Adam McKinney was born in Milwaukee and raised in Whitefish Bay as gay, native, Black and a Jewish man — intersecting identities that he has long explored in his work. An accomplished dancer, choreographer and teacher, McKinney became artistic director of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre earlier this year.
The Chronicle spoke to McKinney in late October as he was preparing the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s season opener.
McKinney was born in Milwaukee in 1976. He and his three siblings grew up on the East Side, and he attended the Hillel Academy Day School (now Bader Hillel Academy) from kindergarten to eighth grade, before attending Whitefish Bay High School. After graduating from Butler University, where he studied ballet, he returned to Milwaukee to dance at Milwaukee Ballet.
McKinney started taking classes at Milwaukee Ballet School & Academy when he was still in high school. “I was introduced to dance by a Milwaukee dancer, who’s also Jewish, her name is Pam Kriger, who suggested that I take a ballet class,” he said. “I realized that I was good at it, given the fact that I was an athlete and a musician, and ballet, as many of us know, is the beautiful and perfect amalgamation of aesthetics and athletics.”
McKinney arrived in Pittsburgh in March as the artistic director of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. It is a non-performing position, although he does continue to dance elsewhere.
We spoke with McKinney as he was preparing to kick off the Ballet’s fall season with a “mixed repertoire” performance called “Light in the Dark.” One of four works included was Jennifer Archibald’s “Sounds of the Sun,” which tells the story of Florence Waren, a Jewish dancer who assisted the French Resistance during the Second World War and saved Jewish lives, while another was “Monger,” by the Israeli-American choreographer Barak Marshall.
McKinney described that program as “quite meaningful,” as it arrived on the weekend of the fifth anniversary of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, in Pittsburgh.
McKinney, along with his husband Daniel Banks, created an arts and service organization called DNAWORKS, and one project of that was The Borders Project, which explored the concept of manmade borders through dance and other creative expression. The project visited an Israel/Palestine border in 2009, and later the U.S./Mexico border. The goal, he said, was to “build capacities for healing and connection across borders.”
“It’s really important to bring people together, and it’s also important for us to remember that people are our greatest resource,” he said.
He also contributed to the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, writing a chapter called HaMapah/The Map: Navigating Intersections.
“I spoke about the work that Daniel and I created, entitled HaMapah/The Map, which became HaMapah/The Map: Dance-on-Film, and my experience as a Black, Jewish, native, gay person, and navigating those intersections, telling the stories of my ancestors, and what it has meant for me to dance their stories, and dance my own stories.”
That film featured McKinney dancing in several locations of his ancestors, from Benin in West Africa, to Montana, Poland, and yes, Milwaukee.
“It’s like a time capsule that I’m leaving for the following generations, l’dor v’dor.”
McKinney still has family in Milwaukee. He has noticed the “many parallels” between Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, from architecture to culture to proximity to water, to what he calls “what it means to be Jewish, and the strong and robust connections to Judaism [which are] both evident here in Pittsburgh as well as in Milwaukee, and it’s really good to be here.”
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