ARTHUR BELL: A Dancer Lost & Found.

When we recall dance and theatrical performances that have given us so much pleasure, we, the audience, sometimes fail to notice the bricks-and-mortar people who contribute to our enjoyment. Without these supporting players--the corps de ballet and character dancers in ballet and the ensemble in modern dance and on Broadway--the show just couldn't go on. These valuable artists are sometimes overlooked, and occasionally they disappear altogether. Arthur Bell was such a dancer, and, until March 1998, he was a forgotten man.

Bell, seventy-one years old and homeless, was the subject of a feature article that appeared in the New York Times on March 25, 1998: follow-up pieces appeared in the same newspaper on April 16 and May 9. He had been found wandering, disoriented, on a Brooklyn street. Paramedics had taken him to a city hospital where a social worker, Mafia Mackin, heard his surprising story. Bell had appeared with the New York City Ballet in the March 2, 1950, world premiere of Frederick Ashton's Illuminations, as well in subsequent performances of the work; on another occasion he had rehearsed onstage with Margot Fonteyn. He had also spent time performing in Pads, had studied there with the famed Olga Preobrajenska, and, in the course of touring Europe, had played a bit role in Alberto Lattuada's 1951 Italian film Anna, starting Silvana Mangano.

Fortunately for Bell, Mackin was no ordinary social worker. She had worked at one time as a photographer for Capezio and was familiar with the dance world. Names such as Ashton, George Balanchine, Tanaquil LeClercq, Jacques d'Amboise, and Talley Beatty--which might not mean anything to the average man in the street--were well known to her, and, after checking with the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, she was able to corroborate Bell's story, and inform a contact at the Times.

This happy ending for Bell was almost a case of media overkill, for he was the subject of national and international coverage by the Associated Press, CNN, ABC, and NBC. Even the Times of London contacted him. There was a later piece, complete with photographs of Bell frolicking on a New Jersey beach, in the June 15, 1998. People magazine. He was reunited with several members of his large family, and, in a final piece of good fortune, he was able to become a resident of the Actors Fund Retirement and Nursing Home in Englewood, New Jersey.

Earlier, Bell had rated a brief citation on page 89 of the February 1997 issue of Dance Magazine. He is noted in the article "Classic Black Dancers & Dance," by Jonnie Greene. Another recent mention occurs in Julie Kavanagh's biography, Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton, fortuitously reviewed on page 122 of the same issue. In her book, Kavanagh gives some insight into Ashton's choice of a black dancer for one of the cavaliers in the "Being Beauteous" section of the ballet:

"The dancer [portraying Pierrot] appeared with three other cavaliers, who, in a grand, Petipa-style adagio, partner the ballerina, Sacred Love. (One of them, Arthur Bell, was black, lending an exotic, Venetian touch and alluding to the Ethiopian servant who accompanied Rimbaud on his North African travels.)" [Page 377 of the Faber & Faber British edition.]

As seems to be the case with many African-American artists--particularly in the so-called classical arts--Arthur Bell Jr. was a son of a southern minister. Originally based in Georgia, the family moved around the South, finally settling in the Tampa, Florida, area. Somewhere along the line, Bell became enamored of dance, an activity definitely not approved of by his strict Pentecostal parents. After graduating from high school in 1941, he immediately migrated to New York City, supporting himself with a sewing job in the garment district.

A sympathetic aunt, Essie Dee Rogers, who lived in Brooklyn, supported his dance studies when the rest of his family did not. He began to take classes with Katherine Dunham and at the same time developed an interest in ballet. Although others discouraged him, he pursued ballet in spite of a dearth of opportunities for blacks and the fact that he had made a very late start. Dance archives reveal that he performed the role of The Boy Possessed in the Broadway show Carib Song (1945), choreographed by Dunham. Because of his contact with New York City Ballet, Belt, along with Louis Johnson, was one of very few black students attending the School of American Ballet. All in all, his training seems to have been desultory and his technical accomplishment scanty, but he pursued a professional dance career anyway, through sheer grit and determination. Former New York City Ballet dancer and company manager Edward Bigelow reported that Bell had the advantages of height, a handsome appearance, and good partnering skills.

Eventually he made his way to France. Paris in the 1950s was as much an artists' mecca as it had been in the fabled 1920s, and the dancer participated in and enjoyed its vital intellectual and artistic life. In 1955 he performed there with Pierre Lacotte's company, Les Ballets de la Tour Eiffel, appearing in a jazz ballet, La Nuit est une Sorciere ("Night Is a Witch"), choreographed by Lacotte and set to a score by jazz great Sidney Bechet. Bell may have lived in the same pension as author James Baldwin, although this cannot be verified. He says that Baldwin gave him a copy of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and that the book was never returned to him after he lent it to someone.

After these recollections, Bell's memory fails him, and he has been unable to fill in most of the subsequent gaps in his life story. In due course he returned to New York City, apparently too old for dancing engagements, and worked at a variety of low-level clerical and administrative jobs. He was a food service worker at Creedmoor Psychiatric Institute in Queens from 1967 to 1972; an office assistant with the City Department of Transportation from 1973 to 1980; and a typist, clerk, and receptionist with the City Human Resources Administration from 1982 until 1992. Somewhere along the line he became homeless, although he does not remember how or why.

Bell was able to meet with various family members after his story appeared in the New York Times. After a Tampa paper ran an Associated Press article about him, his sister Patricia was asked by a deacon of her church if she had seen the news, and within a short time Bell was reunited with his five sisters and his one surviving brother (two others had died). When the Actors Fund home offered him a residency, he felt truly blessed to be among fellow artists. He even danced a little--this time for joy.

Doris Perlman is Web site editor of Dance Magazine.