While there are so many fascinating bits like this throughout Act One, it is Act Two that I found the most insightful, as Valby gives space to longer monologues in each woman’s voice. This choice feels particularly vital, given that she is a white woman, authoring the story of five Black women. In their own words we learn of their professional and personal struggles, some with domestic abuse and alcoholism, as well as their fantastic second careers. Abarca-Mitchell would find her way back to the studio as rehearsal director for Ballethnic Dance Company in Atlanta after many years away; McKinney-Griffith would move to Germany and start a youth dance program called Space and Time and later, develop the ballet department at Tanzforum Wien in Vienna; Sells would go on to be an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn and dean of students at Harvard Law School before becoming the Metropolitan Opera’s first chief diversity officer; Shelton-Benjamin would learn French, move to Paris, and find a role at Van Cleef & Arpels; and Rohan would keep dancing onstage and in film for years, performing in 2019 with the 5 Plus Ensemble that included other dance legends like Carmen de Lavallade. They would all lose many of their dear friends and partners from the company to AIDS; near the end of the Act Two, Valby grapples with that grief.

Any time spent in a ballet career is hard, even in the most mundane and privileged of circumstances, and the negative and traumatic aspects of the training most often seem to relate in a converse way to the ecstasy and thrill of performing onstage. Many memoirs, interviews, and my own brief career with Milwaukee Ballet confirm this for me. But after reading this book, it is undeniable that it was exponentially more difficult for these five women and their colleagues. The highs and lows were more disparate and magnified because of the unique pressures and constraints that were placed on them as “firsts” and Black ambassadors of the art. Much less, Mitchell’s obsessive and often abusive behavior toward them seems hard to top. The power notes that they wrote to cheerlead each other on, the pre-curtain prayers, and the establishment of a DTH family tree were coping mechanisms that bound them together in the face of such strong headwinds. Each woman would leave the company at odds with Mitchell in some way, and their individual attempts to find closure with him before his death are understated and poignant, their hero never being able to utter words like “sorry” or “love.”

Considering this, Act Three has a lot of drama to resolve. There is an overview of the hiatus that began in 2004, Mitchell’s death in 2018, and a panel of these DTH women convening with Copeland in Boston in 2021 that is meant to end the book with a sense of hope and camaraderie. There are also needling questions: Whose stories are worthy of recording? Whose stories are we missing?

In the final pages, Shelton-Benjamin shows the group the August 1968 issue of the magazine Sepia, featuring Cleo Quitman, one of the founding members of the New York Negro Ballet Company in the late 1950s. Though Rohan and a few of the others remember Quitman, Shelton-Benjamin is frustrated her story has eluded her. The scene is an opening in lieu of an ending; an invitation for more research in order to resist the damaging myth that even if there can be more than one successful classical Black dancer at a time, there were only ever be a few. In giving voice to these five stories, many more names are dropped—to my delight, Kathleen Stanford Grant, with whom I trained as an undergraduate at New York University, gets a shoutout as someone who defied expectation. Each mention holds within it the promise of so many more stories than this one book can account for. And just as the Harlem Swans have said passionately of themselves, these other women were there.