Stephanie Dabney, a principal dancer at Harlem’s Dance Theater, an international star, and a role model for aspiring black ballerinas, passed away on September 28 in a Manhattan nursing home. She was 64 years old.
Her sister, Janine Dabney Battle, said the cause was cardiopulmonary arrest.
Dabney was only 16 years old in 1975. In 1969 Karel Shook and the first black principal of the New York City Ballet Harlem, founded by He dancer Arthur Mitchell, joined the company to provide opportunities for dancers of color.
Mr. Mitchell was a disciple of George Balanchine, and Mr. Dabney was a natural fit for the company’s Balanchine-based neo-classical style. “Stephanie had it all: lines, feet, technique, speed, imagination and most importantly, heart,” Virginia Johnson, the company’s artistic director, wrote in an email.
Dabney rose to fame in the company’s 1982 production of Stravinsky’s The Firebird. In this production she played the titular role of rescuing a mythical red-feathered bird from evil that has been captured by a prince (dancing by Donald Williams). Wizard. Inspired by the 1910 Michel Fokine-choreographed ballet Her Luss’ original production, her version of the Dance Theater of Harlem, based on a Russian folktale, transposed the story to a tropical setting.
Choreographed by John Talas, the ballet showcased Ms Dabney’s powerful technique and impassioned stage presence. Peabody Award-winning episode PBS series “Kennedy Center Tonight” documenting the ballet’s rehearsal process and world premiere
“This is a role where you actually dance and become music,” Dabney said in an introduction to the PBS program. “It pushes you, it fills you inside, it lets you express your emotions.”
Dabney’s Firebird also contributed to Glasnost. In May 1988, Dance Theater of Harlem became the first American ballet company to perform in the Soviet Union since 1985, when the United States and the Soviet Union signed a new cultural agreement, her first in six years.
When she performed on opening night at the Kremlin’s parliament building, The Times reported, the audience gasped.
Raisa Gorbachev, wife of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, told Mitchell backstage, according to The Times.
Decades later, Misty Copeland inspired Misty Copeland. Misty Copeland became the first black female principal dancer at her theater in American Her Ballet, and she debuted in 2012 with her own critically acclaimed “Firebird.”
“Stephanie set the world on fire with such power and grace, dancing in bright red tulle flames,” Ms. Copland said in an email. rice field.”
Firebird became Dabney’s signature role, the most played of his career. “Stephanie enjoyed performing it, but she regretted that people thought little of her brilliant performances in other ballets.
There were many.
Anna Kisselgoff was “sizzling” in Ruth Page’s Frankie and Bentley Stone’s “Frankie and Johnny,” she wrote in The Times in 1983.
In the title role of 1989’s Frederick Franklin’s Creole Giselle, she was “hauntingly poetic,” Dunning wrote. Defined with sparkling clarity and simplicity as a department.”
In 1990’s Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, she “perpetually gained the upper hand with sharp technique and erotic voltage.” Written by Alan M. Kriegsman at the Washington Post.
Stephanie Renee Dabney was born on July 11, 1958 in Philadelphia to Dr. James Dabney, an osteopath, and Harriet (Smith) Dabney, a homemaker. She grew up in Youngstown, Ohio with her older brothers Christopher and Dabney Battle.
She began dancing at the age of four at the Ballet Western Reserve, a dance school in Youngstown. “She loved performing,” she told The Times in 2010. Her hair wasn’t blonde and she “didn’t bounce like a white girl,” she said.
As a teenager, Dabney saw the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Youngstown. It was the first time she saw a black dancer on a professional stage, she said, and the first time she felt hopeful about making a career in dance.
She received a scholarship to study modern dance at the Airey School, but fate intervened when she took Mr. Mitchell’s ballet class during a Harlem Dance Theater visit to Youngstown. Mr. Mitchell offered her a scholarship on the spot.
Mr. Dabney turned him down.
But after a week of studying with Airey, she realized that she preferred traditional ballet to Airey’s jazzy contemporary style. She enrolled in her theater at her school of dance in Harlem, and within three months Mr. Mitchell hired her as a dancer in her apprentice company at the age of 16. Six months later she became a full-time employee.
After testing positive for HIV, Dabney continued dancing at the Dance Theater of Harlem until 1994, then appeared as a guest artist with the company, and retired from the stage two years later in her mid-thirties. She later returned to Manhattan after teaching dance at her Spellman College in Atlanta. By the time she was diagnosed, AIDS had already ravaged the dance world, claimed the lives of notable artists such as Ailey and Rudolf Nureyev, and effective treatments were still being developed for her. .
of December 2000 article In Dance Magazine, Dabney was quoted as saying that in 1996 alone he had endured four severe cases of pneumonia.
“My lungs collapsed,” she said. “I had a chest tube pump in her for four weeks. She remembers the doctor walking into my room and she was surprised. ‘Hi, I didn’t know you were here.’ “
She had been encouraged to return to the stage by actress and longtime dance theater supporter Cicely Tyson, but said she would be “better remembered as the Firebird when she was young and healthy.”
According to Copland, she was more than that.
“Stephanie is an important part of the trailblazing history of black dance,” Ms. Copeland wrote. “She displays beauty, artistry and perseverance throughout her work and life that lives on in every Black and Brown girl and boy and beyond.”