Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre has announced a replacement for artistic director Susan Jaffe, an internationally-recognized dance figure who moved on to New York City’s American Ballet Theatre. The search committee headed in the opposite direction this time, plucking little-known 46-year old Adam McKinney from the halls of academia at Texas Christian University, making him the first African American to head a major classical ballet company in the United States and, perhaps, the world.
That is not to make light of McKinney’s accomplishments, a robust list to be sure. But it certainly whets the appetite to know more about this artistic entrepreneur with such a wide range of interests and skills, a searcher who will display a wide range of interests and skills and will certainly bring a new perspective to PBT.
McKinney wants people to know, first and foremost, that he is “a classicist. PBT has been on my radar for the last 25 years.” His father, an attorney who worked for the National Labor Relations Board, lived in Pittsburgh. When McKinney would visit him, he would take company class and taught in the school on several occasions. He further explains, “I was employed by contemporary ballet and modern dance companies because I was a good ballet dancer. By no means will I shift the identity of an organization that is rooted in classical ballet.” Although he has a vision of the company, he admits that he is not able to “actualize” it fully until he gets to Pittsburgh. “The work has to be responsive and informed by the people who are there, both the artists and the audiences and all the people who make up the organization.”
Background. That being said, it’s easier to understand McKinney by looking back. In a 2020 YouTube interview with Caroline Calouche , he revealed that he is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His mother’s family comes Chicago, Montana and Eastern Europe. His father comes from Tennessee, Arkansa, Mississippi, Georgia and West Africa. But he considers himself a “mid-Western-raised person.” That conveys, in a nutshell, the importance of lineage and heritage, ideas that “are central to my work as an artist.”
McKinney was a swimmer and soccer player. But since his mother was a visual artist and his father a former actor turned attorney, he was raised in an artistic environment. One brother is an opera singer. McKinney himself played piano, sang and performed in musicals. Dance did not appear on the horizon until he took his first ballet class as a junior in high school.
“Dance for me was this perfect amalgamation of athleticism, because I was an athlete, and aesthetics and music. I got really good in a short period of time.” By his senior year, he was taking classes at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
By then he wanted to become an artist full time; his parents supported his decision. So McKinney spent four years at Butler University studying dance, with summer programs at the Joffrey and Ailey schools.
Eventually he went to the Milwaukee Ballet School program and received an apprenticeship with the company, where he danced for four years, building his classical repertoire with “Giselle,” “Swan Lake” and more contemporary ballet choreographers like Alonzo King and Choo San Goh.
The young dancer became “hungry” to learn more about the contemporary side of dance. Funded by an arts donor, he went to Europe on an audition trip and landed at Bejart Ballet Lausanne. His “exceptional experience” with a phenomenon of that era, Maurice Bejart, ended with a foot injury.
He moved back to Milwaukee and performed again with his first company, now under the direction of Michael Pink, who is overseeing the PBT production of his “Dracula” in February. Still hungry for contemporary, he danced with Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet for a year, then freelanced in New York. He successfully auditioned for Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, a San Francisco-based group that viewed dance as “spirit science.” He loved working with King, who taught him a “cultural understanding of movement and the world.” But after touring with them for 18 months, he left to teach in Ghana.
Heritage and Lineage. McKinney had become interested in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the possibilities of healing through dance. About this time, he met with his future husband, Daniel Banks. The two started DNAWORKS dance theater that featured film work “pertinent to and in communities around the world.” Social issues like the oppression of native Americans began to take precedence. They were using dance to share stories.
Back to NYC. But first they returned to New York where McKinney freelanced once again. Then word came that the Alvin Ailey American Dance Company was looking for a “tall, versatile male dancer.” Although he had already auditioned twice for his dream company, the third time was a charm. After only two years, though, he decided to get his masters degree at New York University, where he focused on heroin drug use among African heritage women on the lower East Side. Again, could dance support healing?
Teaching. McKinney accepted a position at the New Mexico School for the Arts in Santa Fe, where he started a dance department. After six years, he moved to Texas Christian University, where he is now an associate professor for classical and contemporary dance. While there, he continued performing and made dances, film and theater with Banks. Bonding with four other local, social justice-based organizations, he helped turn a historic Ku Klux Klan building into a performing arts center and did research around lynching. He also worked with an augmented reality app. Dance and music were explored as “healing modalities.” He asked, “What can dance do? What makes performers so important in society, not just beautiful, but carving an indispensable role?”
Other things to know about the new artistic director:
- McKinney will stage classics that have not been presented in Pittsburgh and, at this time, intends to create the choreography for the upcoming new “Nutcracker” that is already on the books several years down the road. “It will have my fingerprints all over it,” he says.
- Choreographers that McKinney intends to invite include the afore-mentioned Alonzo King, who recently unveiled a world premiere, “Single Eye,” at American Ballet Theatre to critical acclaim. Kyle Abraham, Pittsburgh native who has gone on to a major international career including New York City Ballet and the Royal Ballet, is high on his list as well. The two studied together at the Alvin Ailey company early in their careers and have remained friends. Also, he would like to invite Jamar Roberts, resident choreographer at Ailey, Sidra Bell, who recently became the first black female to choreograph at NYCB and has numerous Pittsburgh connections, and Stephanie Martinez, who has choreographed for Joffrey Ballet.
- As a university teacher and proponent of French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss, McKinney acknowledges that PBT has “good educational and community programming.” Additionally, he would like to bring more “values of social justice and social justice education to PBT and Pittsburgh. And these values and practices will be reflected in many ways, including programming and community engagement and in our relationships with each other as people of Pittsburgh and employees of PBT. PBT has set a stage onto which I will step forward to bring them into their intersection with classical ballet.” In that way, he feels he will elevate the purpose of dance.
- McKinney will continue Jaffe’s ABT curriculum that she installed in the PBT school. He has the certification to teach it and already has been working with school director Marjorie Grundvig. As for the company, he will utilize all of the techniques that he has studied, including NYCB, Vaganova, Cecchetti, Bournonville and the Paris Opera Ballet school. “I have established for myself an aesthetic that is “clean and versatile.”
- Since he has worked with an augmented reality app and potentially could continue to develop it, McKinney looks forward to working in Pittsburgh, which he considers a “tech hub.”
- He looks forward to training and mentoring the PBT artists around “self-reflection and self-learning, to know themselves on deeper levels, to investigate through ballet who they are. It’s really about us. How can we continue to move in the direction of each other?”
Bottom line: The PBT search committee and board have taken a bold, maybe risky step in hiring McKinney. This is a company that has kept an eye on its bottom line and that means ticket sales, which, at times, meant a Disney-esque approach to the repertoire. There is a lot to like about him. McKinney talks about dance in a probing way, giving it the sophisticated thought and passion that it deserves. He is obviously intelligent and will provide a singular voice in what essentially has been an elite European art form, but one that has been inching towards change. Subsequently there are a lot of variables and how much will happen is unsure, because change takes time and can initiate other changes. One thing is for certain: there will be many eyes watching McKinney in the local, national and international dance community.
None more so than the company dancers at PBT.
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