Ballets Nègres: Black Dance Takes the Stage in Post-war Britain

A new company on the London stage

In April 1946, Ballets Nègres opened its first London season at the Twentieth Century Theatre in Westbourne Grove. Its founders, the Jamaican dancers Berto Pasuka and Richie Riley, assembled performers bringing experiences from Africa, the Caribbean and Britain. Pasuka led the choreography. The enterprise offered Black performers the opportunity to shape an evening of dance around their own subjects, rather than appearing only within somebody else’s account of Black life. It was an ambitious proposition for a company without secure financial backing. ¹

The date matters. Ballets Nègres was already performing two years before the Empire Windrush reached Tilbury in 1948. Its story therefore unsettles any suggestion that Black participation in modern British cultural life began with that ship’s arrival. The Black British Ballet project places the company at the beginning of its post-war timeline, alongside the later struggles of individual dancers to enter established schools and companies. Ballets Nègres opened a different route: its founders made an organisation through which they could choose the repertoire, present Black dancers together and define the artistic terms of their work. ²

From Jamaica to wartime London

Pasuka and Riley had known one another before the company existed. Research by Bob Ramdhanie traces their involvement in the performance activities associated with Marcus Garvey’s organisation in Jamaica, including the large cast of Snapshots of 1931. Pasuka also performed at Kingston’s Ward Theatre. These connections place him within an existing Caribbean culture of public entertainment and Black self-expression. London offered new possibilities, but the desire to perform, and the material from which he could create, did not originate when he reached Britain. ³

Pasuka arrived in Britain in 1939 and worked in wartime entertainment, including cabaret and revue. Film work helped bring together people who would form the company. The BFI’s account identifies Men of Two Worlds, released in 1946, as a particularly important meeting point. Pasuka’s choreography subsequently drew on Black folklore and Caribbean life, using mime alongside dance to tell stories. Movement, character and dramatic situation belonged together: a performer needed to communicate who someone was, what they wanted and how they responded to other people. ⁴

Black leadership and a varied ensemble

The company gathered people whose routes to London differed considerably. The Museum of Colour identifies performers and staff from Jamaica, Trinidad, England, British Guiana, Ghana and Nigeria. That geographical range is part of its artistic history. A description such as Caribbean dance alone cannot encompass every participant, while African dance should not imply a single, uniform tradition. The company existed through particular people meeting and working together, with the practical task of making performances that an audience could follow. ⁶

Its name also expressed a choice. In an interview examined by dance historian Ramsay Burt, Riley recalled the difficulty of finding a name that asserted Black identity in the racial vocabulary of the period. The French title offered a way to make that assertion while identifying the work as ballet. This was a claim to artistic authority as well as a description of the performers. The company was Black-led, but its membership was not exclusively Black: white British and other European collaborators also took part. ⁵

Music made through collaboration

The composer Leonard Salzedo was one of those collaborators. Born in London into a Sephardic Jewish family, he trained at the Royal College of Music and had already composed The Fugitive for Ballet Rambert before working with Ballets Nègres. He wrote four scores for Pasuka’s company in 1946 and 1947. His involvement connected the enterprise with the wider professional world of British ballet without making its music merely an imitation of an established company’s repertory. Salzedo’s later career included further ballet scores and work as Rambert’s music director, making his contribution to Ballets Nègres part of a sustained relationship with dance. ⁸

The Leonard Salzedo Society describes a collaboration between his piano playing and the improvised rhythms supplied by Ambrose Campbell’s West African Rhythm Brothers. Pat Clover, Salzedo’s wife, undertook business work and also danced. The society dates the opening performance to 30 April 1946 and records an eight-week season. In this small organisation, artistic and administrative responsibilities overlapped: composing, performing and keeping the company operating were closely connected tasks. ⁷

Jamaican stories and colonial encounters

De Prophet drew on a Jamaican story of religious leadership, belief and punishment. As the programme synopsis reproduced by Ramdhanie explains, its central figure tries to convince his followers that he can fly to heaven and is imprisoned after failing. The work included other figures associated with spiritual power and protection. Such material gave Pasuka possibilities for character, dramatic contrast and bodily transformation. It also brought aspects of Jamaican cultural life into a theatre where they could become the substance of a ballet, rather than a decorative background. ³

