Dancin' Queens
When I was a little girl, I was too self-conscious to dance. Anyone who knows me today finds that impossible to believe.
But in my young years, the world was a little less diasporic, and "dance classes" was generally the classical forms, also not financially within reach for this young kid in Spanish Harlem. Even a free class wouldn't have beckoned me; there was nothing about me that was primed for ballet (pun intended), and, for reasons I can't figure out, I was (and still remain) incapable of doing "partner dance." I was a dud at the hustle (to my deep sorrow) and I distinctly remember a Dominican 20-something guy we 15-year-old sophisticates glommed around chuckling that I'd never "get" merengue.
A decade-plus later, a very suave friend who looked like a Cuban David Bowie constantly referred to me as "Hopalong Rozie" because every time I tried to dance salsa, I popped up and down instead of side to side. No matter what style I tried, I was not good at it.
Don't even talk about bellydance.
Decades later, when I discovered the wonderful fusions of African, reggaeton, and hip hop that infused my Bay Area dance world, I found a home for my brand of movement, and I have become a very joyful, sometimes improvisational, but always on-the-beat dancer myself (I still stink at partner dance though, and am avidly trying to improve my salsa moves). I even tried a barre class now and again, but I've determined I should leave ballet, modern, and contemporary jazz to the experts.
All of this to say, I was pleased to discover several Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous dancers who excelled in ballet and brought in jazz and other contemporary forms in ways that expanded "classical." This issue of #SistoryLessons celebrates three historical ballerinas: Sono Osato, Dorothy Toy, and Maria Tallchief, because they not only enthralled audiences, they helped expand representation in the classical dance arts. Good thing this task wasn’t left up to me!
Sono Osato: Broadway’s First Asian American Star
Sono Osato was born on August 29, 1919, in Omaha, Nebraska, the eldest of three children of Shoji Osato, a photographer who had immigrated to the United States from Japan, and Frances Fitzpatrick, a Canadian of French and Irish descent. In an era when "American" was very much treated as a synonym for "white," this half-Japanese ballerina would forge a career that exceeded expectations and redefined representation.
It was while visiting Monaco with her culture-loving French-Canadian mother that she fell in love with ballet, watching a performance of Diaghilev's legendary Ballets Russes and deciding, then and there, that dancing was going to be her track. By age fourteen, she was given an incredible opportunity: an invitation to join the Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo, at the time the most famous dance company in the world. Under the supervision of a married couple from the troupe, but without her parents, Sono sailed off for France. She broke triple barriers as its youngest dancer, its first American, and its first ballerina of Japanese descent.
Six Years on Tour, and a Name She Refused to Change
This chapter of Sono's life involved six years of touring through Europe, Australia, and South America, and since it was the early years of the 20th century, she experienced the cultural restrictions and narrow-mindedness of the global high arts scene. She was advised to change her stage name to something more Russian-sounding, or at least not so Japanese, but she refused. Despite these restraints, she had a successful run, advancing quickly within the corps de ballet to dance featured and principal roles, including Francesca in Massine's Francesca da Rimini during the company's tour of Australia. But by 1941, she was restless and feeling her career had stalled, so she departed the company and moved to New York, where she continued her training at the School of American Ballet, before joining the American Ballet Theatre that same year.
War Comes Home
World War II upended Japanese American families, hers included. Her father, Shoji, was arrested by the FBI the day after Pearl Harbor and held for years in a Chicago detention facility set up for people the government deemed "alien enemies"—a lesser-known version of the larger camps that would soon imprison some 120,000 Japanese Americans, immigrants and U.S.-born alike, out west. Because of her own Japanese ancestry, the U.S. government barred Sono from touring with American Ballet Theatre to California and Mexico, and for a time she danced under her mother's maiden name, Fitzpatrick, to defuse the hostility aimed at anyone who could be perceived as even part-Japanese.
Osata kept dancing in New York the whole time, creating the role of Rosaline in Antony Tudor's Romeo and Juliet and dancing in his Pillar of Fire. Working in the arts is always like passing through the eye of a needle, but as grateful as she was, it was hard to be restricted from leaving the city or the country with her own company.
