Career Highlights

    Many teachers, mentors, and choreographers were amazed by her extraordinary technique and elegance, but all had abstained from casting her due to her skin color. This didn’t discourge her either as she continued to look, and soon a government-funded program called the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre project finally provided her with an outlet. Collins made an appearance in the revival of Hall Johnson’s opera show Run, Little Chillun, in 1938. A year later she appeared in  the Swing Mikado which opened in Los Angeles in July 1939. The connections Collins’ gained throughout her career led her to go on tour with a Vaudeville show that was organized by Eddie Anderson, a comedian who played a servant role in the Jack Benny Program. Her experiences with different theatrical genres finally led her to go to a Katherine Dunham audition. Collins was instantly accepted into the company, but she made an agreement with Dunham that she would only stay for a certain amount of time. Less than two years after she joined, Collins left alongside her colleague Talley Beatty. Briefly they performed as a duo in nightclubs, but Collins had bigger dreams to further her career, soon performing solo concerts where she danced to her own choreography.

    She applied for and received a fellowship grant from the Rosenwald Fund so that she could underwrite her project. This was the same philanthropic organization that funded Katherine Dunham’s. Collins stayed in Los Angeles for about three years working on her choreography and studying with the best teachers she could find. She was able to work with Carmelita Maracci, a stunning performer that was very skilled and highly-respected as a teacher. Collins presented her first solo concert on November 3, 1947 at the Los Palmas Theater in Los Angeles. Her performance left critics extremely impressed. They were moved by how “she located the emotional source of the music and used that as a starting point”. Everything from her facial expressions to the “costumes that would do credit to the finest designer…colorful, theatrical, and flattering. And Miss Collins designed them for herself!”. She then went on to perform a number of solo acts that left  a number of critics in awe of her performances. On July 8 and 9, 1949 she performed Blackamoor at a festival called Jacobs Pillow, which depicted “ The court life of Louis XIV as seen through the eyes of a little Blackamoor”. After which she went on to perform two negro spirituals, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen and Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel. A critic described both of them as being “... the most creative moments of the program” .

    Her style and dance was ahead of her time in the 1930s and 1940s, which was probably why she wowed so many people. She mixed the techniques and abilities of today’s dancers, and her artistic intelligence allowed her to know when to emphasize certain parts of her dance movements. Many critics commented on Collins’s extremely accomplished ballet techniques, and she worked hard to build a repertoire of works that would display it. On November 4, 1950, she opened in a Broadway musical called Out of This World. Although it was a minor role, it included a long solo for her near the end of the first act. In 1951 she was hired by the Metropolitan Opera Ballet as their first African-American prima ballerina at age 34. She stayed there until 1954, after which she began teaching ballet, and using dance as a form of rehabilitation for the handicapped. In 1974 she retired from performing and teaching, spending the remainder of her life painting religious figures in her art studio in Seattle. She died on May 28, 2003 in Fort Worth, Texas at age 86.