In this tribute to legendary dancer and choreographer Judith Jamison, Portia sits down with Alvin Ailey rehearsal director Ronni Favors and Alvin Ailey dancer Vernard Gilmore to celebrate Jamison’s contributions and to discuss how the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater carries on her legacy of artistic excellence.
When Alvin Ailey's seminal dance work Revelations was first performed in 1960, it was about twice as long as the version that's now been seen by millions of people around the world. The company that bears the late choreographer's name is revisiting this history with a new piece set to fresh interpretations of the songs that were removed.
Growing up in Albany, DuBois A’Keen developed a complicated relationship with his hometown. It is the city that produced Ray Charles and provided the template for the Civil Rights Movement, but it was also segregated, impoverished and confining for a Black boy with creative leanings. A’Keen couldn’t wait to flee to the big city.
In 1949, as legend has it, Alvin Ailey, then a young gymnast, followed school buddy and fellow future dance icon Carmen de Lavallade to the famed Lester Horton “Dance Theater” on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. It was a simple gesture that would lay the groundwork for the future of American concert dance. After Horton’s unexpected death, Ailey took over the Horton company for a while before starting the eponymous Alvin Ailey Company in New York, forming a beautiful, long and deeply intersectional lineage that incorporated dance, art, and innumerable interconnected histories culminating in the very first exhibit of the archival record of the Alvin Ailey Company, a show five years in the making and currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art.
Dancer and choreographer Judith Jamison had her own divine grace on stage. As the former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, she could communicate through movement what poets do in words. "We just happen to be very blessed because we've been given the gift of dance," she said in 1991.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has chosen Alicia Graf Mack to be its next artistic director, it announced on Thursday. A former member of the company, Mack, 45, currently the director of the dance division at Juilliard, will take on her new role in July.
The ovation lasted for almost 10 minutes. The solo that prompted it was only six minutes longer. Before the premiere of Alvin Ailey’s “Cry” in 1971, Judith Jamison was hardly an unknown quantity. But after it, she was a singular sensation, a headliner, the embodiment of poise and power. From then on she was unofficially America’s most celebrated Black female dancer — maybe even the world’s.
Music’s in the air, and there’s painting and sculpture in imaginative variety as an art museum gives rare treatment to an ephemeral medium. With the spirited, sense-surround show called Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York art season gets off to an exuberant, enveloping, though puzzling start. The show is a major institutional tribute to the American choreographer and performer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). It’s also a relatively rare example of a traditionally object-intensive art museum giving full-scale treatment to the ephemeral medium of dance.
As a retrospective opens at the Whitney Museum, New York, writers, curators and those close to the choreographer explore his vision to transform American dance
Alvin Ailey is one of the most accomplished and revered dancers in history. And yet, there has never been a wide-ranging exhibition chronicling his singular life, style of dance, company, and the impact he left on American culture. “Around 2018, there was a range of shows at museums about dance: the Lincoln Kirstein ballet, the Judson Dance Theater, Merce Cunningham,” Adrienne Edwards, senior curator at The Whitney Museum in New York City, told me recently. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘Why not Ailey? Why hasn’t a museum done a show about him?’”