Tina Ramirez: Founder of acclaimed Ballet Hispánico
The pioneering dancer and choreographer had a lifelong commitment to education while helping New York’s Hispanic dancers to gain serious recognition and employment for their talent
Tina Ramirez, who dedicated her career to showcasing the diversity of Hispanic culture and founded the dance company Ballet Hispánico in New York City in 1970, shepherding it to international renown, has died aged 92.
After an extensive performing career, Ramirez turned to teaching and developing inner-city cultural resources during the 1960s.
“We were all around New York City,” she told the Los Angeles Times, speaking of people of Latino and Hispanic heritage, “but people thought we were dishwashers, people washing the floors. We weren’t paid any attention. I wanted to say, ‘Hey, we have a beautiful culture.’”
She named the company Ballet Hispánico to reflect maximum diversity, exploring performers and musical styles representing nearly two dozen Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries.
Today the school has enrolled 800 students who train in many different techniques, ranging from jazz to ballet to classical Spanish idioms.
Ballet Hispánico was and is a chamber company, featuring between 10 and 15 dancers, who perform works created especially for the troupe. The company’s repertory encompasses a blend of classical ballet, modern dance, classical Spanish forms and infusions of indigenous dance vocabulary. The music and the stories are almost always Hispanic-derived. The ranks of the troupe have been open, however, to non-Hispanic performers, as well.
“One of the things I'm interested in is risk-taking,” Ramirez told The New York Times in 1994, explaining her decision to commission a new work from choreographer Amanda Miller. “I said to her: ‘Would you like to do a dark piece? To Spanish music?’”
Ramirez said that she saw dance as “painting in space”, in which “emotions should come from the inside and be revealed by the body in motion”.
Ernestina Ramirez was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on 7 November 1929. Her father was a bullfighter from Mexico, and her mother was from Puerto Rico. She accompanied her father throughout Latin America for his work. She was mesmerised by him, later saying that his elegance of movement and flair for the dramatic as a bullfighter seeded her interest in dance. He provided her first dance lessons by having her balance on his feet.
Ramirez was five when her parents divorced, and she and her mother (who remarried) eventually moved into an apartment in Spanish Harlem. Her mother, who came from a family of educators, didn’t want her daughter to become a dancer. But Ramirez’s sister, Coco, was prescribed dance lessons as a way to improve her poor health.
After a year, their mother relented and allowed Ramirez, by now 12, to begin to formally study dance. Her principal teacher was Lola Bravo, a doyenne of Spanish dance who also believed in the importance of classical ballet; Ramirez went on to study with Ballets Russes ballerina Alexandra Danilova.
From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, Ramirez danced on Broadway, in modern dance troupes and with a concert group led by Federico Rey. She lived in Spain for two years and continued to study there. She and Coco teamed up for a nightclub act that toured the world with bandleader Xavier Cugat.
Ramirez returned to New York in 1963 to take over the studio of her former teacher Bravo, who was retiring. She saw firsthand what study after study has demonstrated – that arts education enhances students’ self-esteem and their performance throughout their standard academic curriculum, as well.
That concept inspired her to start Operation High Hopes, a professional performance-training programme for underprivileged children from all five New York City boroughs. The city’s Office for Economic Opportunity awarded her $18,000 to start the programme in the summer of 1967, before the grant money soon succumbed to budget cuts.
Some of her students from the programme continued working with her and had set their sights on professional careers. She wanted to provide them with professional opportunities, and Ramirez founded Ballet Hispánico with a $20,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.
“I wanted to give employment to Hispanic dancers,” she told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. “I wanted to keep them from having to dance in nightclubs. They were serious dancers and deserved the opportunity to be treated as such.”
It was a propitious moment for dancers of colour. Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem had been established in 1969. Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theatre was now over a decade old. Yet back then as well as now, ensuring stability was a continual challenge for even the most acclaimed troupes – let alone a pioneering start-up.
Amid a New York City real estate market that has dramatically affected the vulnerability of arts organisations, Ballet Hispánico’s investment in purchasing its own building was key to its longevity. When it seemed as though the company might lose its studios on West 89th Street, the local community board stepped in to champion its purchase of the building as well as a house next door. Ballet Hispánico raised the necessary $1.3m to buy and renovate the two buildings “dollar by dollar”, Ramirez recalled.
Ballet Hispánico began touring across the US and internationally throughout its first decade of existence. Ramirez’s commitment to education radiated beyond the boundaries of her own school, as she sent the company’s dancers into the schools of New York City and local communities on tour stops.
In 2005, Ramirez received the National Medal of Arts, the highest government award for artists and art patrons.
In 2009, at age 80, Ramirez retired as Ballet Hispánico’s director, citing the way that consuming company responsibilities had swamped her wider appreciation for the arts. “I don’t see enough dance,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t see enough theatre, I don’t go to museums. That has to change.”
Survivors include her sister, Coco Ramirez Morris.
Fundamental to Ramirez’s vision was the continuum, the shared impulse between folk culture and conservatory disciplines – a recognition of the shared roots of all movement to music. “I believe all dancing really comes from folk dance, even though I’m a trained dancer and love classical ballet,” she told The New York Times in 1994. “Even ballet came from folk. Dancers today may have a slick, fabulous technique, but it has to come back to that.”
Tina Ramirez, dancer and choreographer, born 7 November 1929, died 6 September 2022
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