by Jeffrey Stanley
“I’m chasing my tail these days. I’m working on a book about a beloved ballet teacher in New York, a man from Uruguay. One of his daughters is a colleague of mine at Juilliard.” Dawn Lille’s work-in-progress on Alfred Corvino is but one more example of the passion that has driven her for a lifetime—the history of modern dance in New York City.
Dawn was eight or nine years old and living in Park Slope when her mother, whose friend’s children took private ballet lessons every Saturday, decided to have Dawn give it a try. The young girl immediately fell in love with dance. The lessons continued until Dawn’s mother was no longer able to take her on Saturdays. She promised Dawn that when she was old enough to ride the subway alone she could go back. “I was eleven when I did that. I just knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
When Dawn started at Brooklyn Friends in tenth grade, she was still deeply immersed in her passion. “I got excused from field hockey so I could go to ballet class,” she said. She had gone to public schools her entire life up until then, but her mother decided to send her here for high school in order to better prepare her for college. “My mother knew about Friends. Also my friend Judy Glass Kase was there so I didn’t mind going.”
She credits her three years at Brooklyn Friends with inspiring her in two particularly lasting ways—she learned to write decently and she became politically aware. Both of these transformations were to have a lasting impact on her career. “I remember Mr. Burdsall, the Upper School Head—a Quaker through and through—heard me complaining once about some problem I had with a school policy, I don’t remember what exactly, but he said, ‘It’s fine that you’re objecting to it, but then you have to do something about it. If you don’t like it, get in there and help change it.’” She considers that a good life lesson. “To me Quakerism wasn’t a religion; it was a philosophy. I’m Jewish, but I could have become Quaker without any trouble. It has always stayed with me.”
Her memories of Brooklyn Friends also brought back many chuckles, especially the musical the French students performed one year. “John Roach taught French. He was also a piano player, a wonderful musician. I did some of the choreography and I had to dance and even sing a little song. I sang ‘My Man’ in French. It was hysterical.” She recounted that in chemistry class she was relegated to making coffee for her classmates after she twice exploded a set of test tubes during experiments. “It was not my strongest subject,” she admitted.
After Brooklyn Friends, Dawn went to Barnard College so she could continue taking private dance classes in New York. She majored in American civilization. “I was going to go to Northwestern because there was a wonderful dance teacher there, but New York is the center for dance. To me, it was the center. I don’t know how you’d want to live anywhere else.”
During her first semester Dawn took ballet classes at Juilliard. During her second semester, she discovered modern dance right under her nose at Barnard. “They had no dance major but they offered some modern dance classes in the P.E. department.” Soon she was studying with the acclaimed modern dancer Mary O’Donnell.
Meanwhile, Dawn continued with her American civilization major. “I loved the literature part of it. I also had credits from the University of London from a summer school graduate program that I had taken between my junior and senior years. These applied toward my master’s degree from Columbia.”
After Barnard and Columbia, Dawn worked to support her future husband, a medical student, while she continued performing with small modern dance groups in the city. “At one point I also taught English. Then I got a job at the old High School for the Performing Arts—the one of Fame fame,” she quipped.
Soon she was married with children and found herself reluctantly leaving her beloved city for “the wilderness of Suffolk County” because her husband had started a medical practice there. “I raised three kids, then I went to Adelphi and got a master’s in theatre,” she mentioned casually as though it were no great feat.
After obtaining the master’s degree (her second) at Adelphi she began teaching movement classes there. She also worked as a movement therapist for a time. Then, edging her way back into the city, she taught dance at Brooklyn College. Before long she was back in Manhattan, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in performance studies at New York University. Her dissertation on Russian ballet dancer Michael Fokine became a book. Over the years she has also written dozens of articles for magazines, journals, and encyclopedias.
“Then I was asked to write and run a master’s program in dance research and reconstruction at City University,” Dawn recalled. Sadly, the program lost its funding and instead she wound up heading the dance department. This was not a bad consolation prize at first, but then the entire arts program at CUNY was scrapped. “My tenure was useless.”
Never one to let career setbacks embitter her, Dawn set her sights on even bigger horizons. She wound up being offered a position teaching dance at her alma mater, Juilliard. She had come full circle. That was in 1997 and she has been teaching there ever since.
The soft landing at Juilliard wasn’t the end of the line for Dawn. Occasionally in her research over the years she had seen passing references to the New York Negro Ballet, a company founded well before Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969. Dawn started doing some investigating and learned there were indeed many classically trained black dancers from before the Civil Rights era that no one seemed to know anything about.
She obtained a small research grant from CUNY and began tracking down these dancers and interviewing them, recording their oral histories. Some gave her old photos. She unearthed archival photos of the dancers at area museums and from the Dance Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The 55 oral histories and some 100 images became an exhibition. Classic Black opened at the Dance Collection in 1996, curated by Dawn. The exhibit included two four-hour seminars with many of the ballet dancers themselves among the speakers. “It’s one of the most significant things I’ve done.”
Dawn is presently seeking interest from publishers about making the Classic Black exhibit into a book, not only about ballet but about the struggles of African Americans to participate as students and performers in this beautiful art form. “It’s not just a book about dance. It’s about racism. In Philadelphia in 1955 a black dancer couldn’t even try on a pair of dance shoes in the shoe store.”
A teacher for most of her adult life as well as a parent, Dawn’s advice to the current Brooklyn Friends generation was aimed more at parents and teachers than at the students: “Having raised three kids of my own, all you can do is offer and say enjoy. The rest is up to them.”