Through Local Dance Companies, Memphis Puts Its Best Foot Forward

Collage Dance, Ballet Memphis, and New Ballet Ensemble (among others) have elevated the city’s profile as a center of dance innovation and education.

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If Memphis is the “Home of Blues, Soul, and Rock-and-Roll,” as the city’s official slogan boasts, it’s worth pointing out the unifying subtext behind all those musical forms: dance. Social bodily movement was instrinsic to the blues, soul, and rock-and-roll from their very origins.

Popular dance was not always celebrated in elite conservatories, focused as they have been on Western balletic tradition. But that began to change through the second half of the twentieth century as visionaries like Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey incorporated American folk forms into their choreography. Today, due to this city’s role as a crucible of popular music and dance, that merging of what were once thought of as “high” and “low” movement art is accelerating — and putting Memphis on the cutting edge of innovation in the dance world.

Crucially, this is happening in the context of professional dance companies, which have grown exponentially here in the past 20 years. That was underscored this August when a study by the Dance Data Project named Ballet Memphis and Collage Dance among the 50 largest dance companies in the country, with the former ranked at #32 and the latter at #46. Only one other Tennessee dance company, Nashville Ballet, made the list. These companies additionally have affiliated school that offer training opportunities for young dancers.

The rankings are based not on aesthetic criteria but on the size of the organizations’ annual expenses (based on 2021 data). In future years, Collage Dance will likely rank even higher, thanks to the $2 million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant the school received this summer.

Meanwhile, a third dance organization here, New Ballet Ensemble and School, has also been garnering praise for years, winning the prestigious National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award in 2014, with the school’s students dancing at the Kennedy Center in a performance the Washington Post called “dazzling.” Today, some of its former students are finding fame on an international scale.

Clearly, something big is happening in the world of Memphis dance. What’s more, all three of the schools have, to varying degrees, embraced local vernacular dance forms, combining a commitment to the high technical standards of the balletic tradition with vigorous outreach programs that include Memphis’ most underserved communities.

New Ballet Ensemble:

The Transformative Power of Outreach

Long before she founded New Ballet Ensemble, Katie Smythe was well-grounded in classical technique, thanks to her early years with Memphis Concert Ballet, precursor to Ballet Memphis, founded by Dorothy Gunther Pugh in 1986. Even in that traditional environment, the seeds of a more inclusive view of dance were being planted simply because the company was in Memphis.

Years later, around 2000, when Smythe made her first steps toward founding the New Ballet Ensemble and School in the Cooper-Young area, those early days were vivid in her mind. “There was a dancer I grew up with in Memphis named Eric Henderson,” she says. “Eric was my age, super talented, and I believe he could have been a star at Alvin Ailey. He was a phenomenal dancer, and he had trained at Memphis Concert Ballet with me.”

Henderson wound up going to L.A. and dancing for Janet Jackson, among other things. “When he came back to Memphis, he started teaching all these kids hip hop, trying to break them into the music video scene,” says Smythe. “This was the Backstreet Boys era. And then as he prepared to leave Memphis again, all his students came to me.”

“The different techniques you get from studying dance stay with you for the rest of your life. Ballet, modern, jazz, and other dances stick with you, once you learn them. These are tools that you’re able to use throughout life. So that’s one of the things I loved about opening myself up to learning ballet.” — Charles “Lil Buck” Riley

It was a cross-pollination of sorts. The hip hop dancers wanted balletic techniques in their toolbox, and Smythe learned of a new style they favored: jookin’. One student in particular, Travis Butler, made an impression on her. “I started calling him the Baryshnikov of jookin’. And he was like Baryshnikov. It was beautiful. So we started experimenting, combining jookin’ with classical music. It led me to think that Memphis jookin’ was the new ballet, and that’s why I called the school New Ballet.”

