Mary Hinkson: Black History Month in Dance, 2021

78, 79, 80. How many dancers created roles for Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Donald McKayle, John Butler, and Glen Tetley, also sustaining longterm careers as members of the Martha Graham Dance Company and Juilliard School dance faculty, while also being African American and a woman? Mary Hinkson (1930-2014) was the one and only person to qualify in all these respects.

While Graham was still dancing, Hinkson both created new, custom-made roles for Graham (“Canticle for Innocent Comedians”, 1953; “Circe”, 1963), and inherited some of Graham’s own roles (notably Deaths and Entrances”, 1943; and the title role of “Clytemnestra”, 1958 - photo 79). Photograph 78 shows her in another of her exemplary roles, the woman in white in Graham’s Diversion of Angels”.

Many of the other black dancers who have made it with previously white troupes have been the exceptions who proved the rule: pioneers but isolated. Kudos to Graham, who took Hinkson and Matt Turney, also African American, into her ranks at the same time in 1951 - Turney also remaining off many years in the company. Around the same time, Hinkson joined the Juilliard dance faculty at a glorious time when it included Alfredo Corvino, Margaret Craske, Louis Horst, Doris Humphrey, José Limón, and Antony Tudor.

For Balanchine, she created a role beside Arthur Mitchell in “The Figure in the Carpet” (1962 - photograph 80). She was by no means the first black woman to dance for him (as if claimed in some of her obituaries), but certainly she was the first African American woman to dance with New York City Ballet. In the 1950s, she danced at the same time for the Graham company and the dance company of New York City Opera, for which she created a series of roles for John Butler, at least one of which was televised. In McKayle’s “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder” (1959, a signature McKayle work recently revived and presented as part of Paul Taylor American Modern Dance), she created a role beside McKayle himself.

She created other roles for other choreographers too, but it’s worth noting that she wasn’t all career: she sustained a successful marriage, and had a daughter and two grandchildren when she died. She spoke a number of times about being descended from slaves. Of race, she remarked to Kate Law “It is an area of enormous sensitivity in this country. You know. Oh God, the things I listen to on public radio, I can’t believe it. But, you know, the part that’s unpleasant about that is: why do you have to transcend? What’s so bad about it, what’s so bad about your race that you would have to transcend it, right?” I wish I’d seen her dance; I wish I’d met her.

Tuesday 16 February

Mary Hinkson in Martha Graham’s “Diversion of Angels”

Mary Hinkson in Martha Graham’s “Clytemnestra”

Mary Hinkson with Arthur Mitchell in George Balanchine’s “Figure in the Carpet”, New York City Ballet