Les Ballets Nègres, an introduction

Here is the script for this video essay.

(Start with Les Ballets Nègres programme)

Short season 14-21 March 1948 at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, London

Note the 6d seal

also that at a matinee you could order afternoon tea to be brought to your seat in the auditorium.

and there’s an advertisement for sending food parcels to Germany

Les Ballets Nègres were well known at the time.

Founded in 1946 by the Jamaican-born choreographer Berto Pasuka, they made their debut in London in April. The reviews were glowing.

Caryl Brahms wrote in the Evening Standard: ‘A new kind of ballet was born last night at a playhouse in Westbourne Grove, where the Ballets Nègres opened an 8 week season at the Twentieth Century Theatre. Make Notting Hill your Mecca. You will not sit through a lot of dreary tap routines, nor will you see a bevy of coal black mamas cake-walking. What you will see is emotion turned into living rhythm by a company of negro dancers; what you will feel is a compassionate understanding that cannot but wing home to every heart in the house.’

During their season they appeared on BBC television and in cinemas on a Pathé newsreel. After London, Les Ballets Nègres immediately went on a British and then a continental tour. The company went on performing in Britain and Europe until it disbanded in 1953.

Today, however, as Britain’s – and probably Europe’s – first black dance company with a black artistic director, they are probably not as well known as they should be.

This programme from 1948 gives useful insights into the company, in particular the anti-colonial but integrationist position underlying the stories of their ballets.

The first piece on the programme, They Came, is set in Africa and explores tensions between white colonials and African villagers. It has two parts. The first, in the nineteenth century, shows British missionaries arriving in a jungle village. Backed by soldiers, they impose western medicine on the villagers. The second part is set during the war that had just ended. Black and white are depicted as equal and seeking common sanctuary. An African soldier is killed directing them to safety. The political implication here is that, if modern black soldiers are good enough to fight alongside white ones as equals, they are therefore capable of governing themselves and the colonies should be given their independence.

The story line of Pasuka’s ballet loosely resembles that of the film Men of Two Worlds, directed by Thorold Dickinson, which also explored tensions between African religious practices and modern medicine. The film was made during the war, and partly filmed in technicolour in 1943 on location in what is now Tanzania. Unfortunately some of the footage was lost when a German submarine torpedoed the ship carrying it back to Britain. Pasuka helped Dickinson re-film some ceremonial dances in London. The dancers from the film became his company, and he used the money he had earned from the film to hire the Twentieth Century Theatre.

De Prophet was the best received work in the company’s opening season. It is set in a Jamaican village where the prophet performs miraculous healings. When he then attempts to fly, he is arrested and the piece ends with him dying in prison. It was loosely based on the life of the charismatic Jamaican preacher Alexander Bedward, founder of the Jamaican Native Baptist Free Church. Bedward was arrested in 1921 after he led several hundred followers on a march on Kingston claiming that, like an old testament prophet, he would ascend to heaven. He was arrested and committed to an asylum.

Caryl Brahms wrote that ‘The story of De Prophet who promised his flock to fly to heaven on his outstretched arms and, too late found he couldn’t, danced with piety and set to spirituals needed no knowledge of the African dance to be infinitely moving’.

Beryl de Zoete, in the New Statesman and Nation wrote that ‘Pasuka himself is a magnificant dancer and actor’ and his Prophet, ‘who, because he tries to fly to heaven, is clapped in jail, is really superb. His body shrinks, or stretches to heroic height at will, or rather at the command of the rhythm by which he is possessed’ (de Zoete 1946, 317).

The scene where a uniformed policeman arrests the Prophet, beating him to the ground with his truncheon, is particular vicious. Writing in 1950, Fernau Hall noted that ‘conflicts in Jamaican society were brought out by the brutal figure of the policeman, whose recurrent entrances gave social perspective to the story’ (Hall 1950, 147).