The school focused on community outreach from the start. “The words of the original mission statement — to provide ‘a professional standard of training, regardless of the ability to pay,’ implied that we would be reaching into the community,” says Smythe. And reach out they did. For fifteen years, they’ve been taking free dance classes directly to the city’s public schools via their Pathways program, and offering free summer classes to school kids through their City Dance program. Both outreach efforts have expanded dramatically in recent years, with Pathways operating in nine different public schools now.

Performances also help to recruit these students. In 2002, New Ballet began staging a new approach to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, incorporating modern soul and hip hop music and many styles of dance beyond ballet, including jookin’, in a production they called NutRemix. This year’s show runs November 17-19 at the Cannon Center, but early performances are staged especially for local schoolchildren.

Smythe explains, “We get those kids to NutRemix on a school bus with lunch, then invite them to the studio for City Dance or Family Night where we can have dinner and talk about our program. In doing that, we started to recruit students into New Ballet to fulfill that mission of 50 percent sponsored students, and 50 percent students who could pay.”

Having such eclectic training has helped many New Ballet students excel in the competitive world of dance. NBE alum Max Reed recalls that other dance schools were too expensive when he was a teenager. “I was just battle dancing — you know, dancing on street corners, doing the Memphis thing.” Then he was able to attend New Ballet for free, where he says Smythe eventually “started sending me out to do the outreach programs, going into schools and looking for kids that had the same kind of hunger that I did.”

And his hunger proved formidable; he made his Broadway debut in 2011’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, in which he performed for three years, and recently joined the cast of Beetlejuice. But he’s still connected to New Ballet. “I was in the first NutRemix they ever did,” he says, “and I was in the twentieth anniversary performance of it last winter.”

Also performing in last year’s celebratory NutRemix was New Ballet’s most famous alum, Charles Riley, aka Lil Buck, whose success reveals the true potential of the school’s hybrid approach and its focus on outreach. Best known for combining ballet technique with jookin’, he’s parlayed his mastery into work with the likes of Yo-Yo Ma, Madonna, and Cirque du Soleil.

But his teaching work in New Ballet’s outreach programs has stayed with him. His rapport with students was apparent as he rehearsed the cast of his recent touring production, Memphis Jookin’: The Show. He’d known many of the cast members for years. “Two guys who came up in New Ballet are a part of my show now,” he says. “All of the cast members are from Memphis, and a lot of these kids have never had an experience like this.”

Memphis Jookin’ became a critical success, earning a rave review in The New York Times and launching its second tour with a performance at Lincoln Center. Riley credits the diversity of his training with his success. “The different techniques you get from studying dance stay with you for the rest of your life,” Riley says. “Ballet, modern, jazz, and other dances stick with you, once you learn them. These are tools that you’re able to use throughout life. So that’s one of the things I loved about opening myself up to learning ballet.”

The latest New Ballet student to leap forward has been Roman Neal II, who starred in last year’s production of NutRemix in the lead role of The Soldier. This fall, he begins as a dance performance major at Howard University thanks to the prestigious Chadwick A. Boseman Memorial Scholarship, given to only one entering freshman per year in honor of the late Black Panther star.

Ballet Memphis:

Rethinking Inclusivity

While New Ballet teaches a variety of dance methods alongside its ballet training, from African to flamenco to tap, it has embraced jookin’ and other street dance forms to an unprecedented degree. But Memphis’ two larger dance organizations have taken a different approach to their outreach, trusting in the ability of classical, refined technique to attract students. And judging from their growth, it’s working.

“In Memphis, the ballet community is thriving. The city has several schools and companies and I think the love for classical ballet is only growing at this stage,” says Eileen Frazer, community programs manager and teaching artist at Ballet Memphis, which is based in a landmark structure in the heart Overton Square. “We saw a bit of a dip during the pandemic, as all organizations did, and we’re still growing our student body back from that, but we have students coming to us from other studios where the focus hasn’t been classical ballet, because they want that focus on classical technique.”

Yet even with that as a starting point, Frazer points out, such technique forms the basis for a wide variety of dance. “We do a class in modern dance as well, but classical ballet doesn’t just mean dancing to classical music. You need that classical ballet foundation to do all types of dance, even all types of sports. We have kids coming through saying, ‘My football coach told me I had to take ballet.’”

