“The thing that drives everything we do,” Favors adds, “is Mr. Ailey’s beautiful quote. He said, ‘I believe that dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people.’” Now, with Graf Mack leading the way, the collective goal deepens: “How many different ways can we make good on that promise?”
Graf Mack’s own dance life began when she was tiny. Her mother, a Howard professor who also ran a community modeling school in Columbia, Maryland, would tote her along to evening courses; a young Graf Mack, with her coltish long limbs, was soon invited into the neighboring dance class. Ballet became her north star, with rigorous training consuming her free time. “Growing up biracial—just trying to figure out, Who am I and how do I navigate this world?—I had all these images of dancers of color on my walls,” she says. When Ailey toured through town, she’d catch them at the Kennedy Center and Baltimore’s Lyric Opera House.
At 11, she took a master class with Dance Theatre of Harlem—founded by Arthur Mitchell, the first Black principal at New York City Ballet and a noted protégé of George Balanchine—and the principal dancer Donald Williams signed her shoes with a prophetic note: “Hope to see you at DTH one day.” Six years later, she joined the company. Rare as it is to see a woman standing six-foot-four in pointe shoes, Mr. Mitchell never saw Graf Mack’s height as disqualifying. “He said, ‘We have lots of tall partners for you here,’” she once told PBS. “I never had to fight to feel a sense of belonging. I only had to do the thing that I was hired to do.”
A career that began with ease didn’t continue that way; injuries related to an underlying rheumatoid condition sidelined Graf Mack after just three years. She studied at Columbia University as a history major, slipping into dance classes at the studio Steps. There, she began taking Horton technique—a reprieve from ballet—with Milton Myers, then a teacher with Ailey. He suggested she meet with Jamison and arranged for her to take class with the company when the tour overlapped with her spring break. “For me, it was like being a tourist,” says Graf Mack, who relished the chance to meet an idol but already had a job at JP Morgan lined up for the fall. She spent that summer filling in with the contemporary ballet company Complexions, when the dance legend Carmen de Lavallade—a high school friend of Ailey’s, credited with introducing him to Lester Horton’s studio in the 1940s—took her aside. The bank job? “‘You can do that at any time in your life,’” Graf Mack remembers her saying. “‘But it’s clear that you are born to do this and your body is telling you that you can, so you should.”
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“There have been all these—I call them angels—to point me forward, and they’ve all been Ailey people,” Graf Mack says. She took the advice and rejoined Dance Theatre of Harlem as a principal, though the company shuttered after a year due to financial instability. In 2005, she finally auditioned for Ailey, dancing for three years before injury again crept in. Academia beckoned: She got a master’s degree in nonprofit management and began life as a professor. Then, as Jamison was preparing for retirement, she invited Graf Mack and Jamar Roberts to reprise A Case of You, her 2004 duet that imagines a couple caught in the sometimes jagged, sometimes tender cycle of love. Robert Battle, the newly named artistic director, convinced Graf Mack to come back for what would be another three-year run—“this time married,” she recalls. “Life happens in between.”
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