07/29/2026
Michael Jackson learned the Scarecrow dance from a man New York City Ballet refused to hire. His name was Louis Johnson, and in 1977 he was standing under the World Trade Center towers teaching a nineteen-year-old how to fall down in giant clown shoes. Michael had studied Chaplin and loved Fred Astaire, and he wanted to put that in the Scarecrow, so he asked Louis first.
The old School of American Ballet was at Broadway and 83rd, and you went down a flight of stairs to reach the studios. There were bays of windows down there, and in the afternoon the sun came through them and lay across the floor.
One afternoon in that building, Jerome Robbins walked past an open studio and stopped. Inside, a young Black dancer named Louis Johnson was working through the adagio from Swan Lake with a girl from his class.
Neither one of them was looking at the other. They were both watching themselves in the mirror.
Robbins stayed in the doorway and took it in. He said afterward that he was struck by the way they were watching that couple over there doing a love dance.
That couple over there was the two of them.
He went off and built a ballet out of what he saw in that room, and he started making it on Louis Johnson and Tanaquil Le Clercq. He called it Afternoon of a Faun, and he set it in a plain rehearsal studio instead of a Greek wood.
That lasted one rehearsal.
The male role had to go to a member of New York City Ballet. Johnson was a student at the school and a guest artist when they wanted one, and the company was not going to make him anything more than that.
Afternoon of a Faun opened at City Center on May 14, 1953, danced by Le Clercq and Francisco Moncion. It became one of the most performed ballets Robbins ever made, ten minutes long, two dancers, one studio.
Every audience that has ever watched it has been sitting where the mirror was.
He was twenty-three years old. Louis Johnson was born in Statesville, North Carolina, on March 19, 1930, and he grew up in Washington, D.C., raised by his mother and his grandmother.
The family lived two blocks from the YMCA and he was in that building constantly. He swam, he tumbled, he got himself onto the acrobatics team.
The swimming was not a hobby. Glory Van Scott, who knew him for decades, said he swam like a fish, and that there had been talk of the Olympics.
Then the Y closed for renovations and the boys had nowhere to work. Somebody arranged floor space for them at the Jones-Haywood School of Ballet, run by two Black women, Doris Jones and Claire Haywood, who trained the children that other Washington studios would not take.
Jones and Haywood watched the tumbling and offered him a scholarship on the spot.
He was still in high school.
In 1950 he and one other Jones-Haywood student won places at the School of American Ballet in New York, and the other student was Chita Rivera.
Black students at that school were close to nonexistent, and he started at the very bottom of it anyway. "I had started out at the beginning and worked my way up the class levels," he said in an interview many years later, "and I was in advanced classes with Jacques d'Amboise, Eddie Villella, Melissa Hayden, Andre Eglevsky, Tanaquil LeClercq, Maria Tallchief."
Then he said the part that does the damage.
"They were my peers at the time."
Every name on that list went into New York City Ballet, and several of them became the most celebrated American dancers of the century. He was not complaining when he said it, either, because he called the whole thing a learning experience like no other and he meant it.
On February 14, 1952, Robbins put him on the City Center stage in a new thirteen-minute piece called Ballade, set to Debussy, alongside Nora Kaye, Janet Reed, Tanaquil Le Clercq and Robert Barnett. By the most careful accounting anyone has made of the record, that made him the second Black dancer ever to appear with New York City Ballet.
The program billed him as a guest.
Two months later he made his Broadway debut in a revival of Four Saints in Three Acts. Another young dancer in that company was Arthur Mitchell.
Hold onto that name.
In 1953, the same year the studio ballet opened without him, Louis Johnson made his first piece of choreography. He called it Lament and he built it for the New York Ballet Club.
Nobody had to cast him for that one.
Broadway took him, because Broadway would. He danced in House of Flowers and My Darlin' Aida, and he was in both the stage and the screen versions of Damn Yankees under Bob Fosse.
By the sixties he was renting floor space in the Harlem YMCA and teaching classes there for children and teenagers. He had come up out of one Y and gone straight back into another one.
In 1970 he made the dances for Purlie, the musical built out of Ossie Davis's Purlie Victorious, and the Tony committee nominated him for it. That same year he choreographed Cotton Comes to Harlem.
Then Arthur Mitchell called.