“Being attached to our professional company, the students are seeing these incredible professional dancers, dancing to all kinds of music — classical music, or Patsy Cline, or Roy Orbison, or soul music. We aren’t just doing full-length classical ballets.”— Eileen Frazer

The organization’s commitment to outreach has also put it at the cutting edge of inclusivity in the city. Before the pandemic, Ballet Memphis offered movement classes to students at the Stax Music Academy “to feel comfortable in their skin as they’re playing instruments or dancing to different types of music,” says Frazer. “The Stax students also created new music for the Ballet Memphis student dancers to choreograph.”

Beyond that, her company also offers classes to Spanish-speaking students, not to mention what Frazer calls “an inclusive dance class. That is for anyone who has physical or developmental differences. They can develop body awareness, self-expression and creativity, and have a little community. We do that for all ages. And we’ve also developed a Dance for Parkinson’s curriculum. Our program is one of only three in Tennessee.”

Frazer emphasizes that their students are not learning in a vacuum. “Being attached to our professional company, the students are seeing these incredible professional dancers, dancing to all kinds of music — classical music, or Patsy Cline, or Roy Orbison, or soul music. We aren’t just doing full-length classical ballets. We’re bringing in a lot of up-and-coming choreographers, doing a lot of new work. That lends itself to doing more contemporary movement.”

And, as with New Ballet’s NutRemix, Ballet Memphis’ staging of The Nutcracker provides an annual tradition of mixing the professionals in the performing company with some of the 200-300 students, ages 3-18, who typically enroll in classes each year. “The students can audition for The Nutcracker, which is the professional company’s production,” Frazer explains. “So that includes between 60 and 100 of our students getting that performance opportunity. Also, The Nutcracker auditions are open to students from other studios as well. So we get to have a little community and integration with everyone in the city, and even from Arkansas and Mississippi.”

This year’s staging of Tchaikovsky’s ballet, while still hewing to the classic approach, will introduce some innovations, as Ballet Memphis works with teams outside the organization to design a new set and costumes for the show, which runs the weekends of December 8th and 15th.

Collage Dance:

Raising Community Consciousness

Collage Dance, on the other hand, does not trade as heavily on the popular Christmas dance extravaganza, though the touring company does perform The Nutcracker. That’s partly due to its provenance and the focus of its mission.

Founded as a performance company in 2006 by executive director Marcellus Harper and artistic director Kevin Thomas to remediate the ballet industry’s lack of racial diversity, it was first based in New York, not Memphis. Their mission grew directly out of Thomas’ ten years of experience as the principal dancer at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. They relocated here the next year and added the conservatory to the organization, sensing that dance was not only gaining momentum but had potential for growth in Memphis.

They were onto something. That same year, in 2007, a video emerged of Lil Buck mixing ballet and jookin’ in a solo to Camille Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” for a New Ballet event in West Memphis. It went viral, helping to launch the dancer’s career and raising the profile of Memphis dance as a whole. Meanwhile, Collage worked to find its footing locally, teaching in various host locations beginning in 2009, and attracting more students every year. And their professional company, officially known as Collage Dance Collective, was building its reputation and touring internationally.

Karen Nicely, Collage’s community engagement programmer and faculty teacher, has worked with the organization from the start, and is not surprised by her company’s rapid evolution into one of the South’s leading companies and conservatories. “I have been with Collage every year and it’s been amazing to see. It’s grown because of the mission that the guys have: to expand access and quality training to even more communities and especially underserved communities.”

The culmination of that came in 2020 when, despite months of quarantine, Collage raised $11 million to build a dedicated dance center of its own.

Befitting the group’s mission, it’s in the heart of Binghampton, at Sam Cooper Blvd. and Tillman. “The directors really wanted to be in a community that needed more growth and development,” says Nicely. “And Binghampton is one of those areas of Memphis that is often kind of forgotten. It has lower-income families, and not as many resources as other communities in Memphis. So the choice of location was made with that in mind.”

