If life were normal this spring, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater would be on the road performing its annual national tour. They'd be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the company's signature work, “Revelations”, described by The New York Times as “modern dance's unquestionably greatest hit.”
It’s a simple photograph: a young man staring directly into the camera, arms folded. In the image captured in 1962, dance maestro Alvin Ailey looks defiant. Rhea Combs also sees something else when she looks at the black-and-white image. To her, the fact that photographer Jack Mitchell captured the performer shirtless is a visual metaphor, as if Ailey is telling the viewer, “I’m just baring my chest to the world and giving my all,” Combs said.
"You can see this tremendous need for people to connect to their sense of creativity... their sense of how to find hope... and I think the arts are crucial to keeping us feeling that we do have hope... at times when we are really in need of that." Bennett Rink, Exec. Dir. of Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation speaks to the role of dance and the arts today.
Robert Battle has been charged with continuing Alvin Ailey's formidable legacy, bringing mesmerizing, educational dance to audiences around the world.
When Lucy wanted to find a place in her Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood to send her two young and very active boys, she didn’t have to look very far. Her family lives next to Alvin Ailey, the famous dance school. At the time, she had no idea what a big impact weekly dance lessons would make on her sons’ lives, or how the culture and discipline of dance would shape them as teens who are now in high school. Here’s Lucy’s story.
For 21 years former Alvin Ailey principal dancer Nasha Thomas has traveled to Atlanta with a singular mission. In an age when many public schools have gutted or cut back on their arts programs, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Thomas - in a long and important collaboration with the city - haven shown the value of art in individual lives. The founder of the renowned New York City-based Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ailey, who died in 1989, was an advocate for the importance of arts education and believed that bringing the arts to underprivileged communities and to public schools was vital.
Alvin Ailey company features six local children at the Kennedy Center in its signature work. The dancers emerged onto the blue-lit stage wearing all white. In rows of two - their hands clasped - they slid across the theater floor, threw their arms above their heads and twirled. In front of them, 2,000 people sat in red velvet seats at the Kennedy Center's Opera House. But the dancers remained poised - not even the raucous cheering that echoed through the theater could melt the stern looks from the dancers' faces.
Modern dance impresario Alvin Ailey once asked photographer Jack Mitchell to shoot publicity images of his dancers for their next performance without even knowing the title of their new work. Seeing “choreography” in the images Mitchell produced, Ailey leapt into an ongoing professional relationship with Mitchell. “I think that speaks to the trust that they had in one another,” says Rhea Combs, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Ailey “knew it would work out somehow, some way.” This partnership, which began in the 1960s, led to the production of more than 10,000 memorable images, and the museum has now made those photos available online.
When the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre returns to Atlanta each year, it’s a joyous occasion like a family reunion, if your relatives happened to be brilliant dancers. The ensemble will perform at the Fox Theatre from Feb. 20-23. Ailey Artistic Director Robert Battle and choreographer Donald Byrd will speak at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights on Thursday, Jan. 16 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. The event, “Greenwood & Stories From The Soil: Reveal, Remember, Reconcile” is free and open to the public. Battle and Byrd joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes to talk about the dance.
After 48 years with the celebrated Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, both as performer and choreographer, Masazumi Chaya is hanging up his dancing shoes. The Japanese-American artist will start the new year by retiring as the modern dance company's artistic director. But the man known as "The Keeper of the Flame" to some colleagues is working until his very last day with the renowned dance troupe, whose members will celebrate his legacy with a special evening of performances on Sunday at New York's City Center. He got his nickname for preserving the New York City-based company's repertoire and for training generations of dancers through the past three decades.