Arthur Bell - 2021, Black History Month
23: For Black History Month, let’s attend to the most shadowy of the four men seen here partnering Tanaquil Le Clercq in a remarkable photograph by George Platt Lynes. This is Arthur Bell, who was, I believe, the first African American dancer to appear with New York City Ballet; he, in his early twenties, was a student at the School of American Ballet whom Frederick Ashton singled out to appear in the world premiere of his “Illuminations”, made for City Ballet in 1950. The complex supported adagio seen here - the section called “Being Beauteous” - obviously prefigures the complex but much shorter quintet in Balanchine’s “Rubies” (1967).
So Le Clercq, already a dancer of great importance though still aged only twenty, was being partnered by a dancer of colour as well as by three white men. (Ashton was showing some degree of racial enlightenment here, but he was also motivated by the life of the poet Rimbaud, the implicit protagonist of “Illuminations”; when Rimbaud spent years in Africa after forsaking poetry, he had a single black servant. But that was a private biographical point that Ashton used to make a much more important point about racial equality.)
Despite this special role, Bell was not taken into New York City Ballet. He had some other dance engagements, touring Europe, but in due course became a homeless person. When he spoke to people of his ballet past, it was assumed his wits had turned. Finally his story was brought to people l whom it made sense; at age seventy-one, he was reunited with his long-lost siblings and became the subject of a “New York Times” story in 1998. He died in 2005.
Until 2007, I only knew of Bell from the mention of him in David Vaughan’s definitive “Frederick Ashton and his Ballets” (1977). But when I met Jacques D’Amboise - the male star of Ashton’s second creation for City Ballet, “Picnic at Tintagel” (1952) - he spoke with fascination of the 1998 “New York Times” story; he had never forgotten Arthur Bell as one of the men at the School and in the City Ballet repertory at the start of his own career.
Thursday 4 February
The “Being Beauteous” adagio of Frederick Ashton’s “Illuminations”, New York City Ballet, 1952. Tanaquil Le Clercq is partnered by Shaun O’Brien, Roy Tobias (seated), Arthur Bell (shadowed), and Dick Beard.