With its walls angled skyward, the center stands as a beacon in the neighborhood, not least because its wide windows open its dance classes to the community. More than just a visual effect, it represents how Collage is coming to function in the city’s wider dance scene.

“Music and dance are inextricably connected,” he says. “We need music to create dance and music makes all of us want to move, and our city is both a music town and a dance town. With some of the largest dance companies in the nation right here in Memphis, it’s outstanding to say dance has created its home here.” — Marcellus Harper

When Lil Buck began rehearsals for his Memphis Jookin’ production, it was in Collage’s new building, his dancers on full display to passersby. It’s also an inspiring site for the public events Collage sponsors, such as this September’s Memphis Dance Festival.

The free event was a day-long celebration of dance featuring performances by Lil Buck, artists from New York City Ballet, SOLE Defined (from Washington, D.C.), Alonzo King LINES Ballet (from San Francisco), and the Nashville Ballet. Local companies were also featured, including Ballet Memphis, the Grizz Girls, Studio 413, Grind House Dance, Kindred Spirit, the Collage Youth Ensemble, and Company D, a dance company of young adults with Down syndrome.

The event’s capstone, however, was the Collage Dance Collective’s performance of Camille A. Brown’s “New Second Line,” a celebration of New Orleans and the perseverance of Black people after Hurricane Katrina, all to the live music of the internationally renowned Rebirth Brass Band.

The way Harper sees it, such danceable, accessible music is key to their mission. “The first time we did it, the combination of that music and the high-energy dancing just connected with the audience,” he says. “And that’s what we are all about: finding ways to connect with audiences who maybe feel like this is not for them, and really getting them excited about it.”

He explains that part of that is really being strategic about the music that you use. “It’s also about the story, the message. In dance — and ballet in particular — the themes and the stories have left many people out, or have not included diverse communities. That’s part of the reason that dance audiences aren’t diverse. People want to connect to what they see.”

That also explains why Collage’s annual showcase dance is not their take on The Nutcracker, but Kevin Thomas’ “Rise,” set to the final speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to be performed next year on February 2-4 during Black history month. As Shelby Smith wrote for Choose901 upon seeing it earlier this year, “I’d been dancing for 22 years before I’d ever seen a ballet production with a majority-Black cast.”

And, as Thomas told Smith, Collage also pursues gender inclusivity. “When we started the school in 2009, I was telling someone that my idea was to get boys into ballet,” Thomas says. “They told me I was crazy — that I’d never get boys here from Memphis to do ballet, but it happened. … When you see ballet and you say the word ‘ballet,’ right away the thought is female — which is funny, because when ballet was created 400 years ago, it was created for men. … We are really educating people. Not just our dancers, but the community who is questioning why we dance in the first place.”

Events like the Memphis Dance Festival, or the 34th annual International Conference and Festival of Blacks in Dance, which Collage will co-host on January 24-28, 2024, further that educational mission, but Collage’s core activity is engaging people directly through classes. In addition to conservatory instruction, Nicely touts their Turning Pointe program, where “teachers from the conservatory go to schools in Memphis and surrounding areas and teach dance. We average about 13 active schools at any given time, but we have a roster of 20.” But the outreach goes beyond kids. Collage’s Continuum program is a collection of classes and programming focused on adult instruction.

The scope of such education, not to mention the Collective’s busy touring schedule, is one reason Collage Dance was recently named a “Southern Cultural Treasure” by South Arts and the Ford Foundation. With the new building and last month’s multi-year Mellon Foundation grant, Collage’s star is clearly rising.

As Marcellus Harper explains, Collage’s move to Memphis helped make that possible. “Music and dance are inextricably connected,” he says. “We need music to create dance and music makes all of us want to move, and our city is both a music town and a dance town. With some of the largest dance companies in the nation right here in Memphis, it’s outstanding to say dance has created its home here.”