07/30/2026
Black men could not buy a ticket to see Black dancers perform. This was 1972, and Eleo Pomare found the Aboriginal men who wanted in waiting outside the stage door, because they were not allowed to come backstage. He had his own allotment of house seats and he handed over every single one. That had never happened there.
Eleo Pomare was six years old the first time somebody pulled him out of the ocean. It was 1943, and a German submarine had sunk the freighter his father captained off the coast of Panama, with the boy on board.
They found the boy. They never found his father.
He was afraid of water for the rest of his life.
Four years later he was sent alone to New York, to live with an aunt and uncle in a country he did not know.
He was ten years old.
He landed uptown and heard the churches going, and the sound took him straight back to Carnival. "At the time I didn't realize I was studying theater," he said later.
He went to the High School of Performing Arts, one of the only Black students in the building. He said he felt like a fly in a bowl of milk.
By 1960 he had won a fellowship that carried him back across the ocean he was afraid of, to one of the most respected dance schools in Europe. A famous choreographer came in to set a piece for the end-of-term concert, looked around the room, and picked out the only Black man in it.
He wanted Pomare onstage bare-chested and barefoot. The young white woman dancing beside him would stay in full costume.
Pomare said he would wear a costume too.
Understand what was actually being handed to him. Not a costume note, a picture, and everybody standing in that room knew what the picture was supposed to say.
The head of the school backed the visitor and told Pomare to do as he was told, then barred him from teaching or performing anywhere outside the building. Pomare had crossed an ocean on that fellowship, and he walked away from it.
And every dancer in his group walked out with him.
They boycotted the concert, packed up, and left the country with him for Amsterdam, and the school was left holding a program full of holes. Broke in a new city, Pomare took whatever work paid.
One contract in the summer of 1962 put his company inside the museum built to hold the artifacts of the old Dutch colonies. The promoters had notes, and what they wanted was more Black dancers, barefoot, in grass skirts.
His group had been performing a piece set to Bach and the crowds had been polite about it. So Pomare kept every single step exactly as it was, threw out the Bach, hired African drummers, and went out there barefoot.
They loved it.
He was still enjoying himself when he told that story decades later. "Ok these are the primitives," he remembered deciding, "these Europeans are the primitives."
In 1963 the phone rang, and James Baldwin was on the line with the March on Washington coming.
"Eleo," Baldwin told him, "you are going to be there."
He was ready to go, because Europe had not turned out to be what he had been sold. "I was looking for a place to work where my complexion didn't come before my product," he said.
He rebuilt the company in New York and started making the kind of dances nobody had ordered. Blues for the Jungle opened in 1966 and began at a slave auction, then moved onto a block full of people the city had written off, a preacher, a cop, a nun, a man in a cell dreaming his way out, a woman the neighborhood pretended not to see.
The dancers came off the stage and into the aisles, shouting at the audience, telling them to their faces that they had helped build the very place they were sitting there watching. Pomare danced the addict himself, spinning upside down on a swivel chair.
Two years later he stood on the back of a flatbed truck rolling through the neighborhoods, and while the national anthem played, he mimed being sick.
That was 1968, and Colin Kaepernick took a knee forty-eight years later.
So they gave him a name for all of it. The angry Black man of modern dance, and it followed him into the reviews, the program notes, and the write-ups for the next forty years.
He never once accepted it.
The word he wanted was alert.
"Whites see things only in terms of their own values," he said in 1968. "They feel too little for the Negro."
They called his work undisciplined too, and he had an answer ready for that one. "How many critics really understand the discipline it takes to erase all white influences," he asked, "and yet dramatize precisely the world the black artist is struggling to escape from?"
Here is what that one word cost him.
The State Department flew Alvin Ailey's dancers around the world as cultural ambassadors, and Broadway hired Donald McKayle to choreograph its musicals. Nobody called Pomare for either one, not once, in fifty years.
He built anyway, one hundred and eighteen dances in all, set on his own company and on the Cincinnati Ballet and on companies in Holland, Norway, Taiwan, and Brazil. He taught in the public schools too, where he told the children a choreographer is somebody who uses bodies to paint pictures and tell stories.
Long after he died, a dance writer said his name out loud to a college dance history class. Not one student in that room had ever heard it.
She played them a clip of him moving, and then they wanted to know why nobody had ever told them about this man.
In February of 1972 he took his company to a festival in Australia, and the festival put both of the Black companies on the bill in a run-down hall out past the edge of the city. Six weeks before he landed, Aboriginal activists had pitched a tent embassy on the lawn across from Parliament House, and he had watched the footage of police trying to clear them off it.
Then he looked at the hall they had given him. He refused to dance in it.
The papers ran the story, and the mayor came to his dressing room and begged him not to turn it into an international scandal. What they did instead was find a condemned movie house downtown and rebuild it overnight, moving the sets, putting in seats, fixing the stage, and standing up a real theatre by the next day.
Opening night, Pomare looked out at the house and did not see one Aboriginal face in it. Then somebody came backstage and told him there were men outside asking for him who were not allowed to come back there.
So he walked out to them.
He had never seen them before in his life, and they told him they wanted to see the first black company and could not get tickets. He asked why not, since there was a box office standing right there.
Then he stopped asking questions. He had his own allotment of house seats, and they were orchestra seats, the best in the building.
He gave every one of them away, and then asked for the next night's too.
The box office man went out of his mind.
Those rows filled up. His lead dancer, Carole Johnson, said white Australia was uninterested and in plenty of cases revolted by the work.
The people in those seats were not. Johnson said it was the first time they saw what this kind of work could do with something that actually mattered to them.
When the company packed up to leave for Sydney, they came to say goodbye, and they covered the stage.
He died in Manhattan on the eighth of August, 2008, at seventy years old. He never got the plane, he never got Broadway, and he never got the chapter in the book.
What he did get came from people who could not buy a ticket to a theatre in their own country.
Flowers, presents, and small rocks, every one of them wrapped in paper, with somebody's words written on the outside.
Eleo Pomare built more than dances. He built space for people who had been told they did not belong there. I research stories like his because forgotten artists deserve to have their names carried forward. If you want to help preserve more overlooked histories:
https://ko-fi.com/blackamericanrecord
Every coffee helps keep these stories alive.
