Capitol Ballet Company and Charles Adams

Charles Adams was a member of the Capitol Ballet Company. With the death of Claire Haywood, Doris Jones contacted American Ballet Theatre’s first Black principal male dancer, Keith Lee (who was performing at the Kennedy Center of Performing Arts in DC) to be a guest teacher at the school.

Eventually, Jones asked Lee to revive the company and become its new artistic director. He accepted and gathered 15 dancers in two months. Some of these dancers included Charles Adams, Hinton Battle, and Sandra Fortune–Green.

He performed at the Lisner Auditorium with the company in November 1979. One review by the Washington Post said that “The company looked best in the two ballets by its assistant artistic director, Keith Lee. ‘Times Past,’ to music of Cole Porter, is a phantasmagoria of the kinds of people one might have met on the street 40 years or so ago. The choreography is funky-vulgar, and the company obviously enjoyed itself tremendously. Everyone was good. Guest David McNaughton (from the San Francisco Ballet) was a naughtly shoeshine boy, Charles Adams an oily ‘man on the Make.’”

Adams also performed at Howard University in November 1973 in “Taps for Old Times,” “Hinty,” “Three Black Cries,” and “Asha I.” In another performance in Washington D.C., “Piloting Capitol Ballet Clipper, Flight #4 8 74 ‘Around the World,’” performed in 1974, Adams performed as a “native” in the performances “Duvalier Airport, Port-au-Prince, Haiti,” “Montego Bay Airport, Jamaica,” and “Leonardo da Vinci Airport, Rome, Italy.”

Sources:
Capitol Ballet, Ngoma Center for Dance
Capitol Dancing, The Washington Post
Capitol Ballet Guild, Incorporated, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library

More About Charles Adams

Adams created a work called “Common Law,” which Carol Childs and L.D. Burris performed at the 1998 North Carolina Dance Festival. Adams is also featured in a film containing performances choreographed by Keith Lee, in which Adams performs “Hymn” alongside Gregory Hinton, Adrienne Armstrong, and General MacArthur Hambrick.

Sources:
DANCING DUO ELECTRIFIES ’96 N.C. DANCE FESTIVAL, News & Record
Keith Lee Video Archive, The New York Public Library

 

 

Alisha Naidu