MAY 5, 2022
Over 20 years, Ballet Black has become a major force in the dance world. Founder and artistic director Cassa Pancho tells Tim Bano about the racism that persists in the industry, championing new work and talent, and why the company is unlikely to stage The Nutcracker any time soon.
In March, Ballet Black celebrated its 20th anniversary with a double bill of shows at London’s Barbican. One of the shows started with a voice-over speaking real comments the company had received online.
“I was a bit surprised by the audience reaction,” says the company’s founder and artistic director Cassa Pancho – ‘boss lady’ to most. “Some of the comments are very unpleasant. One of the first things you hear is: ‘Isn’t Ballet Black racist? What if I started Ballet White?’, which is a comment I heard even yesterday. But the audience laughed. And the audience laughing at it reminded me that these comments are usually nonsense, they’re usually by faceless, anonymous people, and by laughing they remove the power of that comment to be upsetting.”
Nor have those comments prevented Ballet Black from becoming a force in the ballet world, changing perceptions of who ballet is for, creating a vast array of new work over two decades, nurturing successive generations of dance talent from childhood through to positions of power in the industry, and even performing as part of Stormzy’s Glastonbury set in 2019.
Although the comments keep on coming, Pancho believes there has been a subtle change over the years. In the early days, people said these comments to her face. Now it’s mostly trolls online. “It’s not scary,” she says, “but it is really unpleasant.”
I ask what’s kept her going for more than two decades. “I love ballet and I think it should be open to you whatever colour you are,” she says. Then there’s a glint in her eye. “Also, it’s a fuck you. There’s a little bit of spite in there. Every time someone says: ‘Don’t call it Ballet Black, that’s really racist,’ I just think: ‘Oh fuck off.’ We’re going to do that even more now. We’re not going anywhere.”
The need for Ballet Black
Pancho realised the need for a company such as Ballet Black when working on a dissertation project during her final year studying classical dance at Durham University. Her father is from the Caribbean and her mother is British but, she says, “I don’t look like a person from the Caribbean. I’m super white-passing, and grew up hearing a lot of stuff that people would say because they thought there was no black presence in the room.”
These comments prompted her to interview black women in British ballet for her dissertation, but she quickly realised there weren’t any. So she widened the pool, talking to Carlos Acosta and Aesha Ash, who had been a principal at the New York City Ballet, along with other dancers.
“The overwhelming thing I got back from the women was: ‘I was the only black face in the room, I was told to break my feet, to reset them so that they pointed more, or that my body wasn’t right for ballet or I had too much hair,’ and I thought it all came down to the power dynamic. If you’re the only black person in a room full of white ballet dancers, obviously that does not feel good.”
Aged 21, straight out of university, Pancho started Ballet Black to redress the woeful imbalance and to create a space that felt safe and creatively free. “The dancers get to put aside the racial element. No one stands out for looking different. No one is going to touch your hair. No one’s going to hand you a beige pair of shoes or tights and say: ‘We’re doing skin colour, just wear this.’ None of these things are issues here. And, in fact, there is a different freedom in the room, separate to race, because we’re always creating new work. You don’t need that protective thing where you’re going to be called the aggressive person or told your hair is too wild.”
Quickly, the company developed two distinguishing features that have become something like hallmarks. Firstly, audiences won’t see Ballet Black doing Giselle or Swan Lake, or any of the ‘classics’ of the ballet world. The company’s programmes usually showcase new work by some of the most exciting composers, choreographers and dancers around. Secondly, while their precision and unity is visible on stage, it’s equally important that the dancers maintain their individuality and their personalities, rather than subsuming themselves into a uniform mass.
Those are two qualities that show how Ballet Black has always been several steps ahead of the industry it operates in. In some spheres, the discussion is still about diversity on stage – how many people of colour are in an ensemble. That was the very first step for Ballet Black. For years, Pancho has aimed far further, trying to open ballet up at both ends of the spectrum – from the very youngest people first developing an interest in dance, right up to the positions of power within the industry.
That means a lot of structures have to be in place: ballet classes for young children that don’t give off the impression it’s not for certain people; ballet schools that actively recruit dancers in a way that’s representative of society; roles for principal dancers of colour in the major ensembles and roles after they have retired, whether that’s teaching, leading organisations or sitting on boards.
Pancho started Ballet Black’s Junior School, based in Shepherd’s Bush, with classes for three to 18-year-olds, and has seen dancers progress through that into the company, and beyond into influential roles.
“Generally, you need to start by the age of five or six to train the body for ballet. So it’s no good offering diverse outreach workshops to 14 and 15-year-olds, you’re not going to change the make-up of ballet that way. You’ve got to start at the beginning, the real beginning – teaching three-year-olds how to skip. After the death of George Floyd, we saw institutions saying: ‘We’re doing this outreach work’, but you’ve already lost, because it’s too late.”
Pancho started ballet at the age of two and a half, when she was taken to local classes by her dad. “He threw me into that ballet class. So when I was told: ‘Black people don’t like ballet,’ well my Trinidadian father dragged me off to ballet, so somebody in the Caribbean world likes it. And have we forgotten that Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey [American Dance Theater] exist in America?”
Training up dancers
In the company’s early days, the resources weren’t there for a ballet school, but it’s now a crucial part of Ballet Black’s existence. Pancho was asking herself: “Where are our dancers going to come from? We need a school. Who’s going to teach those kids so that we don’t have the same situation where the person in power is always Caucasian? How are we ever going to tell a Caribbean story or an African story when most choreographers in the UK are Caucasian? It takes so much time to nurture those sorts of careers. It is only really in the last five-to-eight years that we’ve been able to start to do that.”
