4 New Books on Pioneers of American Performing Arts

The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History

Vanity Fair contributor Valby (Welcome to Utopia) paints a vibrant portrait of the “first permanent Black professional ballet company” in the U.S and the five trailblazing dancers who put it on the map. Originated in 1968 by George Balanchine protégé Arthur Mitchell, the Dance Theatre of Harlem featured “founding” ballerinas Lydia Abarca, Mitchell’s “prized” dancer who later landed on the covers of Essence and Dance magazines; Sheila Rohan, who performed while running a household and raising three children; Juillard-trained Gayle McKinney-Grffith, who served as the company’s “ballet mistress” and later taught choreography for the 1978 film The Wiz; Marcia Sells, who joined the company at just 16; and Karlya Shelton, who stepped in with little notice to star in the 1978 production of Serenade. The company shattered artistic boundaries even as it strained under financial pressures, the whims of the brilliant yet tyrannical Mitchell, and an old guard media that favored more renowned—and more white—troupes. Valby meticulously untangles the prejudices woven into the dance world and analyzes the politics of establishing a Black ballet company amid a period of backlash to the civil rights movement (“Let the gorgeous lines of his dancers’ bodies serve as fists in the air,” she writes of Mitchell’s mission). In the process, Valby successfully counters the perception that Misty Copeland was the “first” Black American ballerina. The result is a captivating corrective to an often-whitewashed history. Agent: Barbara Jones, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (Apr.)

The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America

Biographer Tye (Bobby Kennedy) presents a mesmerizing group portrait of American jazz greats Duke Ellington (1899–1974), Louis Armstrong (1901–1971), and Count Basie (1904–1984). Tracing each man’s influential career, Tye captures their intense work ethic and rigorous travel schedules (Armstrong alone averaged 300 nights on the road per year), their music’s deep gospel roots, and their artistic styles and gifts (Ellington and Basie flourished as conductors, while Armstrong thrived by communing with a live audience). Yet Tye’s main focus lies in how his subjects changed American culture at large: even as Armstrong, Ellington, and Basie endured the indignities of touring during the Jim Crow era, they brought alive in their music the “invisible stories of Black America.” In doing so, Tye contends, the jazz legends opened “white America’s ears and souls to the grace of their music and their personalities” and “the virtues of Black artistry,” and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. With scrupulous attention to detail, Tye brings his subjects to life as both forces of social change and three-dimensional human beings who lived and breathed their art, from Ellington’s soulful, “Shakespearian” arrangements to Armstrong’s “heart as big as Earth” and Basie’s “Buddha-like” temperament. It’s a vibrant ode to a legendary trio and the “rip-roaring harmonies” that made them great. Agent: Jill Kneerim, Kneerim & Williams. (May)

Chopping Wood: Thoughts and Stories of a Legendary American Folksinger

Folk singer and producer Bernz gathers an endearing mix of “thoughts and stories” drawn from his conversations with folk singer and liberal activist Pete Seeger (1919–2014) from roughly the mid-1990s on. Seeger reveals the background behind some of his biggest hits (“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” was inspired by a line in a Soviet novel) and recounts career misadventures, including breaking a banjo while jumping off a freight train with Woody Guthrie. The bulk of these reflections center the singer’s activism, including the time he sang the antiwar anthem “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour during the Vietnam War in 1967, sparking a controversy that contributed to the show’s cancellation. Elsewhere, Seeger recalls how his activist ethos was catalyzed when, as a young idealist with a “Henry David Thoreau way of thinking,” a few other teens challenged his dream of living as a hermit in the woods: ”You’re going to be nice and pure yourself, and let the rest of the world go to hell?” In his own words and speech patterns—Bernz resisted “the temptation to edit everything into perfect sentences”—Seeger emerges as a humble lover of humanity who used his music to fight injustice and inspired a “new generation of political singers” and fans. It’s essential reading for folk music fans. (May)

Peerless: Rouben Mamoulian, Hollywood, and Broadway

Jensen debuts with a scrupulously researched portrait of Armenian director Rouben Mamoulian (1897–1987), whose wide-ranging career boasted 16 films and 17 Broadway productions, including Oklahoma!. Born in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), Georgia, to a banker father and actor mother, Mamoulian and his family fled the Russian Revolution of 1905 for Paris. As an adult he immigrated to London, where a series of chance encounters landed him a job as director of the experimental play Porgy, which debuted in 1927 and paved the way for an eclectic career that included the films Applause (1929) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), which used such cutting-edge techniques as spinning cameras and colored filters. In 1932 he directed the romantic musical comedy Love Me Tonight in collaboration with Richard Rodgers, forging a partnership that would redefine his career when the two—along with Oscar Hammerstein—collaborated for the wildly successful Oklahoma!, which, Jensen argues, cast off “long-accepted tropes of musical comedy” to pioneer the “integrated” musical, in which “songs and choreography advance the plot.” Sifting through a wealth of production notes, diaries, and letters, Jensen weaves together a biography that gives equal due to Mamoulian’s stylistic innovations, wide-ranging artistic legacy, and uncompromising vision that was buttressed by egotistical self-confidence (Mamoulian sometimes claimed “to be the Zeus from whose brow all talkie innovations sprung,” according to film historian Scott Eyman). Musical theater buffs will be riveted. (May)