasure was tempered by a frightening realization.
“Whenever you stroll right into a room and also you’re the one Black individual there,” she later stated, “you straight away develop this persona that’s protecting but additionally standing robust. You’re used to considering two issues without delay: ‘Sure, I’m the one Black individual right here,’ and ‘Sure, let’s do that.’”
That perspective not solely helped her acquire admittance to that elite arts establishment; it additionally carried her via a nine-year profession as a founding member of Dance Theater of Harlem, the groundbreaking New York troupe that supplied overdue alternatives and worldwide acclaim to Black ballet performers.
As was the case with many dancers with the corporate within the early years, Ms. McKinney-Griffith’s accomplishments light over time, and her dying on Oct. 11 was not extensively reported. She died of most cancers at 74 at her dwelling in Quaker Hill, Conn., her daughter, Khadija T. Griffith, stated.
Ms. McKinney-Griffith’s keep at Juilliard turned out to be temporary. She left the college in 1968 to affix Arthur Mitchell, the primary African American principal dancer at New York Metropolis Ballet and a world star, to affix the daring new troupe he was beginning together with his former teacher, the ballet grasp Karel Shook.
Ms. McKinney-Griffith served not solely as a principal dancer at Dance Theater of Harlem but additionally as the corporate’s first ballet mistress. In that place, now generally known as rehearsal director, she was Mr. Mitchell’s prime lieutenant, accountable for operating rehearsals, teaching dancers on choreography, serving to with casting and different duties.
Her Juilliard coaching proved invaluable.
“In these early days, Arthur Mitchell wanted actually well-trained dancers,” Virginia Johnson, a founding member of the corporate, stated in an interview. “And she or he was that dancer. She had the approach and line to step into George Balanchine’s ‘Concerto Barocco’ with no query.”
Ms. Johnson added: “Her dancing had a transcendent high quality. She was musical and meticulous the way in which classical ballet requires.”
Ms. McKinney-Griffith toured the nation and the world and carried out for numerous luminaries, together with Stevie Marvel, Mick Jagger and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mom.
However her legacy wouldn’t final — some extent made clear within the e book “The Swans of Harlem: 5 Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking Historical past,” by Karen Valby, which was printed final month.
“The Swans of Harlem” recounts the triumphs of Ms. McKinney-Griffith and her Dance Theater of Harlem colleagues Lydia Abarca-Mitchell, Sheila Rohan, Karlya Shelton-Benjamin and Marcia Sells. It additionally recounts their disappointments, together with being “robbed of laurels upon which they may now be resting,” as Danyel Smith wrote in a latest evaluation in The New York Instances, by being consigned to relative obscurity after their years onstage.
As Ms. Johnson put it, “We have been like celebrities, however when the corporate closed, it was as if Dance Theater of Harlem ceased to exist, even in historical past.” (Dance Theater of Harlem went on hiatus in 2004 due to monetary challenges and reopened in 2012.)
In 2015, when Misty Copeland turned the primary Black principal dancer at American Ballet Theater, the information media typically portrayed her as if she have been the primary star Black ballerina, Ms. Johnson stated. “Folks took that to coronary heart, as if there had been no Lydia Abarca, no Gail McKinney; as if all of the individuals who danced with us and Mitchell for 20 or 30 years had not existed.”
Gayle Dunkin McKinney was born on Aug. 26, 1949, in Harlem, the daughter of Harold McKinney, a draftsman, and Millicent (Herndon) McKinney, a supervisor of phone operators.
When Gayle was 5, she and the household moved to a Colonial home on a number of acres in Quaker Hill, in jap Connecticut north of New London, when her father took a job on the submarine manufacturing firm Electrical Boat.
She began taking ballet classes at Carnegie Corridor when she was 3, and when she was about 10 she was performing the “4 Swans” variation in “Swan Lake,” in keeping with Ms. Valby.
She furthered her coaching within the American Dance Pageant at Connecticut Faculty in New London. She was accepted at Juilliard after graduating from close by Waterford Excessive Faculty in 1967.
Regardless of the status of being admitted to the Manhattan college, all was not straightforward there. As Ms. Valby wrote, Juilliard initially steered Ms. McKinney-Griffith towards the trendy dance program regardless that she had a prolonged ballet résumé. Faculty officers informed her in non-public, she stated, that they believed it was the very best path for her, since she would by no means discover a spot with knowledgeable ballet firm due to her race.
Distraught, she started to marvel why she was even attending the college. Little marvel that when she heard that Mr. Mitchell was beginning an organization, she was thrilled to have an opportunity to affix.
She wangled an audition, and, after she demonstrated her pirouettes to Mr. Mitchell, he handed her a word that learn: “Go be taught this dance. We’re rehearsing the primary motion of ‘Tones’ tomorrow.” (“Tones” was a brand new ballet by the corporate.)
Ms. McKinney-Griffith remained with Dance Theater of Harlem till 1977, when she was employed by the choreographer Louis Johnson to teach the dancers — together with Diana Ross, Nipsey Russell and Michael Jackson — for the elaborately choreographed numbers in Sidney Lumet’s 1978 movie model of the Broadway hit “The Wiz,” an exuberant Black retelling of “The Wizard of Oz.”
“Such as you needed to educate Michael something,” she was quoted as saying in Ms. Valby’s e book. “He knew these steps yesterday! I felt so silly simply doing these little ‘Ease on down, ease on down’ strikes. How embarrassing!”
In 1979, she accepted an invite to carry out in a manufacturing of the musical “Present Boat” in Berlin. She remained in Berlin for the majority of three many years, educating dance in a number of German cities in addition to in Austria, Switzerland and Italy. Within the Nineteen Nineties, she joined the college of Indiana College South Bend. She taught there for 3 years and helped create a dance division.
Along with her daughter, Ms. McKinney-Griffith is survived by a son, Don Griffith II, and a grandson.
She continued to choreograph and dance via the Nineteen Nineties, and he or she by no means misplaced the fun of the opening moments earlier than an viewers. As she recalled in an interview with Ms. Valby, she would knock on the stage 3 times for luck earlier than every efficiency.
“It’s like there’s an vitality curtain,” she stated. “And you then break via. It’s so highly effective, as a result of that’s once you break out of your stress. No extra coaching. No extra stress. You present your reward.”
