On April 21, the Dance Theatre of Harlem Ensemble will make the trek from West 152^nd Street in New York City to perform in Norfolk as part of the Virginia Arts Festival.

Norfolk native Lorraine Graves made the same trip–but in the opposite direction–a little more than thirty years ago.

Graves, who grew up in Norfolk and trained at the Academy of the Norfolk Ballet, was a member of Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) from 1978 through 1996 and a principal dancer for most of those years. Tall and slender, Graves is serious and wry by turns as she describes the legacy of Dance Theatre of Harlem in the few minutes she has before the one o’clock ballet class that she teaches to area high school students at the Governor’s School for the Arts. In addition to her teaching and her work as a leader in the arts community, she travels for 20 weekends a year to Washington, D.C., as part of the Dance Theatre of Harlem Kennedy Center residency program.

Angels from Harlem.

Graves attributes much of her success as an artist to Arthur Mitchell, who founded Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969. One of the ballets Mitchell choreographed in 1971, Fête Noire, will be on the program Thursday night when the DTH Ensemble performs at the Wilder Center on Norfolk State’s campus.

“He is my legacy,” Graves said of Mitchell. “He gave me the opportunity to fulfill the childhood dream of a little African American dancer from Norfolk, Virginia, becoming a ballerina.”

The full company, which has been on a hiatus since 2004, is gathering itself to return in the 2012/2013 season. It is currently headed by artistic director Virginia Johnson, another former principal dancer, who took the reins in 2010.

In an interview about the origins of Dance Theatre of Harlem, Mitchell recalls reaching out to train young people from the community of Harlem where he was born. The former principal dancer with New York City Ballet has said that he was moved to create DTH in an attempt to turn his grief about the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to a constructive end. In the decades since the company’s founding, Dance Theatre of Harlem has achieved national and global acclaim and changed the texture of ballet in this country. The company is noted for high-profile international tours: DTH performed in the former USSR in 1988; in South Africa soon after the fall of apartheid; and in China in 2000 after the signing of the US-China trade treaty.

The DTH Ensemble is composed mainly of former students from Dance Theatre of Harlem’s professional training program. The ensemble has been touring extensively since 2009, performing full-length evenings of dance and lecture demonstrations in more than 26 states. This March, Graves saw the company perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Grace and beauty from the north.

“I sat there, and of course the steps started coming back to me,” she said. “It was really hard to just watch.”

Graves performed Mitchell’s Fête Noire–the earliest work on this Thursday night’s program–during her tenure with the company. Mitchell’s elegant jaunt of soldiers and their courtly ladies is joined by Peter Pucci’s acrobatic pas de deux Episode and Royston Maldoom’s Adagietto No. 5, set to the fourth movement of Mahler’s sweeping Symphony No. 5. Also on the program is a recently commissioned work by Mexico-born choreographer David Fernandez, Six Piano Pieces (Harlem Style).

Robert Garland, a former company member and DTH resident choreographer, created Return; this piece is a rousing highlight of Thursday’s program, which is set to music by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Alfred Ellis, and Carolyn Franklin. Garland’s work has been called “urban neoclassical” for its fusion of contemporary syncopation and sound with the classical lines of ballet.

Graves characterizes this blending of the old with the new–the urban with the classical and neoclassical ballet traditions–as an intrinsic part of Dance Theatre of Harlem’s contribution to American ballet.

“There was always this idea that African Americans couldn’t do classical ballet, and I think we dispelled that myth in so many different ways,” she said. “I mean, we did things that were traditional. And we put them in our own setting. For instance, our Creole Giselle. Same steps, same choreography, but we transcended that scenario so that it was more apropos for Dance Theatre of Harlem. Same thing with our Firebird, which became a huge signature piece for the company. It was Firebird, it was the Stravinsky score, but we set it in a different environment, and so it became ours.

And so Dance Theatre of Harlem, a company that has always been about a rebirth of an artistic tradition from the 1600s, is in the midst of its own rebirth.

“I know it’s not going to be the same; it has to be different, change is inevitable, change has to be,” said Graves. “But I want, again, little African American dancers to have an opportunity similar to what I had. And so with Dance Theatre coming back, hopefully in the 2012/2013 season, there will be an opportunity for dancers out there to again fulfill their dreams.”

Graves rose elegantly to take her leave. She had a class to teach.

Dance Theatre of Harlem Ensemble performs April 21 at 7:30 p.m. at the Wilder Center at Norfolk State University. For tickets, visit the Virginia Arts Festival website.