They Came addressed colonial encounters more directly. Clover, interviewed in 2010, remembered playing a nurse among the white newcomers who entered an African community. Alongside medicine, the ballet brought business and organised religion into that encounter. Her account emphasises the intrusion of these outside forces. The choice to place such a story on stage made the relationship between Europeans and Africans a matter for dramatic examination. Costumes and movement distinguished characters and institutions, allowing the choreography to ask who possessed authority and what their arrival meant for the people already there. ⁹

Aggrey approached racial relationships through a different image. Named after the Ghanaian educationalist James Aggrey, it used the black and white keys of a piano as a metaphor for cooperation. Burt’s examination of a 1948 programme describes dancers representing the keys, Pasuka as the Pianist and a figure of Fear threatening their harmony. This was an argument expressed through bodies and music rather than through a spoken political address. ¹⁰

A repertoire with more than one mood

The company did not confine itself to solemn statements. Market Day offered a lighter setting, while later works widened its dramatic range. The 1948 programme studied by Burt included Blood, a tragedy set in Haiti whose plot turned on a woman’s concealed mixed heritage and her relationship with her husband. Its imagery also requires critical reading today: the programme presented Haitian religious practice through a sensational dramatic story. Recovering the work does not require accepting every representation within it as an accurate account of the people or traditions depicted. ¹⁰

Ballets Nègres combined storytelling with a distinctive physical presence. The BFI characterises its approach through mime, dance and material drawn from Black life. That combination helps explain why the word ballet can mislead a reader expecting an evening defined by pointe work. Pasuka was making theatrical dance that could carry feeling and narrative through an ensemble. The important question is what the movement accomplished within each work, rather than whether every gesture fitted a single inherited category of European ballet. ⁴

Touring and an early television appearance

The first London engagement led to further performances at the Playhouse Theatre and touring in Britain and continental Europe. Voices of British Ballet records visits to the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland, and identifies Roy Hobdell as the company’s designer. Ballets Nègres therefore belonged to a network of theatres and travelling performers, reaching audiences well beyond the room where it began. Sets, costumes, music and choreography had to function as a touring production. Its international engagements also demonstrate the distance between the company’s brief institutional life and the breadth of its public activity. ¹¹

Television provided another form of visibility. The Salzedo Society records a BBC appearance at Alexandra Palace on 24 June 1946, with Edric Connor introducing the performance and singing while the dancers changed. The programme presented two ballets. The broadcast came during the opening season, showing how quickly the company reached beyond theatre audiences. The performers’ work could move between stage and screen even while the organisation remained financially insecure. ⁷

Recognition did not remove prejudice

Professional visibility did not protect the dancers from everyday racism. Clover recalled cafés near the theatre being unwilling to welcome Black members of the company. Her testimony is particularly valuable because she spoke from inside an ensemble whose members were treated differently outside the rehearsal room. Audiences could applaud a company while the surrounding society continued to obstruct ordinary activities. Her memories also caution against treating the successful first season as proof that its performers had been accepted on equal terms in British cultural life. ⁹

Nor did touring success secure a lasting financial foundation. The National Portrait Gallery’s account describes critical and public acclaim but an inability to obtain subsidy; box-office income alone could not sustain the enterprise. It dates the company’s closure to 1952. This was a practical limit on what Pasuka and Riley could continue to organise. Recognition needed to be accompanied by the resources to employ people, rehearse and keep presenting work. Without them, a company could lose its future while still having made a substantial artistic impression. ¹

Dancers carried the work onwards

Closure did not end the artistic lives connected with Ballets Nègres. Elroy Josephs appeared in its 1952 London programme, taking ensemble and character roles across several ballets. Burt follows his subsequent career into television, community dance and teaching. Josephs developed Dance Theatre Workshop No. 7 and later taught in Liverpool. His history makes the company’s afterlife more concrete: experience passed through working dancers into other performances and classrooms, even when the original organisation no longer existed to gather or publicise those connections. ⁵

