Dancer Nia Towe had been keeping a secret for months.
Last week, Towe, who was born and raised in Chicago, settled in to watch an episode of reality television with her family and boyfriend.
On-screen, Towe stood on the “America’s Got Talent” stage in Pasadena alongside fellow members of the Chicago company Hiplet Ballerinas.
They stood in front of the judges, ready to audition for Simon Cowell, Sofia Vergara, Heidi Klum and Howie Mandel.
Their piece started with bourrées and music from “Swan Lake.” But then the music changed, and the dancers strutted upstage before expertly tossing aside their white tutus. They sambaed on pointe; they moved their hips. Dancer Alexandria Franklin wrapped up the piece, choreographed by fellow company member Trevon Lawrence, with a series of fouettés and a slide into the splits.
That was in April.
Until a couple of weeks ago, Towe, Franklin and three other members of the Hiplet Ballerinas — Taylor Edwards, Nia Parker and Allison Harsh — had to keep their TV appearance tightly under wraps.
At the Chicago Multicultural Dance Center, where the Hiplet Ballerinas dance under the direction of Homer Hans Bryant, the inventor of hiplet and a former principal dancer with the vaunted Dance Theater of Harlem, they rehearsed in secret. Towe only told her family about the audition a few days before it aired on NBC.
The Hiplet Ballerinas received unanimous “yes” votes after their audition, meaning they will advance to the judge’s deliberation rounds. They don’t know yet whether they will make it to the next performance round, which would mean dancing on live TV.
Hiplet came out of a ballet Bryant made in the 1990s to rap music. As rap gave way to hip-hop, rap ballet became hiplet, a term Bryant coined in 2009. Now, he has students whose parents trained with him. His dancers have performed hiplet around the world.
“You split the ballerina in half,” Bryant said. “You give her this movement that is grounded and earthy, and that’s the bottom half. And then you have the top half that’s ethereal and classical.”
‘There’s this joy in the building’
“Tell me why ballet, because ballet’s quite boring,” Cowell asked the Hiplet Ballerinas before their audition. When the group started to dance, the camera panned to Cowell’s face appearing displeased before Tchaikovsky gave way to the Pussycat Dolls. (Cowell was won over.)
The Hiplet Ballerinas don’t share Cowell’s apparent distaste for ballet. For some of them, ballet was their first love. Hiplet is something that isn’t meant to replace either ballet or hip-hop but stand on its own as something else entirely.
Franklin began training with Bryant when she was 11, and the ballet barre is still her church. Now 34, she has had a diverse professional dance career, dancing in contemporary ballet companies and on cruise ships after graduating from Howard University. In 2017, she joined Hiplet Ballerinas.
“I like that you can just be free,” she said. That freedom comes out of hard work: Hiplet is more difficult than people tend to think, Franklin said.
Melding genres of dance is a challenge of trial and error. All pointe work requires significant ankle strength; this is particularly true in hiplet, which involves much more hopping on pointe than does classical ballet. Bryant requires his students to train in his rigorous ballet program, sometimes for years, before they are allowed to add hiplet to their schedules.
Franklin compares ballet to church. Towe adds that if ballet is church, then hiplet is that time after church, when people are talking and eating and kids are running around.
“There’s this joy in the building,” she said.
In 2016, videos of Bryant’s young hiplet dancers went viral on social media. The dancers — mostly Black teenage girls at the time — received a lot of love but a helping of backlash along with it. The criticism, much of which came from ballet purists, tended to focus on the fact that the dancers were dancing on pointe turned in and with bent knees, or that they weren’t getting over the box of their pointe shoes — something that’s necessary to perform the hops on pointe that are central to hiplet.
“It’s one thing to have a Black body doing a classical art. OK, they can deal with that. But now we’re taking that art form and we’re fusing it with a more Afrocentric art form,” Parker said. “To some people it’s like bringing together oil and water. But really, I think it’s more so like flour and butter. And it just makes something real nice that tastes good.”
Ballet has a history of racism and exclusion, both in the U.S. and abroad. Towe notes that despite this, Black people and Black culture have had a heavy hand in shaping American ballet. George Balanchine, often called the father of American ballet, was famously inspired by jazz.
“When kids don’t see themselves doing things that they’re interested in, subconsciously it makes them think that they aren’t allowed to do it,” Franklin said.
She remembers, as a child, auditioning for the role of Clara in a Chicago-area production of “The Nutcracker.” After auditioning, the dancers were told that the production would be looking at how potential Claras would match up with the adults who would play their parents.
“And in my head, as a kid, I kind of thought ‘Well, it’s just a show, why does it matter if we look like the adults that will be playing our parents?’ ” Franklin said. “I knew I wouldn’t get that part, because I knew the neighborhood I was in and that most likely there wouldn’t be too many adults auditioning that looked like me.”
And while the ballet world is known for its rigid requirements on body size and shape, “that’s not really our shtick,” Parker said. Hiplet is not about what a body looks like, but what it can do.
Erin Barnett, the Chicago-based founder and director of Black Girls Dance, said she was “beyond ecstatic” to see Hiplet Ballerinas audition for “America’s Got Talent.”
“They represented the ballet aesthetic while adding that Black Girl Magic,” Barnett said. “The combination of the two is just unstoppable.”
