Dance Theatre of Harlem new leader’s Philly roots run from Central High to Philadanco
The company will "Higher Ground," a ballet set to the music of Stevie Wonder.
Robert Garland, the next artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, is connected to Philadelphia in that six-degrees-of separation, everyone-knows-everyone-else way that so many people here recognize and have experienced.
Born and raised in Mount Airy, he was a teenager who had only been dancing a couple of years when Joan Myers Brown hired him for her then-young Philadelphia Dance Company, now better known as Philadanco.
His niece, Stephanie Bandura, was Marie in the Nutcracker in 2009, and performed with Philadelphia Ballet at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Garland’s brother-in-law, Steve Bandura, coached Mo’ne Davis and the Taney Dragons in 2014 — the year Davis made national headlines for pitching a shutout at the Little League World Series.
In July, Garland, the DTH’s resident choreographer and director of the school, will become only the third leader of the troupe, taking over from Virginia Johnson, who is retiring.
The company will be coming to the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts this weekend. The program includes a William Forsythe world premiere, a Balanchine work, and one of Garland’s own ballets, Higher Ground, set to the music of Stevie Wonder.
“Higher Ground is a ballet that was choreographed in 2019 when we were going through the impeachment process with the (former) president,” Garland said. “There was a song that Stevie Wonder wrote, addressing Richard Nixon called, ‘You Haven’t Done Nothin’. And, I remember being a child and people saying he wrote that for the president. And so I became aware at a very early age, like 7 or 8, of the word impeachment, which of course Nixon avoided because he resigned first.
“But here we [were] again. So, I chose to take some of his ‘70s music, and put it together to address that.”
Higher Ground was supposed to premiere in Michigan, Wonder’s home state, in March 2020. But the pandemic pushed it to 2022.
“But what those years brought — which were the Black Lives Matter movement, which was the George Floyd situation — the ballet fit that same idea,” Garland said, “in fact, in an almost premonition kind of way. It, quite frankly, is quite moving in that regard.”
Garland’s work focuses strongly on social justice, but he also wants the company to revisit its ballet roots.
“We need to create balance; balance is the key to life,” he said. “I really believe that we moved in a very contemporary direction. And so we needed a tutu or two, just put it out there.
“I appreciate my work which leans into the Black history, Black diaspora direction, and [Forsythe’s] work, which leans into contemporary deconstruction. But you know, there’s those little girls out there that want to put on that tutu, too. So I’d like to make that happen as well.”
Garland credits his musical tastes to Italo Taranta, his music teacher from Central High School. He started ballet classes at 13 and was in Taranta’s class around the same time.
“So my dancing and my introduction to classical music were just, like, kind of hitting each other and exploded into where I am now,” he said. “To this day, most of the repertory that’s in my brain classically is via that Central High School teacher.”
Garland also feels DTH company founder Arthur Mitchell tapped him early in his career as a dancer to one day take over the company. Garland was then asked to take on the dual role of resident choreographer and director of the school.
The resident choreographer position came fairly easily to him. He had studied choreography as well as performance at Juilliard, where he returned to school after dancing professionally at Philadanco.
But the DTH school leadership was a much bigger challenge.
“I had to learn immediately how a business ran, how to do all that administrative work that needs to be done in the back end … and then also, working for a paying community,” he said.
Garland will inherit a company that has a straight line to Balanchine via Mitchell, a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet, who was moved to create DTH for Black ballet dancers after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Garland also inherits a company that is much stronger financially since philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave DTH a $10 million gift in 2021.
Garland who choreographs works for other companies along with DTH, is in California this week setting a new work on San Francisco Ballet.
“And so that is why I cannot be in Philadelphia [for the Annenberg performances], which is killing me because it’s my hometown,” Garland said.
DTH has had a long relationship with the Annenberg. So are there plans to return after this weekend?
“Wait, you’re talking to a Philadelphian?” Garland said. “Hello? Yeah. Of course. We are definitely going to be coming back. Most definitely.”
Dance Theatre of Harlem, Jan. 20-21, Zellerbach Theater, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. pennlivearts.org 215-898-3900.