' Joffrey Ballet '
We want to be able to grow by Hannah Ross
Linda Swayze is the director of community engagement and a dance instructor at the Joffrey Ballet. “I've always enjoyed dancing. And I can't even remember the time when I saw ballet first. But I knew that I fell in love with ballet.” For a time, Swayze danced at a school on the South Side. When her teacher knew she had taken her as far as she could, she recommended the Stone-Camryn studio downtown, which was known for turning out professional dancers. “But little Black girls didn't do ballet. They might have danced, but they didn't do ballet.” So Swayze straddled two worlds. “Adjusting to the different cultural experiences was challenging because there weren’t a lot of Blacks in my classes. In fact, I was the only Black for a long time. I would be going to this white institution five days a week after school and loving it, but then going to an all-Black neighborhood after my classes, I got ribbed, very much so. My classmates and my friends, they couldn't understand. ‘Why are you taking these ballet classes? Why did you go down there?’ And so trying to navigate both of those worlds was quite interesting, especially being an adolescent and really not having anyone to mentor me. Stone-Camryn mentored me as far as my talent and technique was concerned. But the emotional side of it, I really didn't have anybody to mentor me in that way. So I was trying to find my way.” As Swayze continued her education at Stone-Camryn and her passion for dance grew, she started looking to the future for a career in dance. “Walter Camryn and Bentley Stone knew that, although I didn't know at that time, they knew that there was not really going to be a place for me in a white ballet company.” However, Camryn and Stone had a connection with Dance Theater of Harlem co-founder Arthur Mitchell who, at the time, was noted for innovating the dyeing of tights to match dancers’ skin tones. “So here I go, this little Black girl going with a letter from Walter Cameron and Bentley Stone to go have an audition and I was just awestruck at the time, because I never really saw myself in a company until that point. And then that evening, I had tickets to go see them perform and that solidified it for me. When I sat in that seat at the Auditorium Theater, and I saw Dance Theater of Harlem do “Four Temperaments”—that was the opening ballet that they did—and immediately I knew that that was what I wanted to do.” Swayze had always
worn pink tights, but Dance Theater of Harlem showed her something new. “I think that was one of the things that subconsciously seeing that just kind of pivoted for me that the brown tights in the brown pointe shoes made sense.” Swayze danced with Dance Theater of Harlem for 15 years, traveling to London, Spain, Brazil, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Italy, France. She participated in the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics. “At Dance Theatre of Harlem, it's 52 weeks in the season, and we had 45 weeks of guaranteed work. So I didn't know at the time, but we were making history.” Of course, things rarely always go exactly as planned during a performance. And Swayze’s time with Dance Theater of Harlem was no different. They were performing George Balanchine’s “Allegro Brillante,” which Balanchine described as all of classical ballet boiled down to 13 minutes. A dancer was injured and Swayze went in as her understudy – except that the injured dancer was on the other side of the stage, doing the opposite set of move-
