By Yaël Tamar Lewin, Janet Collins
Winner of the The Marfield Prize / nationwide Award for humanities Writing (2011)
Dancer Janet Collins, born in New Orleans in 1917 and raised in la, soared excessive over the colour line because the first African-American prima ballerina on the Metropolitan Opera. Night’s Dancer chronicles the lifetime of this impressive and elusive girl, who grew to become a different live performance dance soloist in addition to a black trailblazer within the white global of classical ballet. in the course of her occupation, Collins persevered an period during which racial bias prevailed, and thus avoided her from showing within the South. still, her remarkable performances reworked the way in which black dancers have been seen in ballet. The e-book starts off with an unfinished memoir written through Collins within which she provides a charming account of her youth and younger grownup years, together with her rejection via the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Dance student Yaël Tamar Lewin then choices up the thread of Collins’s tale. Drawing on vast learn and interviews with Collins and her kinfolk, buddies, and associates to discover Collins’s improvement as a dancer, choreographer, and painter, Lewin supplies us a profoundly relocating portrait of an artist of indomitable spirit.
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Extra info for Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins
Example text
Legakes—color and design. Anatomy—I have forgotten his name—he taught us anatomy with a geometrical technique—more how muscles influenced the surface than their actual structure and attachments underneath the skin. I think Mr. Henninger was not in favor of this method and, frankly, neither was I. He never said this directly, but I recall one day he stated he was not in agreement with the way artists learned anatomy today. Exceedingly super28 | act one Sketch by Collins based on Michelangelo’s work.
She opened to me another realm to explore and discover! Mrs. Lamb, my algebra teacher, failed me! But not before she told me she was going to do it. She asked me to remain after class—she wanted to speak with me. She told me that she could pass me with a C, but that she knew I was capable of getting an A, so she said that she was going to fail me and make me come to summer school. How I hated her! But in my sneaky little heart, I knew she was right. I saw no use for algebra, and simply did not want to put forth the effort to learn it.
Sometimes the students would sit on the edge of this charming centerpiece and chat between classes. The very back, or curve, of the horseshoe were the oil painting classes. I remember this very vividly because I recall that I always used to visit these rooms when the students had left. I could observe their work. The teacher was a fine-looking man with a very dignified face and graying black hair. He and my drawing logic teacher, Edward Kaminsky, were friends and used to talk together in Russian or Polish.