Meanwhile, back when Ballet Black first started, Pancho was “a nobody in the ballet world”, she says. “No one knew we existed. We were this little weekend thing, working under our own steam.”
A meeting with Deborah Bull changed the company’s course. Bull had retired as a principal ballerina at the Royal Ballet and was taking over as director of the newly built Linbury and Clore Studios at the Royal Opera House.
“She really loved the idea of what I was trying to do and said: ‘Move your operation to our studios at the weekend because no one works here then.’ These were insane studios, the size of the main stage of the Opera House for just five or six of us. Being under the banner of the Royal Opera House suddenly lifted us up to a place where people noticed us. Dancers and choreographers wanted to work with us. But also having something called Ballet Black in a building like the Opera House meant there was a little irritant saying: ‘Why does this company need to exist in the UK?’”
The early days of the company were a constant process of figuring things out as they went along. At one performance, Pancho was approached by the musicians whose music she had used for the ballet, who said: “We’re glad you liked the music, but we never got a request for permission.” She says: “That’s when I realised: ‘Oh, you’re supposed to do that? Got it.’ Luckily they took it well. We gave them a seat to the show, we were really nice to them and we paid them.”
Even now, Pancho is learning as she goes along. The pandemic forced Ballet Black, like so many other companies, to find new ways of bringing work to audiences. A filmed work called Eightfold featured eight new short dance pieces and was screened online and on Channel 4.
“I thought I had learned everything there was to know about making work. But, wow, making films is boring,” she laughs. “The finished product is stunning, but we were filming it with film people who don’t know about dance, and we are dance people who don’t know about film. They would want 20 to 30 takes of an intense solo, not realising that a dancer could do it three and a half times, then they’re done for the day. Film people would want to film the whole thing head to ankle, and we would have to say: ‘You’ve got to have the feet in there, this doesn’t make any sense to a dance person.’ That was a massive learning curve for me and the company.”
But she’s clear that film is going to become an important part of Ballet Black’s output from now on. “It’s another way of offering up what we do to try to attract a new audience, which we’re really good at getting in our live shows. It’s nice to think that someone in a place where we can’t tour because there’s no venue, or who can’t afford to go there, could still experience the work and see the inspiring dancers and choreography.”
Over 20 years you must have seen huge changes, I start saying, but Pancho stops me. “Actually I haven’t. Did you see the photo shared on Instagram of dancers in full blackface, celebrating completing their run of La Bayadère?”
In 2018, Pancho and Ballet Black dancer Cira Robinson worked with shoemaker Freed of London to develop the UK’s first range of pointe shoes for dancers with darker skin tones. Prior to the collaboration, all ballet shoes were pink, and dancers would have to ‘pancake’ their shoes – covering them in make-up that matched their skin tone – which took a long time, decreased the lifespan of the shoe and cost a lot of money. New shoes were such a simple solution to a ridiculous problem entrenched in the white-centric ballet world, but the result has been immeasurable.
Still, a few online reactions managed to drag things down. “No one got upset until we posted about it on social media. I will always remember the comment of ‘Now you look like you’ve got shit on your shoes.’ I can take everything that’s been thrown at us. But I think about my 11-year-old student who’s about to get those shoes seeing that comment, and that’s where it’s hard to laugh it off. That’s when we know there’s still deep-level racism out there.”
Looking ahead
So what will the next 20 years look like for Ballet Black? Pancho and the company’s board have just finished their National Portfolio Organisation funding application and are hoping for good news when the next round is announced in 2023. Meanwhile, they will continue to experiment with film, and the schools are being expanded with a new branch open and another hopefully coming to east London.
The focus will continue to be on new work rather than the classics – although Pancho makes clear that she never shuts any avenue down. A Ballet Black Nutcracker, for example, is not completely out of the question, just very unlikely. “If someone came to me with a Nutcracker for eight people that doesn’t have all this Arabian and Chinese dance stuff, that might mean that suddenly we have a great show for Christmas. I can’t imagine who and what that would be, but I wouldn’t want anyone to not come and bring that idea.
“And I think something that will look like success to Ballet Black, and to me personally, is to drop the ‘Black’ tag from some things. If someone wants to interview one of our dancers, it will just be an artistic interview about what it’s like to be a ballerina, not a black ballerina. I’m very happy to do interviews that talk about everything, because I started the company and with that comes a responsibility to talk about why. But sometimes I wish the dancers would get the opportunity to speak as artists. It’s very rare that they get to do just that. Racism is a form of trauma, and when something traumatic happens to you, if you were stabbed or assaulted, you wouldn’t be asked to describe it or relive it all the time.”
With no plans to step back anytime soon – “I don’t know where I end and Ballet Black begins” – all of this will be under the aegis of Pancho, and her very straightforward, effective approach to dismantling racism within the dance world. “I am often asked: ‘How do we get a diverse audience?’” she says. “And I think: ‘Is this a trick question? Have I missed something deep and meaningful?’ You put it on stage and it will shine back at you. It’s that simple.”
Q&A Cassa Pancho
What was your first non-theatre job?
I worked as a teaching assistant at my local ballet school.
What was your first professional theatre job?
I was a crocodile in Die Fledermaus in an amateur opera production at the Questors Theatre in Ealing. I’m not sure why.
What is your next job?
Why, what have you heard?
What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
Just because there is a traditional way of doing things, it doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do things.
Who or what was your biggest influence?
I don’t feel influenced by anything, but I am inspired regularly by the people at Ballet Black.
If you hadn’t been an artistic director, what would you have been?
I would have hoped to be a writer, but probably would have fallen into full-time ballet teaching.
Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?
Over the years I’ve learned these don’t make a difference to the outcome of the performance, but I do make sure I am fully prepared for every show. And I might cross my fingers during a very tricky part of the choreography.