‘I never dreamed that one day I would be a ballerina in New York, or that people would know who I am,’ the Dance Theatre of Harlem principal Ingrid Silva said a few days after the company’s recent New York season drew to a close. Silva’s path has not been easy, but her determination is part of what makes her such a compelling artist. Offstage she is direct, unassuming, with intelligent eyes and a quick smile. And onstage, she lights up, dancing with brio and joy and a desire to be fully seen for who she is. She has been described as a ‘queenly presence,’ an ‘impressively strong technician,’ and (by a friend and colleague) ‘small but mighty.’ For her it’s simple: ‘When I’m onstage, I feel there is nothing else.’
Silva’s success is all the more remarkable for the fact that it once seemed it might elude her. ‘I had many people who didn’t believe in me,’ she says. This was in Brazil, where Silva grew up in the poor Rio neighbourhood of Mangueira. One person who did believe in her was her mother, Maureny dos Santos Oliveira, a strong woman who had moved to Rio from a rural area to get an education and create a better life. For years, Maureny worked as a maid. (Silva’s father was in the Brazilian Air Force.) One day in 1996 a neighbour told her about ballet classes being offered at a local community centre. She encouraged Ingrid, aged eight, and younger brother Bruno, to go.
‘When I’m onstage, I feel there is nothing else’
Ingrid Silva
The school, founded by Brazilian ballet dancer Thereza Aguilar, was called Dançando Para Não Dançar. Silva trained there every day for the following 10 years. What captured her interest was the challenge. As soon as she learned a new skill, she wanted to figure out how to do it better. More pirouettes, higher jumps, straighter legs, more turnout. ‘It was incredible to see how I transformed,’ she says. ‘This is what made me curious about the art form.’
At 12, Silva also enrolled at the Escola de Dança Maria Olenewa, affiliated with the city’s classical company, the Ballet do Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro. But throughout her training she encountered attitudes that reflected a racially-coded idea of what a ballet dancer should look like: what Silva refers to as ‘the look.’ Despite the fact that almost half of the population of Brazil identifies as mixed race, ‘we are not as diverse as we like to think,’ says Silva. ‘Even now, there are no dark-skinned Black ballerinas in the company of the Theatro Real.’’
Teachers commented on her physique in ways that felt undermining, even traumatic. More than one told her she was too muscular to be a ballerina, a complaint Black dancers have heard all too often. Others commented on her body shape: ‘I’ve always had a little bit of a butt,’ says Silva, ‘even though I was very skinny and long. My teacher would always say, “you have to put your butt in, or I won’t give you corrections.” How can you put in a muscle?’ She noticed that dancers of European descent did not receive these criticisms, even when their physique was similar to hers. The comments had lingering effects on her self-confidence. Only after the birth of her daughter, in 2020, did she stop feeling that she had to cover up in class. ‘Now I don’t care,’ Silva, now 36, says. ‘I’ve finally let go.’
As a kid, Silva’s dream was to join the Theatro Municipal, Rio’s only classical ballet company. She auditioned, but was not chosen: ‘None of us [the school’s Black dancers] had the “look.”’ Instead, she studied at the contemporary dance school founded by Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker, then spent two years as an apprentice with the highly-respected Grupo Corpo, but was never made a full member. ‘Nobody wanted to give me a chance.’
‘‘Nobody wanted to give me a chance’
Ingrid Silva
‘No matter how hard I asked her to work, she worked harder’
Virginia Johnson
At 18, it seemed her dream of becoming a professional dancer might be slipping away. Just then the former Dance Theatre of Harlem dancer, Bethânia Gomes, spotted her at Dançando Para Não Dançar. DTH had temporarily closed due to financial difficulties, but its school continued. Gomes suggested that Silva send in an audition tape, which led to an in-person audition. Arthur Mitchell, founder of both school and company, told her, ‘You have to come back.’ She is still amazed that Mitchell saw something in her after just one class, when others who had known her for years had not. It convinced her to take a leap of faith and come to New York with no guarantee of a career. In 2007, she packed her bags and joined the DTH Professional Training Program, on full scholarship. She spoke virtually no English.
The following year, she joined the company’s Dancing Through Barriers Ensemble. It was only then that she truly believed she would become a professional dancer. ‘After so many no’s and so many doubts, I had a signed contract, and I knew that they wanted me.’ In 2013, DTH was fully restored and Ingrid Silva’s professional career had truly begun.
The ballerina Virginia Johnson, then artistic director, remembers working with Silva as she refined her craft, early in the morning before company class. ‘No matter how hard I asked her to work,’ says Johnson, ‘she worked that hard and harder.’ Johnson would ask her to analyse movements, finding nuances of expression and expanding her palette. Johnson also suggested Silva keep a journal, writing down all the things she wanted to work on, as well as her artistic goals. It was a game-changing idea. ‘I never knew that by making a plan for yourself and visualising it, you could actually accomplish something,’ Silva says. Still an avid writer, she has published a memoir as well as a children’s book.
This constant refining and ferocious work ethic have made Silva a leading dancer in the company: as the ballerina in George Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante and Valse Fantaisie, the bride in Geoffrey Holder’s Dougla, and in Darrell Grand Moultrie’s Harlem on My Mind, Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, Robert Garland’s Return, and more recently William Forsythe’s Blake Works IV and The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude. In a company with no official ranks, she stands out. ‘I remember dancing Valse Fantaisie together on tour in Brazil,’ says dancer Christopher Charles McDaniel. ‘We had a magical show. Leaving the theatre was like Beyoncé had finished a show, because her people wanted to see her, hug her, and thank her.’ She had become the artist she had always wanted to be.
Her horizons have kept expanding. Silva has long been a role model in the company, leading by example, and is also a voice for Black dancers. She has been vocal about the need for pointe shoe companies to expand their range of shades. It took her two years to convince her own shoemaker, Chacott, to make a model that matched her skin tone. She donated the last pair of toe shoes that she had to dye herself, with Black Opals’ Ebony Brown liquid foundation, to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History, where it went on display in 2020. That same year, she had a daughter, Laura, now four, and demonstrated that it was possible to integrate a baby into life as a working ballerina. ‘Being a mother makes me happy, but it’s not all of who I am, right?’
That’s not all. During breaks in her performance schedule Silva frequently teaches in Brazil, and in 2020 she co-founded Blacks in Ballet, highlighting the careers of Black dancers around the world and operating as a ‘creative collective’ and network. And she has begun to choreograph, for festivals like the Fire Island Dance Festival and Bryant Park Picnic Performance, and, more recently for companies including Chattanooga Ballet and Ballet Nacional Dominicano. Whenever she can, she uses her own prominence to offer opportunities to dancers from Blacks in Ballet.
It’s all part of who she is. For Silva, dance is not just about expressing herself, or about finding creative outlet, but something much more basic and human and necessary. As she says, ‘I think dance is transformative. It’s a kind of survival, a way of being able to have a voice as a person, to be seen as a full human being.’ Of that, there is no doubt.
WATCH
Ingrid Silva in the dance film Above
Marina Harss is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, New Yorker, Dance Magazine and Fjord Review, and author of The Boy from Kyiv, about the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky (Farrar Straus and Giroux).
