GOOD MORNING PRAGOBOTS!
We continue our look at Blacks In The Ballroom with…
RUFUS DUSTIN
Dancer, choreographer and judge Rufus Dustin is a bonefide legend in ballroom dancing. Peep this brotha’s resume:
- Two time lecturer at the World Ballroom Dance Congress in Blackpool, England
- North American Latin Champion
- North American 10-dance Champion
- US, British and World Champion
In a 2003 interview with Christina Zona of Dance Notes magazine, Mr. Dustin talks about his background, his experience as a Black man in the ballroom dance world and why so few African Americans are involved in ballroom dancing:
Tell us a little bit about your dance background.
I got started because I was hyperkinetic, which is now Attention Deficit Disorder. I was a child that didn’t sleep, was overactive and couldn’t pay attention, stuff like that, sometimes I wouldn’t sleep for as much as 72 hours. And that would drive my parents crazy. But I was born in 1949, so this was in the fifties. Mymother was a nurse and at that time it was called hyperkinetic. They said, “He’ll outgrow it. The best thing to do is to put him in some kind of program that keeps him physically active so he grows more tired at a proper time.” My parents put me in dance school because I loved to dance. That progressed into going to ballet classes and then that progressed into wanting to be a ballet dancer, but my parents didn’t want me to do that. It’s kind of a typical story. I was coming off of summer tour with a regional ballet company and I didn’t want to be a waiter again, waiting for Nutcracker season to start. I was living in Boston and saw an ad in the Boston Globe saying, “See the world, travel and teach dancing” for Fred Astaire Dance Studios. I applied for the job and here I am thirty-some-odd years later, still doing it.
How long did you work for Fred Astaire?
The first 20 years of my career, I was an employee of Fred Astaire Dance Studios.
Why do you think you stuck with it when you wanted to be a ballet dancer?
In the other performing dance arts, modern, jazz, ballet, the subject is about your own sort of absorption as a dancer. It’s just about you, just your dancing. I was so excited about the idea in the ballroom world… to recreate mythically what Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly did in the movies, who I always admired greatly. The dancing came from such a different place, because you had to be concerned not only about yourself, but also about this woman in your arms. I found that, and still to this day, find that magical. It’s what’s kept me, and I still call it ballroom dancing, for all these years.
[…]
What was your biggest challenge when you were dancing?
My biggest challenge initially was my skin color and my ethnicity. It was rather overwhelming for me and for the industry at large. Remember, I started in the dance business in 1969, and we were having race riots all over the United States. So for all intents and purposes, when I came into the dance business, I was thought of as being black. That was very difficult for some people in the industry who found it an effrontery, considering the tempo of the time here in the States. And I may have exacerbated my arrogance on the basis that I felt that, but it was never told to me in those terms. That was a difficult time for me to try and figure out how to get through the idea that someone was judging me totally on the basis of what I looked like, but they weren’t actually looking at what I was doing. They were already looking at this problem, which I had nothing to do with. Something I couldn’t hide.
Was it hard with the students too? Did people not want to take lessons from you?
Well, I don’t know that. I do know that when I first started in Boston as a new teacher, I did get some wind from a supervisor that there was perhaps difficulty in booking me. But I think it was always hidden from me, because the people that I worked for were very kind and wonderful to me. But I do have one quick short story about it. I worked predominantly for this wonderful woman, Kay Connors, who owned a Fred Astaire franchise in New Jersey. She was my greatest patron, as well as my employer, for many years. When I first moved from the Massachusetts area to New Jersey 
to work for her, I attempted to go and get an apartment. She said, “I’m going to give you the day off, go and find an apartment. The studio will pay the security deposit.” So I found this lovely apartment very close to the studio and I ran back to her and I said, “I think this is the one.” She said, “Okay, let me call the landlord.” When she called the landlord, he said, “Oh, I’m sorry, but I can’t rent to him.” She asked why and it came out in the wash that he thought I was Puerto Rican, well, so what? She had to call a local congressman, who threatened the landlord with a discrimination suit led by the federal government if he chose to keep me out of this apartment on the basis of my ethnicity. That was rather a shock for me moving to a far more sophisticated metropolitan area than where I was in Massachusetts, to suddenly be met with that. There were many other incidents, but that’s one time that stays in my mind. But I must say that the dance business has been very wonderful about my ethnicity ever since I won my first United States championship. I’ve been treated with greater deference, I think, as a result. Part of what helped me be so unique was the way I look, and people have chosen not to make that an issue. The dance business has been wonderfully welcoming to me after that initial period. I think that initial period was just a bad time in America.
Why do you think there are not more African Americans in ballroom dancing?
I don’t think they know we’re here, like so many other people don’t know we’re here. We have bad marketing skills. It is a very expensive enterprise and the Williams sisters, in tennis, are an example of how long it’s taken tennis, other than Arthur Ashe, to actually achieve some balance. Still, when you look at the balance of tennis players, which I very commonly equate to the dance business, because they have lots of patterns that are similar, the Williams sisters are almost an aberration. And also there’s Tiger Woods in golf. When you look at the majority of who plays tennis and who plays golf, these are not sports that are demographically evaluated by consumption in the Afro-American communities, or Latin either, for that matter. The dance business is very similar. We just don’t have very good marketing skills as it is. And then we haven’t gone to that demographic, because that demographic actually doesn’t help any of us pay our rent or mortgage. It is mostly a white, now it’s beginning to be Latino and Asian, population which populates America’s dance business in general. So the African American community hasn’t really been marketed in any way. I believe that Pierre Dulaine and Yvonne Marceau are doing a very wonderful program in Harlem, which is beginning to expose that community in New York to the idea, that ballroom dancing is here and that it’s available.
You can read the entire interview with Mr. Dustin here.
Here’s Mr. Dustin dancing with Donna Van Camp in the 1975 Classic U.S. Championship: