Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our databases. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale In Context: Biography Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom.

Janet Collins: a spirit that knows no bounds

Author: Yael Lewin Date: Feb. 1997 From: Dance Magazine(Vol. 71, Issue 2) Publisher: Dance Magazine, Inc. Document Type: Biography Length: 2,695 words Content Level: (Level 4)

About this Person Born: March 02, 1917? in New Orleans, Louisiana, Died: May 28, 2003 in Fort Worth, Texas, United States Nationality: American Occupation: dancer Other Names: Collins, Janet Faye Full Text: The African American ballerina who broke a color barrier at the has also lived, a full life out of the spotlight.

Janet Collins occupies a special place in dance history as the Metropolitan Opera's first African American prima ballerina. Her celebrated achievement, however, was only a part of a rich and varied career. Janet Fay Collins was born in New Orleans on March 2, 1917. Her family moved to in 1921, where at the age of ten she enrolled for her first dance classes at the Catholic Community Center. Unable to afford the lessons, her mother agreed to sew costumes for the center's student recitals in exchange.

Because Collins was also a talented artist, her family hoped that she would pursue painting as a career rather than dance, which, at the time, offered very limited opportunities to blacks. She did become an art major at Los Angeles City College, later transferring to the Los Angeles Art Center School when she received a scholarship. But she continued to study dance with, among others, Adolph Bolm, , and Mia Slavenska.

Despite Collins's strong classical training, she received little encouragement in the world of professional ballet. When the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo performed in Los Angeles as part of its American tour, Collins auditioned for Leonide Massine, then director of the company. Massine told her he greatly admired her dancing, but he could accept her for the corps only if she painted her face white.

Popular culture was more hospitable. During her high school years, Collins had performed as an adagio dancer in vaudeville bookings. In 1940 she became the principal dancer for the Los Angeles musical theater productions of Run Little Chillun and The Mikado in Swing. Columbia Studios also hired her to perform in The Thrill of Brazil, a film choreographed by Jack Cole, that featured her in the "Rendezvous in Rio" macumba. Blacks were also accepted in ; Collins performed with the companies of Lester Horton and . She and her partner, Talley Beatty, still had to sneak into the dance studios very early in the morning to rehearse, however, because blacks were not permitted to use the space.

In 1945 Collins received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship of $1,800 that enabled her to study at the San Francisco School of Ballet and to begin working on her own choreography. Fascinated by liturgical dance, she also studied in Oregon with composer Ernest Bloch, an authority on Hebrew music. A diverse repertory evolved, including several works that reflected her French as well as her black heritage. Some were created to spirituals; others were based on life in New Orleans. One unusual dance, Blackamoor, set to music by J. S. Bach, was about life at the court of Louis XIV as seen through the eyes of a little black page.

Collins's first concert, a single evening on November 3, 1948, at the Las Palmas Theater in Los Angeles, left critics hailing her as a unique performer. "Seldom indeed is anyone able to convey meaning and mood as does Miss Collins," said the Los Angeles Daily News, "for not only is her pantomime telling, her grace matchless, but she has the rare talent, even in her almost stylized numbers, of reaching out to her audience and making them share emotions that her characters are portraying." She was also praised for her striking costumes, all of which she had designed. This concert and several subsequent appearances were artistic but not financial triumphs; Collins paid for her train ticket to the East Coast mostly through her portrait painting.

When she arrived in in 1949 she had only two hundred dollars to live on. Quickly she arranged an audition for a concert the 92nd Street YMHA was presenting as a showcase for young dance artists. "You can imagine how hard-boiled a bunch of New York dance teachers are," said Muriel Stuart, a member of the audition committee. "Janet did a dance to a Mozart rondo. When she finished, there was applause. I mean spontaneous applause. I mean we clapped, we shouted, we stamped our feet."

The concert took place on February 20, 1949, and the critics were equally stunned, including Walter Terry, who wrote in the Herald Tribune that "it took no more (and probably less) than eight measures of movement in the opening dance to establish her claim to dance distinction . . . She could, and probably would stop a Broadway show in its tracks as easily as she could and will cause a concert-going audience to shout for encores." After another shared concert at the YMHA on March 19 and one of her own on April 2, Collins was named in the May 1949 Dance Magazine "The Most Outstanding Debutante of the Season."