Mitchell had gone into New York City Ballet in 1955 and become its first Black star. After Dr. King was killed in 1968 he walked away from all of it and built Dance Theatre of Harlem, so that Black dancers coming up behind him would have somewhere to go.
He needed ballets for a company that did not have any yet. What Louis Johnson gave him, in 1971, was called Forces of Rhythm.
He put Tchaikovsky in it. He also put Donny Hathaway in it.
Ballet technique, social dancing to popular records, the Katherine Dunham movement he had studied on the side, spirituals and acrobatics, all of it on one stage in the same piece. Every kind of dancing this country had ever told him to keep in a separate room, he ran together and handed to a company of young Black dancers in Harlem.
They kept it in the repertory for the next twenty years.
Virginia Johnson danced in it and later ran that company, and she remembered exactly what he was like in the rehearsal room. He would not let anybody copy him.
"He didn't want you to parrot what he was doing," she said. "He wanted you to be painting inside the lines in the most beautiful colors that you could imagine."
The Metropolitan Opera came next, first for a revival of La Gioconda and then for a new production of Aida. His dances were still standing in that Aida years later, on the night Leontyne Price sang her farewell at the Met.
In the fall of 1977 he took a job that would put him in front of more people than everything else combined. Motown was filming The Wiz in New York, and Louis Johnson was hired to choreograph it.
He was forty-seven years old.
The shooting days ran long and most of them ran underneath the towers of the World Trade Center. Sidney Lumet had decided the plaza down there would be the Emerald City.
For that one number Johnson had four hundred dancers on the concrete, changing costume three times. They had to set up twenty-two playback speakers across the plaza, because without them the dancers in the back would have heard the music half a second behind the dancers in the front.
He kept them together.
The other thing he had on that set was a nineteen-year-old boy in a scarecrow suit. Michael Jackson's costume was a huge curly wig, a hat and a vest stuffed with scraps of newspaper and bits of trash bag, a nose painted on his face, and enormous clown shoes.
He was thrilled about the nose. His brothers had spent years calling him Big Nose and Ugly, and the makeup covered it.
The scene they had to build was the Scarecrow coming down off his pole and learning how to walk. Johnson worked it out with him step by step, and Michael stumbled, went down on the ground, knocked his knees out sideways, got up wrong and went down again.
The boy took those sessions more seriously than almost anything else on that picture. He had done his homework, too, because he had watched Charlie Chaplin, and he loved Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and he wanted to put what he had learned from them into the Scarecrow.
So he asked.
"He asked me, could I do this," Johnson remembered later. "So I let him use it, and then enhanced it."
Michael Jackson asked permission. Louis Johnson gave it.
The film lost money and it lost it badly, and theater chains in white neighborhoods would not book it because they were afraid of who would show up. Black folks went anyway, and forty-eight years later that Emerald City number is still the thing people put on when they want to feel something.
The last stretch of his working life he spent with kids. He built the dance department at Howard University, and he taught the first course in Black theater that Yale ever offered.
Then he took over the dance program at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side and stayed with it until he retired in 2003.
The children who came through that program got called Louis' Kids, and they went further than anybody had a right to expect. Stevie Wonder saw them and put them on his show in Atlantic City.
Marian Wright Edelman's Children's Defense Fund brought them to the Kennedy Center, where Sidney Poitier stood up and introduced them. Kids from the Lower East Side, on that stage, with Poitier saying their names.
He talked to the New York Times in September 1975, and the paper ran the interview under a line taken straight out of his mouth about loving dance, any kind of dance. Further down in that same conversation he said something harder.
"Very few Blacks have had all the experiences I've had," he told the reporter. "There haven't been that many opportunities."
In January 2018, Columbia University opened the first major exhibition of Arthur Mitchell's career.
The cases held the telegram inviting Mitchell to join New York City Ballet. They held his souvenir program from Four Saints in Three Acts, 1952, the show where the two of them had made their Broadway debuts in the same chorus.
Louis Johnson was in that room on opening night. He was eighty-seven and he came in a wheelchair.
Mitchell died that September.
Johnson died in Manhattan on March 31, 2020, twelve days past his ninetieth birthday, of pneumonia and renal failure after testing positive for the coronavirus. Glory Van Scott, his friend and his health care proxy, was the one who gave the papers the news.
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