Hi, it's Erica. This is the second part of a special guest series for The Turning.

If you missed part one, I want to jump in and tell you about a new book called The Swans of Harlem, Five Black Balarinas, 50 Years of Sisterhood, and their reclamation of a groundbreaking history. In it, writer Karen Valby records the largely forgotten histories of five black ballerinas who changed the art form.

Today in our second of the series, Karen speaks with former ballerina Sheila

Rohan.

In every possible way, Sheila Rhan was an unlikely ballerina.

As a child, she survived polio and the temporary loss of her legs.

Dance was essential to her healing and to her life as an artist. When she first joined the Dance Theater of Harlem, Sheila

was a 27-year-old mother of three young children. She had long since put away her point shoes.

It was her sister, Nanette Bearden, who saw the notice in the New York Times

that Arthur Mitchell was looking for black classically trained dancers,

and she convinced her baby sister to make the trek from Staten Island up to Harlem.

Under the tutelage of Mitchell, Sheila would travel the world, performing on the grandest of stages.

Now in her 80s she continues to challenge expectations of what a dancer looks like.

Welcome Sheila.

Hey Karen!

Sheila, your journey to becoming a professional ballerina

began in such dramatic fashion. You were diagnosed with polio at seven years old. Can you just

tell me a little bit about being in a house of seven sisters and and losing control of your legs.

Well yes I get you can imagine how traumatic it was for my mother and my sisters. I'm even thinking now that I was

younger than seven. The polio epidemic was already in the environment at that time. I remember it started I had a

terrible headache. I had been ill like say flu or a cold or something.

So I was at home.

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