BOSTON -- Dancer Augustus Van Heerden will be the first black artist from South Africa to perform in his native country if the Boston Ballet tours the white minority-ruled nation.
The ballet trustees last week authorized the company management to negotiate a tour for three weeks in June, bringing 18 dancers to perform in Johannesburg and Bloemfontein.
Ballet officers said Wednesday the troupe will perform only if the nation suspends its apartheid policies for the dancers and their audiences.
Van Heerden, 28, originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, 'feels strongly' the company should perform in his racially-troubled country, said Jim Copple, publicity director for the company.
'There is a difference here,' Van Heerden said in a statement read Wednesday by Copple. 'I am a South African black in a major dance company. This is a contradiction to the South African way of life. It will be an inspiration to my people that someone can make it.
'If we go, I am going back to my people to show I made it. What the people want to see is not necessarily what the government wants to see. If I help a few, the trip is worth it.'
Copple said Van Heerden, who is dancing the lead in 'Swan Lake,' will be 'the first major black artist from South Africa to return to South Africa and perform.'
Ballet treasurer Thomas W. Jones, who is also black, said Wednesday the ballet will only go to South Africa if the promoters meet certain conditions -- those being an integrated theater audience, that Van Heerden be housed, fed and onstage with white dancers and that the company be allowed to give demonstrations and dance lectures in the black township of Soweto.
The tour would be exactly the opposite of endorsing the minority government of South Africa, Jones said, and as long as the troupe adheres to its own standards of 'human rights and personal dignity' the ballet could be a force for social change.
Contradicting critics who claimed the tour would be an endorsement of the nation's institutionalized racism, Jones said allowing the nation to remain isolated from a conflicting culture is 'playing right into the hands of the South African government.'
'We recognize there are serious problems in South Africa, but we don't believe travelling there under these terms and conditions is any more an endorsement of their different practices than was our trip to China an endorsement of Communism,' Jones said.
Jones said the tour is 'likely to be a beacon of hope to some other child who might be there like Gus was 20 years ago, wondering if there is some opportunity available to him in the world outside ....'