This is one reason that Ballets Nègres deserves more than a brief position in a list of firsts. A timeline can establish that the company existed, but it cannot by itself reveal how its work travelled through people. The Black British Ballet project places its founding and closure within a longer record of participation and exclusion. Read in that setting, those two dates mark both an achievement and an interruption in the development of opportunities for Black dancers. ²

Reconstructing a company on film

Stephen Dwoskin’s film Ballet Black, made in 1986, returned to the company through surviving participants and a younger generation of performers. Henry K. Miller’s BFI essay describes the importance of former dancer Astley Harvey, a friend of Dwoskin, and Riley’s contribution to reconstructing They Came. At the Mercury Theatre, the younger cast worked with memories and instructions that could not be recovered from a photograph alone. The film brought rehearsal, recollection and performance into a shared account of the company. ¹²

That process involved interpretation. As Miller explains, the production drew on interviews, archival material and the memories of original members, including John Lagey and Salzedo. A later reconstruction is evidence of how people remembered and transmitted choreography; it is not an untouched recording of a performance in 1946. Its value lies partly in making that exchange visible. Veterans could explain actions and dramatic intentions, while younger dancers supplied the physical work through which a past repertoire could become performance again. ¹²

The records that keep the history available

Preservation has also depended on institutions retaining the material around performance. The University of Reading holds Dwoskin’s archive, and its research project examined the combination of papers, photographs, correspondence and audiovisual files left by the filmmaker. Its account identifies Ballet Black’s interviews with original troupe members, including Harvey and Lagey, as part of the film’s attempt to recover an overlooked company. Keeping such material accessible allows later researchers to ask new questions about who contributed, how recollections differ and which parts of a production remain recoverable. ¹³

Black Cultural Archives provides further points of contact with the company’s own period and its later remembrance. Its dance subject guide lists a Ballets Nègres programme dated 2 September 1952, a photograph of Riley, press cuttings and his recorded interview, The Myth of the Motherland, from January 1985. These are different kinds of evidence. A programme documents what audiences were offered; an interview records a participant’s account decades afterwards. Bringing them together helps prevent a company’s history from being reduced to the language of contemporary critics or a single retrospective summary. ¹⁴

The Museum of Colour places Ballets Nègres within a much longer history of performers who helped shape British cultural life. That context gives its achievement a useful scale. Pasuka, Riley and their colleagues were neither isolated visitors nor interchangeable representatives of a continent. They were artists making particular choices about stories, movement, sound and collaboration. Their company lasted only a few years, but the work they created belongs within the history of British theatre and dance. ⁶

Sources

[1] National Portrait Gallery. Les Ballets Nègres; 2016.

[2] Black British Ballet. Timeline.

[3] Bob Ramdhanie, University of Warwick doctoral thesis. African Dance in England: Spirituality and Continuity, volume 1, especially pages 150–155; April 2005.

[4] BFI Replay. Ballet Black; Film 1986; catalogue undated.

[5] Ramsay Burt, The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies; author manuscript at De Montfort University. Elroy Josephs and the Hidden History of Black British Dance; 2019.

[6] Museum of Colour. A Very British Rhythm: historical context and Ballets Nègres; 2023 exhibition.

[7] Leonard Salzedo Society. Ballet Negres Anniversary; 24 June 2026.

[8] Wise Music Classical. Leonard Salzedo.

[9] Voices of British Ballet. Patricia Clover: interview with Patricia Linton; Interview 2010; published 21 July 2026.

[10] Ramsay Burt, British Dance and the African Diaspora. Les Ballets Nègres, an introduction; 7 November 2019.

[11] Voices of British Ballet. 1946: Les Ballet Nègres established.

[12] Henry K. Miller, BFI Southbank programme notes / Sight and Sound. Ballet Black; 15 February 2022.

[13] University of Reading Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Digital Humanities. The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin’s Personal Cinema.

[14] Black Cultural Archives. Black British Dance: Subject Guide.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.