Americans in Paris

There is something charmingly didactic and intellectually generous about American dance companies touring Europe. At the start of a performance, it is not unusual for a director to step forward and offer a brief introduction, explaining the reasons for the tour and sketching the wider context of the programme. Paris audiences experienced this with the Martha Graham Dance Company last autumn, and now again with Dance Theatre of Harlem. Robert Garland, at the helm of the ensemble, took a moment to anchor the performance in lineage, recalling the company’s origins and its illustrious founder, Arthur Mitchell. As Garland recounted, Mitchell had been on his way to Brazil in 1968, where he was due to found a ballet company, when he turned back after learning of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It was this event that led to the establishment of Dance Theatre of Harlem the following year, at a time when Black artists were widely marginalised within classical art forms, including dance.

Performance

Dance Theatre of Harlem: Programmes A & B

Place

Palais des Congrès, Paris, France, February 26, 2026

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Alexandra Hutchinson in “Firebird.” Photograph by Rachel Papo

Dance Theatre of Harlem, back in France for the first time in forty years, toured in late February and early March. In Paris, across four performances at the Palais des Congrès, the company presented two programmes in an order that felt deliberately counterintuitive. Programme B came before Programme A, twice over, and if a hierarchy was ever intended, Programme A clearly outranked Programme B, not only for its sharper edge and historical significance, but also because it was far better aligned with the ensemble’s spirit, character, and founding impulses. What follows retains the order in which the works were presented, saving the strongest items for last.

Programme B opened with Robert Garland’s own “Nyman String Quartet No. 2,” which he frames as an act of homage to Arthur Mitchell and to John Carlos, the Olympic medalist whose 1968 podium salute became one of the defining emblems of Black pride. It is set to Michael Nyman’s score of the same name, originally written for Shobana Jeyasingh’s “Configurations.” The music’s energetic, motor-driven minimalism, dense with repeating ostinati and hard-edged harmonies, felt like an uneasy fit. Its dissonances sat awkwardly with Garland’s vocabulary of athletic, everyday gestures, relaxed hips and shoulders, flashes of disco flair, and more codified ballet steps and positions.

Garland then offered another of his works, “Higher Ground,” created in 2022, set to Stevie Wonder’s songs and conceived as a dialogue between the politics of the 1970s and those of today. It frames art as a response to social strain, with all the dancers in striking orange costumes by Pamela Allen-Cummings and a street-born groove folded into a funky, stage-ready style. In the final section, set to Wonder’s title track, the blend finally turns convincing: a loose, swinging mix of idioms that at last clicks.

Dance Theatre of Harlem in “Return” by Robert Garland. Photograph by Jeff Cravotta

There were then two contemporary pearls to complete Programme B, interpreted in ways that felt fresh to a Paris audience more accustomed to cooler, more linear renderings. “Take Me With You,” Robert Bondara’s 2016 duet, is a tightly wrought contemporary pas de deux built on intense physical contact. With the woman on pointe, both dancers dressed in white shirts and black shorts, and Radiohead’s “Reckoner” supplying its percussive pulse, it asks for sleek elegance and fluid continuity. Here, by contrast, Lindsey Donnell and Jhaelin McQuay brought an instinctive, energetic directness, less refined, perhaps, but more immediate, more forceful, and more assertive.

William Forsythe’s “Blake Works IV” posed a different kind of challenge. The dancers approached it with their own style and a very personal physical touch. Anyone accustomed to the piece as a geometrical distillate, crystalline and austere, may well have been surprised. Here, the company approached it with kinetic brightness, stripping away some of its formality and replacing it with a more forceful, less rarefied elegance, sharpened by an attacking energy that seized on the music’s glitchy beats.

Programme A, as already noted, was far more flattering to the company and its style. In “Return,” Robert Garland seems intent on carrying Mitchell’s inheritance forward, setting out to fuse physical swagger with neoclassical style. Created in 1999 for DTH’s 30th anniversary, the piece is built for twelve dancers and driven by songs by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Alfred Ellis and Carolyn Franklin. Here the music was a perfect fit, sitting in intriguing contrast to the pointe shoes and the elegant sweep of so many arabesques and fast chaînés. The ballet declares its mood immediately: playful, ironic, and a little cheeky. The result is a buoyant hybrid, spirited and sporty, wonderfully reminiscent of the late 1990s. The joyful soundtrack and the dancers’ evident pleasure in riding it warmed the stage and, with it, the audience.

Micah Bullard and Kamala Saara in “Take Me With You” by Robert Bondara. Photograph by Jeff Cravotta

George Balanchine’s “Donizetti Variations” is a brisk 26-minute showpiece, set to music from Donizetti’s opera “Don Sebastian” and created in 1960 for New York City Ballet. If the ballet carried a special charge here, it was partly for historical reasons: Balanchine is woven into DTH’s identity. He helped shape Arthur Mitchell’s early stature by choreographing major roles for him and, when Mitchell founded the company, granted the young troupe the rights to several of his ballets, helping it build a credible repertoire from the start. Yet the performance never felt merely emblematic. The piece overflowed with joy and conviction, driven by that brilliant Balanchine mixture of athleticism and nonchalance, in which the dancers sparkled with lightness, speed, and airy attack.

Another major historical gesture was the return to the stage of the legendary “Firebird,” announced in Paris as an exclusive event and revived there after having lain dormant since 2010. This signature company classic, first created in 1982, captivated audiences from its very first world tour. DTH reimagines the traditional Russian fairy tale through a Caribbean lens. Where the 1910 Ballets Russes original drew on Slavic folklore, this version of Stravinsky’s renowned ballet relocates the story to a tropical, mythical island. Geoffrey Holder’s designs bathe the stage in warm tones, with the Firebird blazing in vivid orange. The monsters, minions of an evil sorcerer, appear in terrifying masks with huge butterfly-like eyes and intricate body paint, moving with a visceral, earthy force. In the choreography, John Taras blends classical ballet technique with phrasing that feels more fluid and sensuous, perfectly suited to the island atmosphere. We were blessed with Alexandra Hutchinson in the title role, vibrant and fierce.

It must be daunting to inherit Arthur Mitchell’s legacy, born of a visionary and militant desire to open ballet to those from whom it had too often been withheld. Not every work in the programme landed with the same force, but the larger impression was unmistakable. DTH appeared not simply as the guardian of the past, but as the living continuation of a project that still matters in two ways. First, historically: the company stands as a living witness to a double inheritance, at once aesthetic and political: aesthetic in its fertile mingling of classical ballet with other physical idioms, social energies, and performative traditions; political in its emergence from a concrete struggle against exclusion and in its continued fidelity to that founding impulse. Second, as an example: for more conventional companies, DTH offers a model of integration, technical excellence, and stylistic freedom.

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti is a Paris-based philosopher researching ancient thought, divination, and practices of salvation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. With over a decade of ballet training, she studied History of Dance as part of her Philosophy and Aesthetics degree at the University of Bologna. Alongside her academic work, she writes about dance.

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