Terry's predictions came true. Hanya Holm, impressed by Collins's performances, cast her in 's mythological spoof, Out of This World, that she was choreographing for Broadway. ( was the original director, but veteran George Abbott eventually replaced her.) Collins played the minor role of Night, whose function was to create an atmosphere in which Jupiter could seduce a mortal woman. After the show opened on December 21, 1950, the critics again could not praise her enough; often she earned more space in the reviews than the stars Charlotte Greenwood, William Eythe, and David Burns. Arthur Pollack wrote poetically in the Compass that "Janet Collins dances with something of the speed of light, seeming to touch the floor only occasionally with affectionate feet, caressing it as if she loved it and, loving, wanted to calm any fears it might have that in her flight she would leave it and never come back." The Savannah Evening Press added: "It is the completely captivating Janet Collins that gives the show a wallop. Only she is truly out of this world."

Still more recognition was showered upon Collins in 1950 when she was named "Young Woman of the Year" and given a Merit Award, courtesy of Mademoiselle magazine. Television and radio appearances followed. Nineteen-fifty was also marked by recognition from the black community: The Committee for the Negro in the Arts lauded Collins "for outstanding contributions as an artist to the cultural life of the United States and to the struggles of the Negro people and their artists for full equality and freedom." Finally, she won the Donaldson Award for the best dancer on Broadway in 1951.

That same year, Zachary Solov, the new ballet master of the Metropolitan Opera, saw Collins in Out of This World. "She walked across the stage," he recalls, "pulling a chiffon curtain, and it was electric. The body just spoke." Solov knew instantly that she was perfect for the new production of Aida he was about to choreograph. He immediately went to Rudolf Bing, the Met's general manager, and told him that he wanted to hire that she was black. "Is she good?" Bing asked. "She's wonderful!" exclaimed Solov. "Hire her," Bing decreed. Inspired by her movement, Solov was able to prepare the choreography in only a few rehearsals. He featured her as an Ethiopian slave in the spectacular second act Triumphal Scene, where she was partnered by two Watusi warriors (actually white men in body tights and blackface). After the premiere on November 13, which included thirteen black singers in the chorus as Ethiopian captives, P. W. Manchester in Dance News praised "the supple ferocity of the lithe and feline Janet Collins," observing that "the ballet rightly becomes the peak of the scene instead of, as usually happens, the somewhat embarrassing anticlimax." In one dramatic moment, Collins raised herself high on the shoulder of one of the chorus men, and then fell slowly into the arms of fifteen others.

The Aida role was restaged in later years for her first cousin, , who remembers the thrill of using Collins's dressing room as "one of those experiences you'll never forget." It was a dressing room on the first floor that the old Met assigned to stars, instead of on the second floor where the rest of the dancers were placed. Collins occupied it throughout her tenure at the Met, remaining Solov's muse for three new productions. She appeared in Carmen (1952) as a gypsy; in La Gioconda (1952) as the Queen of the Night in the Dance of the Hours, notably the only time she performed at the Met on pointe; and in Samson et Dalila (1953), leading what Terry called a "handsome, sensible, and exciting opera bacchanale." She generated excitement in every part, but it was in Aida that Collins firmly established herself as a dancing sensation.

Historic as her debut was, there had been other performances for which the Met had engaged blacks in specialty roles. Dancer Helmsley Winfield, for example, had appeared in Louis Gruenberg's The Emperor Jones, based on Eugene O'Neill's play, in the 1932-33 season. Collins, however, as the Met's first full-time black company member, is regarded as the pioneer who broke the color line. Bing was asked in 1966 what he considered his greatest accomplishment at the Met. He replied, "One should not take bows for doing what is decent and right, but in all honesty I have to say I consider having broken the color barrier one of my most important contributions. I broke it twice: with dancer Janet Collins in 1952, and singer Marian Anderson in 1955."

Former Met dancer Alfredo Corvino explained that the hiring of Collins was in keeping with the new management: "In those days, the company was very good, very friendly. Mr. Bing had a lot of new ideas for the opera. A revolution in those days. Kind of a terror." Outside of New York City, however, Collins was not accepted as easily. When the company toured Memphis and Atlanta, Collins's parts had to be danced by understudies. Angered, Bing and Solov threatened not to return unless blacks were permitted in the theater and Collins allowed a room in any hotel. There was also prejudice even in Canada. Once in Toronto, when Collins and her partner, Loren Hightower, went out to eat after a performance o Carmen, they were denied service at a crowded restaurant; the man at the door took one look at them and said that the place was closed. According to Hightower, Collins "behaved like a queen": she told the man that it was pity because she heard so many compliments on the restaurant, and she asked if he knew whether there was another one open nearby.