Members of Les Ballets Nègres were aware of current political debates about colonialism. Richie Riley, Pasuka’s close friend and collaborator came from Jamaica in 1946 to study ballet in London and help Pasuka with his company. Registering at the Colonial Office he was sent to stay in a hostel in Tavistock Square for black students from Africa and the Caribbean. He later recalled ‘Pandit Nehru, Kwame Nkrumah, quite a few other African exiles of the time used to meet there at night and talk politics. But politics referred to the colonies rather than England.

The ballet Aggrey was named after the Ghanaian missionary and educationalist James Aggrey 1875-1927. After studying at Universities in the United States, he led several research expeditions to Africa gathering information in order to improve education on the continent. The programme quotes Aggrey: ‘One can get some sort of tune from the white note, one can get some kind of melody on the black notes, but for complete harmony one needs the two together’. In Pasuka’s abstract, metaphorical ballet, the white piano keys are the female dancers, the black keys are males, Pasuka himself takes the role of the Pianist, and their harmony is threatened by the figure of Fear.

All these, together with the colourful, light-hearted Market Day had been in the company’s repertoire since the beginning. The one new ballet on the 1948 programme was Blood.

Set in Haiti, this tells a tragic story about a couple honeymooning in a tourist hotel in the Caribbean. They dance a waltz together but hear the sound of drumming coming from the jungle outside. Entering the jungle they discover a voodoo ceremony. The husband doesn’t know that his wife is of mixed race (the programme calls her ‘the Half-caste Girl’). The power of the ceremony overwhelms her and she abandons him for the cult. When he returns another evening in disguise to try and get her back, he is apprehended and stabbed, and his wife commits suicide.

Blood raises the problem about mixed race children. Richie Riley later recalled that some of the British-born dancers in Les Ballet’s Nègres were from port cities like Liverpool, Cardiff and the East End of London, with white British mothers and black sailor fathers (Riley c.1986). The tragedy in the piece comes from the fact that the Half-caste Girl had, for whatever reason, kept her dual heritage a secret from her husband. She was therefore cut off from her African roots.

G.P., the critic for the Manchester Guardian, particularly admired ‘the incessant beating of the tom toms’ which ‘has a power that it would be a long business to analyse’. She also admired Pearl Johnson’s portrayal of the Half-caste Girl whose ‘movements and mime have immense and unholy significance; fear, fascination, and above all physical ecstasy and physical revulsion can never have been more searchingly reproduced for stage purposes’ (G.P. 1949, 5).

Les Ballets Nègres were clearly a strong company performing powerful and well received ballets. So why did they fold in 1953? A clue can be found in the financial accounts they submitted with their unsuccessful Arts Council application. The company seem to have broken even financially from box office receipts each year but rarely made enough money to be able to create new works. I’ve already said they made four ballets for their opening season. They made two more in 1947, Blood and The Bride Cry, and two in 1950, Cabaret 1920 and Nine Nights. In 1946 they were said to be the first new thing in dance since the start of the war. By the early 1950s they must have been going back to the same theatres with essentially the same increasingly familiar ballets. By 1953 key dancers like Pearl Johnson were leaving the company to dance elsewhere.

The make-or-break year seems to have been 1951 when the company were not accepted to be part of that summer’s Festival of Britain. According to Richie Riley, they were told that it was a festival of British, not colonial, culture. Today, following the result of the referendum to leave the European Union, there no longer appears to be any consensus on the nature of British cultural identity. National identity is not found by looking back to an imagined, idealized past but is what one’s makes in the present with one’s cultural resources. I’d argue that , in the late 1940s, Les Ballets Nègres making an important contribution to contemporary British dance culture.

It was only in Britain at that time that Les Ballets Nègres could have achieved all this. It was in London that Richie Riley was able to take part in anti-colonial debates led by major figures like Nehru and Nkrumah. It was in London that Pasuka could find Nigerian drummers to accompany their dancing. Whereas being light skinned was valued in the Caribbean social hierarchy, in London the presence of mixed race children was a source of anxiety. Ballets like Aggrey, Blood, De Prophet and They Came could only have been created in London for British and European audiences.

Les Ballets Nègres deserves to be better known and celebrated.

This video draws on research for one of the chapters of Mike Huxley and my book Dance, Modernism and Modernity.

Thanks for watching.