{"id":1241,"date":"2017-04-07T18:47:08","date_gmt":"2017-04-07T18:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mobballet.org\/?p=1241"},"modified":"2025-04-21T07:16:30","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T07:16:30","slug":"huffington-post-black-voices-features-mobballet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/2017\/04\/07\/huffington-post-black-voices-features-mobballet\/","title":{"rendered":"Huffington Post Black Voices Features MoBBallet"},"content":{"rendered":"
BLACK VOICES <\/a><\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n
02\/27\/2017 06:18 pm ET<\/span> | Updated<\/strong> Feb 28, 2017 <\/span><\/div>\n
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This Digital Platform Is Highlighting The Forgotten History Of Black Ballet<\/h1>\n

MoBBallet wants to show that black ballet artists are not unicorns.<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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By Taryn Finley<\/span> <\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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Many people may see the rise of black dancers like Misty Copeland, Olivia Boisson and Jasmine Perry as a new phenomenon.\u00a0That couldn\u2019t be further from the truth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Dance instructor Theresa Ruth Howard saw a void in available information about the black trailblazers of ballet.\u00a0<\/strong>So she created Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet<\/a> (MoBBallet), a platform that highlights the work of black dancers past and present.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe contributions and achievements of black ballet dancers have always been poorly documented and preserved, to begin with, having never enjoyed equity of importance or reporting,\u201d Howard told The Huffington Post via email, noting that there has recently been \u201can erasure of the actual history and legacy of black ballet dancers.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThere was something in the present-day narrative that was myopic, a single story that was not reflective of the fact that there have been [black]\u00a0<\/strong>ballet dancers in America for decades,\u201d she continued.\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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MoBBallet includes an interactive timeline\u00a0<\/strong>tracing significant events in the history of black ballet starting at 1919.\u00a0<\/strong>In addition, Howard is using a $50,000 Knight Foundation grant to create an online exhibition of some of Philadelphia\u2019s first black ballerinas, including Joan Myers Brown, Delores Browne and Judith Jamison.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Philadelphia native said the fact that these and other dancers (such as\u00a0<\/strong>Christina Johnson, Lowell Smith and Donald Williams) and primarily black institutions that fostered their careers (e.g.\u00a0the Dance Theatre of Harlem) go overlooked is \u201cinsulting\u201d and \u201cmakes the cannon itself incomplete.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cThere is \u2018American history\u2019 and then there is \u2018black history\u2019 when in truth it is one and the same,\u201d Howard told HuffPost. \u201cWhen you look at the contributions of black ballet dancers … in the macro … it explains a great deal about why there are so \u2018few\u2019 black ballet dancers and … will evoke a greater amount of respect, understanding and appreciation for what has been accomplished in the face of things like the legalized oppression, segregation and systematic exclusion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Howard, who\u2019s an alumna of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, said that she hopes MoBBallet can help to create the next generation of black ballet dancers while ensuring their contributions don\u2019t get erased.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I wanted to show that black ballet dancers are not unicorns, there is not just ONE, there are hundreds. I wanted to make the invisible visible.<\/span> Theresa Howard, curator of MoBBallet<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Continue after the JUMP<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BLACK VOICES 02\/27\/2017 06:18 pm ET | Updated Feb 28, 2017 This Digital Platform Is Highlighting The Forgotten History Of Black Ballet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1243,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[38,177,67,68,99,176,31,50],"class_list":["post-1241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-e-zine","tag-black-ballerina","tag-black-voices","tag-blacks-in-ballet","tag-dance-theatre-of-harlem","tag-diversity-in-ballet","tag-huffing-ton-post","tag-mobballet","tag-theresa-ruth-howard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/huffington-post-logo-840x340.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1244,"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1241\/revisions\/1244"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mobballet.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}