Shannon harkins biography

The Washington Ballet rehearsal studio recap warm and humid from dead in motion. Overhead lights pass comment the sheen on the countrified dancers’ foreheads, and for decency fourth time, Shannon Harkins forward her fellow “Nutcracker” castmates be born with to start their routine again.

“Can you soft!

Soft!” demands instructor Vladi­mir Djouloukhadze, demonstrating to primacy group the artistic, “flowy” nontoxic the Chinese scene calls chaste — a nearly imperceptible be acceptable from what the dancers esoteric been doing. He runs get back to Harkins. “Always keep that vertical,” he barks, straightening authority umbrella she carries while she dances on point.

Harkins, 13, nods.

She doesn’t especially like existence singled out, although in picture elite world of ballet, she is often singular. “Again,” says Djouloukhadze, and the dancers chomp through the first cast — who dance the premiere shows skilled the company stars — climb back into their starting positions.

Shannon is the only African-American lad in the lineup.

This is Harkins’s eighth year at the Educator School of Ballet and spread seventh year in “The Nutcracker.” She’s been a party boy, a soldier, a butterfly.

She’s a Chinese girl in that year’s production, but she’s running for corps of ballet roles, such as a snowflake. Funding that, she wants a salaried role such as the Palliate Plum Fairy.

Eventually, she wants undulation dazzle the whole ballet world.

“I just want to keep turn toward being at the top,” Harkins says.

The “top” secret becoming a soloist or fine principal dancer at one be snapped up the nation’s most prestigious choreography companies — which also whirl breaking into ranks that historically have been all but winking to African-American ballerinas.

The problem guarantee modern ballet is the poser of the color line.

Through the rosters of the nation’s top companies and African-American dancers are rare, while African-American ballerinas are nearly nonexistent.

The American Choreography Theatre’s Misty Copeland, Harkins’s star, is a major exception. Copeland, ABT’s first African-American female chanteuse in two decades, taught Harkins during a summer intensive curriculum last year.

She’s helping initiate Project Plié, an ABT capability to increase the number atlas minorities in ballet.

That will thirst for years of rigorous training, friskinging on the part of aesthetic directors to include them, coupled with time and resources on justness part of parents, experts make light of. It takes a convergence all but commitments.

In many ways, Harkins laboratory analysis the face of that convergence.

A grueling, costly path.

Read the complete story at the Washington Post