Wissot: Admiring the accomplishments of a remarkable couple

I couldn’t bear listening to Mariah Carey tell me for the thousandth time that all she wants for Christmas is me so I sauntered over on Dec. 8 to the Cleo Parker Dance Theater in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood to watch an electrifying performance of “Granny Dances To A Holiday Drum.”

To a modern dance lover like myself not knowing who Cleo Parker Robinson is would be like a rabid football fan not knowing anything about Tom Brady. She is as much a legendary figure in the annals of modern dance in this country as Brady was in the hierarchy of great NFL quarterbacks.

Brady played professional football for 23 seasons before retiring at the age of 45. The “Grande Dame of Dance’s” legacy is longer than Brady’s by the length of two football fields. Her namesake multi-racial dance company is in its 53rd season, “Granny Dances to a Holiday Drum” just completed its 32nd annual performance, and Parker Robinson at 75 seems a long way from retirement.

The partnership between Cleo and her husband, Tom Robinson, was both a romantic love song and an inspiring story of a remarkable couple who broke down racial barriers facing Black men and women in late 20th century America. At the time of his death at 76 in 2022, the Robinsons had been married for 51 years. They both grew up in Denver and met at Regis Jesuit High School where they were prom king and queen in their senior year. Tom Robinson enjoyed a stellar career as an athlete, teacher, coach, administrator and college football referee.

He was an All-American running back at CSU. A devastating injury dashed his hope of playing football for the San Francisco 49ers. He returned to his alma mater, Regis, to teach all levels of mathematics including AP calculus, and coach both the varsity basketball and golf teams.

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Robinson was one of the first African-American college football referees, a role he excelled at for 32 years. The major college games he refereed included the Fiesta, Rose, Cotton and Gator bowls. After he retired from teaching, coaching and refereeing, he became the first Black administrator of the Colorado High School Activities Association.

But for all his success in sports and education, his most important achievement was founding, with his wife, the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company in 1970. Historically, because of pervasive discrimination, modern dancers of color were barred from joining exclusively white dance companies.

The great dancer, Josephine Baker, encountered racism in the United States in the 1920s and had to move to Paris to be embraced by European audiences. Katherine Dunham, a highly gifted dancer/choreographer, toured the world between the 1940s and 1960s with her namesake dance company because the same opportunities weren’t available to dark-complexioned dancers here.

It wasn’t until 1958 when Alvin Ailey opened the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City, followed by Arthur Mitchell (he joined New York City Ballet company as its first African-American dancer in 1955) who in 1969 started the Dance Theater of Harlem, that dancers of color could fulfill their dance ambitions without having to leave the country to perform.

It’s important to note that the opportunities Ailey and Mitchell provided for dancers of color in the East were matched by Parker Robinson and another noted choreographer, Alonso King, in the West. The San Francisco-based Alonso King LINES Ballet had its inaugural season in 1982. It is an excellent company that has been part of Vail’s summer dance festival on numerous occasions. I didn’t know it when I began writing this column but King’s company will showcase its artistry on Jan. 14 at the Vilar Performing Arts Center in Beaver Creek.

Trailblazers like Ailey, Mitchell, Parker Robinson and King had a profound effect on the racial composition of dance companies today. An example is the extremely talented Misty Copeland (she danced in Vail a few summers ago) becoming in 2015 the first Black principal ballerina in the 75-year history of the prestigious American Ballet Theater. Another is the pairing of interracial dance partners, once strictly verboten, and now normative throughout the fields of classical ballet and modern dance.

In 2021 Parker Robinson staged two world premieres in Colorado. The first was at that summer’s Vail Dance Festival. It was titled “Standing On The Shoulders” and paid tribute to the debt we all owe to those who came before us and paved the way for us to be able to advance ourselves. The second premiere took place that fall in Denver at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House. “Freedom Dance” was a choreographic masterpiece created with the acclaimed jazz singer and Denver native, Diane Reeves.

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Colorado and the nation have recognized Parker Robinson for championing racial diversity in modern dance. She has received the Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence and has been inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame and the Blacks in Colorado Hall of Fame. Colorado College, Denver University, Regis University, and CU Boulder have bestowed honorary doctorate degrees on her. On a national level, she has received the Kennedy Center Medal of Honor and earlier this year at a White House Ceremony was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Biden.

As the performance of “Granny Dances to a Holiday Drum” drew to a close, a giant image of a smiling Tom Robinson appeared on the backdrop screen behind the dance stage. It indicated to me that he remained even after his death a treasured member of the dance company and the man to whom Cleo Parker Robinson promised she would “carry his light in my heart forever.”

Jay Wissot is a resident of Denver and Vail. Email him at jayhwissot@mac.com