In 1954 Collins changed the direction of her life. She resigned from the Met, exhausted from its cross country tours and from her tours as a solo performer for Columbia Artists Management, performing her own choreography. She returned to teaching--from 1949 to 1952, she had taught modern dance at the School of American Ballet--and she began volunteer charity work. Her greatest challenge as an educator came in 1957 at St. Joseph's School for the Deaf in the Bronx, where dance was a means of rehabilitation. Collins devised her own teaching method to adapt dance to the children's needs instead of molding the children to fit the needs of dance. In an article she wrote on the experience, she said that "the dance is a mute and living art form." Therefore, she claimed, it is perfectly suited for deaf children. She marveled at the natural ability of the children for pantomime, noting that people with the gift of speech are often immobile.

Eventually teaching became entwined with her increasing commitment to Roman Catholicism. She joined the faculty of Marymount Manhattan College in 1958 and in 1959 accepted a concurrent position at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart at Purchase, New York. Over the years, she restricted her own performances to academic and charity events but continued to choreograph for her students on liturgical themes. Marymount was the site of the 1965 premiere of Genesis, a piece that Collins had been working on since 1954, when she first commissioned its music from Heitor Villa-Lobos. Depicting the evolvement of primordial man and his eventual awareness of the power of God, Genesis was Collins's quintessential dance, the culmination of her deep-rooted religious feelings.

She returned to opera one more time to choreograph Nabucco for the San Francisco Opera in 1970. By then, Collins had relocated to California and continued to teach and choreograph at, among other places, Scripps College and the Mafundi Institute. Her last work to premiere in New York City was Canticle of the Elements, which she set on the Alvin Ailey Dance Company in 1974. On the same program, Judith Jamison danced Collins's Spirituals (1947), probably the piece most closely identified with Collins, who performed it consistently throughout her career. Doris Hering in these pages in 1949 captured the essence of the choreography and her performance: "The movement radiated from a central axis onstage and kept returning to it. The whole body was constantly, ripplingly, in motion, and yet there was a still-soured calm about the whole conception."

Hightower associates Spirituals with Collins's gift of making a mental impression visible: "She told me that she was sunk in mud--and that's exactly what she looked like. . . A remarkable concept and a remarkable visual image." He adds that, as her partner at the Met, he felt that she was in an artistic world all her own and he was not quite in the same sphere as she. "You could show Janet a movement, and immediately it became something that nobody else could do. But she did not alter it," he explains. "It was as if Janet looked inward, and a strange power that she had seemed to come from there . . . it was magic, hypnotic. It was totally intuitive, and when anything is that unadornedly genuine, it's absolutely compelling."

He remembers her saying that a dancer's life is the life of a nun. Certainly, one perception of Collins throughout her career is of a private and disciplined person. And yet, critics and colleagues alike have commented on her sparkling eyes and frequent laugh. Carla de Sola, who had worked with Collins at Marymount and subsequently founded Omega Liturgical Dance Company, perhaps described her better than anyone else: "a valiant and sensitive spirit that probably felt exhausted but did nevertheless make a mark."

Collins's professional archives, which she has donated to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, chronicle both her artistry and her elusiveness; all documentation ceases upon reaching 1974. What had she been doing since then? That question was answered on January 28, 1995, when Collins appeared in as the keynote speaker at the Eighth International Conference of Blacks in Dance.

She revealed that for the last twenty-one years she had devoted herself exclusively to painting religious subjects. In Seattle, where she now resides, her living room is her studio. Rembrandt and Michelangelo have inspired her, she notes, but dance remains an influence. The fanciful figures in her costume designs are active--some are jaunty, sad, ecstatic--but all could have been created only by an artist especially attuned to the nuance of a body in motion. Even the New Testament subjects of her current project can, Collins insists, move.

The unusually vibrant presence one sees in old photographs of Collins can still astonish as she approaches her eightieth birthday. It flashed into life at the Philadelphia conference, during the session, "Honing Your Craft--Transition from Student to Artist," that was moderated by de Lavallade. The guest of honor startled everyone by suddenly rising from her chair and pointing at us in the audience and proclaiming that we will all be the next Martha Grahams and Lester Hortons.

I could only think that I would rather be the next Janet Collins.

Yael Lewin is a freelance choreographer, dancer, and writer in New York City.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1997 Dance Magazine, Inc. http://www.dancemagazine.com/ Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Lewin, Yael. "Janet Collins: a spirit that knows no bounds." Dance Magazine, vol. 71, no. 2, Feb. 1997, p. 66+. Gale In Context: Biography, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19060974/BIC?u=scschools&sid=BIC&xid=62446e23. Accessed 7 Jan. 2021. Gale Document Number: GALE|A19060974