In 1943, short on cash and newly married to real-estate developer Victor Elmaleh, Sono left ABT altogether. But, as sometimes happens, luck was a lady for her: a fellow dancer's tip led her straight to choreographer Agnes de Mille, who built her a show-stopping comic solo in One Touch of Venus that won Sono a Donaldson Award and launched her as a Broadway star. Nine months later, in 1944, she landed the role of a lifetime: the original Ivy Smith, the "Miss Turnstiles" of On the Town. Her father could not be there to see his daughter, as he was was still being detained when the show opened that December.
Casting Defiance on the Great White Way
In On the Town, not only was Sono a sensation, the casting was a bit sensational, in the sense of "audacious and shocking." Imagine this: the US is at war with Japan, hundreds of thousands of her fellow Issei and Nissei (first- and second-generation Japanese Americans) are languishing away in internment camps, and Sono, a Japanese American woman, is cast as the all-American love interest. It sounds Hamilton-esque, but Broadway has long been a place of stretching boundaries (as long-time readers will recall from our tributes to Lorraine Hansberry).
Osato's casting was a deliberate act of defiance by the show's creators, Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins, two gay Jewish sophisticates who deliberately filled the stage with a mixed-race company. One happy end to the story is that she performed the role long enough for her father to win release from the camp and finally watch his daughter on Broadway.
Life After the Spotlight
Sono Osato's post-On the Town life included interesting ups and downs. She danced opposite Frank Sinatra in the 1948 film The Kissing Bandit, in a memorable scene where she cracked a bullwhip in a manner that can really only be described as terrifyingly exotic, but later found herself blacklisted under McCarthyism for her politics. She related the whole story in her 1980 memoir, Distant Dances, and in 2006 founded the Sono Osato Scholarship for Graduate Studies to help dancers build their next chapter. Sono died at her Manhattan home on December 26, 2018, at ninety-nine.
As she once said of that On the Town run: "Only the power of illusion created between performers and audiences across the footlights can transcend political preference, moral attitudes, and racial prejudice."
Reflection: How do I honor joy in the face of injustice?
Dorothy Toy: The "Asian Ginger Rogers"
Dorothy Toy was born Shigeko Takahashi on May 28, 1917, in San Francisco and grew up in Los Angeles, where her family's restaurant faced a vaudeville house called the Regent. Like Sono, she learned ballet from the Russian school, but in her case, a prime influence was a ballet teacher who drilled her in leaps and pointe work—and Cossack kicks, sometimes inside the same four counts. You try that; just even try envisioning it, woah. With her sister Helen and a young dancer named Paul Wing she formed a trio, the Three Majongs. After a while, Helen left the act to pursue a singing career, and Toy & Wing packed up a Model T, and drove east to chase fame. The would become one of the most celebrated Asian American acts in the country, the first Asian entertainers to headline London's Palladium in 1939.
A Name Built for the Marquee
They were billed as "the Chinese Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers," and Dorothy as well as her sister Helen dropped Takahashi for the shorter, snappier "Toy" because in that era, a Japanese name was a liability. Paul and Dorothy duo married in 1940, by the way, not for romance but to save on hotels, which tells you everything about how pragmatic these women had to be.
War, Exposure, and Reinvention
Like Sono, Dorothy saw her life turned inside out by the Second World War. Paul was drafted into the armed forces, Dorothy's parents were sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah, and if that weren't enough to contend with, a jealous rival dancer outed Dorothy's Japanese heritage to the press, a subterfuge which cost Toy and Wing a planned film with Chico Marx of the world-famous Marx Brothers. Dorothy herself only escaped the camps because she happened to be performing on the East Coast when the detention orders came down.
Determined to keep up the career she loved despite these difficult circumstances, she moved to Chicago, where she reunited with her sister Helen for a few years as the Toy Sisters. She and Paul Wing eventually divorced in 1950, but continued to headline the "Chop Suey Circuit" of Chinese nightclubs as "America's Greatest Chinese Dance Team," playing rooms frequented by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby. One night, while performing at San Francisco's Forbidden City nightclub, Toy met businessman Leslie H. Fong, whom she married in 1952 and with whom she raised two children, Dorlie and Peter.
A Career, and a Joy, That Never Really Stopped
Dorothy Toy enjoyed a long career in entertainment. In 1962 she and Wing launched a bigger act, Toy & Wing's Oriental Playgirl Revue, an ensemble show with Toy at the helm as manager and lead, and toured it across the U.S., Canada, Europe, the Caribbean, and Japan through the mid-1970s. When dancing became too difficult, she switched to a new career as a pharmacy technician, a role she held for twenty-five years. While she kept at this job up until age eighty-two, she remained in dance til the end, opening a dance academy in the basement of her Oakland home where she taught generations of children. She ran the studio well into her nineties. Dorothy's lifetime in dance lasted nearly a century. She passed away on July 10, 2019, at the age of 102.
