Observations on ballet

Now aged 70, Raven Wilkinson has performed with the New York Metropolitan Opera as a "silent actor" for the past 30 years. She is currently appearing in La Bohème, Carmen and Don Giovanni. Despite occasional mentions in inspirational lists of great African Americans, Wilkinson's life has been lived out in relative obscurity - until now. The rediscovery of her stage career in the 1950s as America's first black ballerina was the catalyst for the award-winning documentary Ballets Russes, in UK cinemas from 21 April.

Wilkinson was the first ex-dancer the directors interviewed, and the one who made them realise that they had a project. The documentary is that rare thing: a film about a specialist subject which is able to draw a broad audience by wringing out every possible human detail, from the comic to the tragic. The film focuses on the lives of the dancers of the Ballets Russes over 60 years, from Diaghilev's early company in Paris to the rival dance companies that toured America during and after the Second World War.

Wilkinson's story is the film's most striking cameo. In 1954 she became the first African-American woman to be hired as a permanent dancer by a leading American ballet troupe, at a time when many were still scandalised by the idea of black dancers. Six years later, after an on-stage encounter with the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, she resigned (even though she is so light-skinned that the Klansmen failed to spot the "nigger" they were looking for).

"This was before the civil rights marches of the 1960s, a year after schools had been desegregated. The South was up in arms, as it felt segregation was its way of life," she says. The company toured annually from September to June, spending several months all over the South. For two years Wilkinson passed unnoticed, but then the threats began. "In one hotel they told me they would be bombed because of me. The company would tell me, 'Just pretend to be Spanish.' But I felt that was denying myself. So if I was asked, 'Are you a negro?' I would say yes. The company went to my parents and told them I shouldn't be broadcasting this fact."

Despite this, she has nothing but admiration for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo for hiring her when no one else would (the next year, the dance legend Dame Alicia Markova looked "as far the other way as possible" at an audition).

Shortly after the Klan incident, she was told she would never dance a lead. "I finally realised that they were never going to have a black white swan," she laughs. "Although I don't understand

why they couldn't have a black black swan." She eventually found her place as a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet, and later turned to acting on the opera stage.

Wilkinson still teaches dance occasionally, but finds it hard to know what to say to frican-American ballet hopefuls. "Things have come forward - now there are black men dancing - but so few women. Even a few years ago I was told I had the 'wrong racial characteristics' for a particular production, and I have performed in every opera for 30 years. I thought, 'What is this, Nazi Germany?' I told them I need to be considered as an individual and an artist - not a race. I hate to say it, but those ways of thinking are still out there."

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