Night's Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins BY Yaël Tamar Lewin AND Janet Collins (Wesleyan University Press, 2011) From the Publisher: “Night’s Dancer chronicles the life of this extraordinary and elusive woman, who became a unique concert dance soloist as well as a black trailblazer in the white world of classical ballet. During her career, Collins endured an era in which racial bias prevailed, and subsequently prevented her from appearing in the South. Nonetheless, her brilliant performances transformed the way black dancers were viewed in ballet. The book begins with an unfinished memoir written by Collins in which she gives a captivating account of her childhood and young adult years, including her rejection by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Dance scholar Yaël Tamar Lewin then picks up the thread of Collins’ story. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with Collins and her family, friends, and colleagues to explore Collins’ development as a dancer, choreographer, and painter, Lewin gives us a profoundly moving portrait of an artist of indomitable spirit.”

Born in New Orleans in 1917 to a lively, educated Creole African-American family, Janet Collins went on to become, in 1951, the first black artist to break the color line for full-time employment at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet — and broke it in a grand way, appearing as the company’s new prima ballerina. Universally acclaimed for her soulful, seemingly effortless dance, Collins was also a talented visual artist. But her life was far from charmed. She led a wave of such artists, including Raven Wilkinson (Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo) and Arthur Mitchell (New York City Ballet), and brushed against many notable figures of twentieth-century dance and theater — Doris Humphreys, Mia Slavenska, Maya Deren, Judith Jamison, Lester Horton, Katherine Dunham, Agnes de Mille, Hanya Holm, George Balanchine, Cole Porter, Alvin Ailey, and others. Universally acclaimed for her soulful, seemingly effortless dance, Collins was also a talented visual artist. But her life was far from charmed. Aside from the daily discrimination of pre-Civil Rights America (which Collins always downplayed, even though she lost countless opportunities because of it), she suffered from deep depressions, during one of which, in 1940, she was sterilized while hospitalized, in accordance with California’s eugenic laws. Her peak was brilliant but brief. Later in life she taught dance and sought religion; she died in 2003. But what can we really feel or know from these facts? Luckily, we have more than that: Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins, by Yaël Tamar Lewin, begins with Collins’ own unfinished memoir, a fascinating document of the dancing mind. Here we have the young Collins, already a dancer, reacting to the world around her: The palm trees — I remember these two towering palm trees in our front yard! They were so tall — I used to love watching their tops swaying in the wind… I will never forget opening my arms and dancing to their melody — I wanted to be swept by the wind like they were — to dance to the music of the wind! — p. 7 Her romantic responsiveness is married to a practical interest in how movement works. Here she is observing her father, a tailor, sewing: He would snap the needle through the cloth with the side of the finger — it made sense to me as I used to watch him sew for it gave the finger more leverage. — pp. 9-10 Her desire to understand the body led her, while she was an art student, to ask for permission to observe dissections at the University of Southern California, which she does at first with pleasure and interest: All of the bodies were covered with a white sheet. The doctor went to one body —and pulled back the sheet to the waist. It was a male torso with the head completely covered like a mummy. It was only a body — not a person to me… Across the lower part of the pectoral muscles (breastbone) a vertical line was cut. It formed a cross on the torso and, at the interception of the cross, all four points were folded back away from each other, exposing the beautiful muscular structure underneath… I saw tendons — and blood vessels — and even nerves. I was amazed — I thought nerves were simply mysterious electrical currents, which ran through the body unseen! — p. 30

Collins’ study of anatomy leads to one of the most memorable incidents in the unfinished memoir. She goes to the dissection hall and pulls back the sheet on a cadaver and finds something unexpected:

Although Collins wants to leave, she forces herself to sit still and draw the dead man for the usual hour. Then she goes out and never returns to the dissection hall. This incident shows a great deal about Janet Collins, her persistence and sensitivity, but also about how a dance artist is made. Her need to experience, her visceral reactions, and crucially, her observation of her own reaction — all this powerfully combats the idea that dance is merely athletic.

Collins places deeply embodied experience on the inside of the dance in her discussion of her own dance career:

Her solo flight may be the primary reason she is so little-known today. Her affiliation with the Metropolitan Ballet was short, and she built no school or technique, left behind no students; her few choreographic works were mostly made on and for her own body. But her explanation of her solo flight, her sensual intelligence and moving insight, all this will make her matter far more than biographical data can.

The best parts of Lewin’s book do not so much evoke Collins anew as trace the shape of her absence…. When Lewin claims, in her epilogue, that ‘a person’s life has been saved,’ Collins is not saved, but profoundly lost, as all dance artists are in time.

The best parts of Lewin’s book do not so much evoke Collins anew as trace the shape of her absence. When Glen Tetley describes Collins’ dancing — “She was fleet, she was quicksilver, she was magical, she was like an extraordinary startled animal” (p. 158) — I can’t see her, but I can, briefly, imagine her effect. The rest of the book, though, buries Collins in data — exhaustive quotations from less-than-skilled reviewers, lists of fellow performers, disquisitions on this or that apparently related topic, scholarly and tentative claims for Collins’ importance that seem rather to undermine than to exalt her. When Lewin claims, in her epilogue, that “a person’s life has been saved” (p. 297), Collins is not saved, but profoundly lost, as all dance artists are in time.

In one way, the dancer is preserved: this volume’s illustrations allow readers to see Collins as she might have looked in motion. What Collins says about Pavlova applies equally to herself: “I have never seen a photograph taken of Anna Pavlova that is ‘dead’ — she always looks alive, like she is captured in a moment of movement” (p. 8). One photo shows Collins in a sky-high leap, her back arched in what must have been an explosive moment, yet every limb is as perfectly placed as if she were sitting on the ground in front of a mirror, even her head, even her radiant eyes. She must have been something to see.

It is notable that the book’s cover photo, Collins in a tutu, standing sur les pointes, is still a startling image. Ballet’s racism hides under “aesthetic considerations” — the violation of a black swan in a line of white ones — or perhaps it is the other way around, aesthetic considerations taken for granted and solidifying over time into racism. The picture of the corps de ballet has changed: Middle-eastern, Asian, and biracial dancers have broken up the swan-white ranks. Yet the line Collins so spectacularly breached still exists. If Collins were young today, would her path through dance be any easier?