As she put it: "We loved to dance, and I guess it came across to the people."
Reflection: What would you teach children, in your "third" or even "fourth" act, if you could?
Maria Tallchief: Osage Prima Ballerina
Maria Tallchief was born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief on January 24, 1925, in Fairfax, Oklahoma, on the Osage reservation, the daughter of Alexander Joseph Tall Chief, a member of the Osage Nation, and Ruth Porter, of Scots-Irish descent. Her family moved to Los Angeles when she was young, and at twelve she began training with Bronislava Nijinska, a former dancer and choreographer of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Her younger sister, Marjorie, would become an acclaimed ballerina in her own right.
Joining Ballet Russe, but Refusing to "Russianize"
In 1942, the same year Sono Osato walked away from that same company, seventeen-year-old Maria Tallchief joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. When choreographer Agnes de Mille suggested she Russianize her name to "Tallchieva," to fit in with a company full of dancers going by names like Danilova and Krassovska, she refused. "Tallchief was my name, and I was proud of it."
The Five Moons
Interestingly, she was one of five Oklahoma-born Native American ballerinas who passed through Ballet Russe in that era and became collectively known as the Five Moons. This cohort included her own sister, Marjorie, as well as Rosella Hightower of the Choctaw Nation, Yvonne Chouteau of the Shawnee Tribe, and Moscelyne Larkin of the Eastern Shawnee and Peoria peoples.
You must wonder how one small patch of Oklahoma produced five world-class ballerinas in a single generation. Part of it was about money: the Tallchief family's Osage oil wealth, the same fortune that had drawn killers during the Osage Reign of Terror (think Killers of the Flower Moon, the 2023 Martin Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone), also paid for the kind of elite dance training most families couldn't dream of. Against this backdrop, there was a single teacher, Bronislava Nijinska, a Ballets Russes choreographer who'd opened a studio on the West Coast which became the connective tissue linking these girls to the world of professional ballet. Wartime timing was also a factor: with Europe's usual supply of Russian-trained dancers cut off, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo relocated to New York and went hunting for young American talent wherever it could find it, casting dancers as young as fourteen.
Balanchine, the Paris Opera, and the Firebird
While at Ballet Russe, she met the world-famous choreographer George Balanchine, who would marry in 1946. The following year, Maria became the first American to dance with the Paris Opera Ballet, and two years later, in the New York City Ballet's 1949 staging of Balanchine's Firebird, she gave the fiery performance that crowned her America's first major prima ballerina.
A Legacy in Bronze and on Currency
After her marriage to Balanchine ended, Tallchief continued dancing as the company's star, then settled in Chicago, where she founded the Chicago City Ballet and raised her daughter, the poet Elise Paschen. The Kennedy Center honored her in 1996, and President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 1999. On November 14, 2007, the Tulsa Historical Society unveiled five life-size bronzes of the Five Moons, sculpted by Oklahoma artists Monte England and Gary Henson, each ballerina cast in the role she counted as her signature. Maria's bronze shows her as the Firebird, wings flared and caught mid-flight.
Maria Tallchief died in Chicago on April 11, 2013, at age eighty-eight. In 2023 the United States Mint placed her on a quarter, the first Native American woman so honored.
Reflection: What would your fiery performance be about? (It doesn't have to be in dance form!)
Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone
As you think about Sono Osato: what does resilience look like in the face of injustice? Reflect on a time your family or other dear ones faced unfair treatment.
Reflecting on the story of Dorothy Toy: what would keep your passion alive over a lifetime? Write about something you love that you have never given up.
In celebration of Maria Tallchief: Where have you blended tradition and excellence into something wholly yours?
HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color
As we recognize Sono Osato: where has beauty or art saved you? Explore your family's migration or displacement story and share it.
Honoring the story of Dorothy Toy: when did your joy break some rules? Share your passion or hobby with young people.
In gratitude to Maria Tallchief: what part of your identity have you been asked to soften to be accepted, and what would it look like to honor it instead?
Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends
To celebrate Sono Osato: Support AAPI artists this month: amplify, purchase, or share their work. Learn one fact about Japanese American incarceration during WWII and share it with your network.
To honor Dorothy Toy: Spotlight AAPI performers in U.S. entertainment history. Celebrate their grace and grit. Support arts education in diverse communities.
In commemoration of Maria Tallchief: Learn about Native women in the arts. Support programs that nurture their brilliance.
What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember
The main takeaway I gather from writing about these women is not only that most early 20th century ballet passed through the Russian tradition, but more importantly, joyous expression through dance is one of the fundamental forces of life—and not just for the dancers, so many of whom continue dancing in one form or another, well into the elder years.
So, friends, kick up your heels, shimmy, sashay, or just tap your feet to the beat: dance is inclusive, dance is joy, dance is life. It's also resilience and resistance put into motion, so move your body and claim your space. Dancing can be a form of marching—or is it the other way around?
PS: Legends Who Broke the Color Line
Long before Misty Copeland, there was Janet Collins, who in 1951 became the first African American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera, after an earlier audition with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo where she was told she'd have to perform in whiteface if she wanted the job (OMG so remember the times used to be even worse...). She said no thanks to that, and the Met said yes to her a few years later, sans whiteface. Raven Wilkinson followed in the 1950s, joining the same Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo as one of the first Black ballerinas in a major company, touring the segregated South under constant pressure to hide her race, until she refused to lie to a hotel clerk who asked her outright and subsequently got banned from the building.
Arthur Mitchell broke a parallel barrier for Black men, becoming the first Black principal dancer at New York City Ballet in 1956 before co-founding Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969, a company built specifically to give Black dancers the stages other companies wouldn't.
Decades later, Misty Copeland became American Ballet Theatre's first Black female principal dancer in 2015, seventy-five years into the company's history. She'd later say that the first time she saw footage of Raven Wilkinson dancing with Ballet Russe, she cried, because she hadn't known a Black ballerina of that caliber had existed. Copeland retired from ABT in October 2025 after a quarter-century with the company and immediately joined its board of trustees, because she wants to ensure the doors stay open to other Black ballerinas.
Latina Ballerinas Who Made History
Alicia Alonso, born in Havana in 1920, became one of the most celebrated ballerinas of the 20th century despite a degenerative eye condition that left her partially and then nearly fully blind for most of her career—her partners learned to guide her with subtle cues of light and sound so audiences would never know. She co-founded the Cuban National Ballet, ran it for decades, and is still considered one of the defining prima ballerinas in dance history. In the U.S., Evelyn Cisneros-Legate, a Mexican American dancer from a family of migrant farmworkers joined San Francisco Ballet in 1977 and danced there for 23 years, rising to become the company's prima ballerina and, by most accounts, the first Hispanic/Latina prima in the United States—this after being told early in her career to lighten her skin with makeup to fit in with the rest of the company. Such a bad trend: she also said no to that.
Dancing Into Their Elder Years
Flowers for Yuriko Kikuchi, the Japanese American modern dancer who was reportedly the first non-white dancer Martha Graham ever hired permanently. She danced and choreographed for the Graham company for over fifty years and remained active into her 90s before her death at 102. (Her daughter Susan Kikuchi, who was involved in 15 different productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I and re-staging Jerome Robbins' ballet was a family friend.)
Of course, we also must mention Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey's muse and later the company's longtime artistic director, who kept dancing, choreographing, mentoring, and speaking publicly about the art form right up until her death at 81 in 2024. New York City now marks May 10, her birthday, as Judith Jamison Day every year in her honor (two days before mine!).
You may not be as familiar with Carmen de Lavallade, who trained alongside Ailey himself in 1940s Los Angeles and danced everywhere from the Metropolitan Opera to Yale Repertory Theatre. She gave her final performance at 88 and didn't stop speaking, teaching, and touring her one-woman show until shortly before her death at 94 just this past December 2025.
Further Reading: The Five Moons
If you want to go deeper into Maria Tallchief's cohort, Pointe Magazine's feature on the Five Moons is a good starting point; it covers all five women's individual careers and the ongoing festival at the University of Oklahoma that honors their legacy, tribe by tribe.
Let us know if there are other Black, Brown, Asian, or Indigenous dance innovators in history you'd like us to discover and share about. The research remains rather slim.
Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research.