Alvin Ailey, America’s Charismatic Choreographer
He was handsome, gentle by nature, talented beyond expect-ations, funny, a black choreographer with a background in Los Angeles in Lester Horton's modern dance technique. When he danced, you couldn't take your eyes off him. In performance, he was catlike, soft, big in stature, sure and commanding on stage. His first performance of "Revelations," in 1960, occurred at the YM & YW Hebrew Association, a long-established institution for presenting emerging choreographers in an inexpensive venue. "Revelations," based upon Southern gospel songs, is a finale piece and has now received more performances than any other work in history. The audience joins in, clapping as if in a revival meeting.
Ailey (1931-1989) had come a long way from humble beginnings in Rodgers, Texas where he was once employed picking cotton and where his mother was a domestic. Ailey's talent was so apparent at an early age and so nurtured that it is an almost unbelievable story, and one that we would like to believe can happen everywhere. In addition to study with Horton, who was an undervalued teacher and choreographer, Ailey studied with Graham, Holm and Weidman in New York, ballet with Karl Shook and acting with Stella Adler. After a brief stint as artistic director of Horton's theater before Horton's death in 1953, Ailey performed in the musical "House of Flowers," the film, "Carmen Jones," and the play, "Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright" in 1964. By 1958, he was ready to establish his own company He toured the U.S. and Europe.
But Ailey's crushing burden to find funds, cope with discrimination and eventually with drugs and AIDS, the spiraling inflation of the 1970s, along with the requirements of the National Endowment for the Arts for new works, but not for maintenance of a company, was his undoing.
His unique blend of modern dance, jazz, ballet and black vernacular dance attracted large audiences of mixed cultures. The programs also included works by Jerome Robbins, John Butler, Garth Fagan and many others. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Company, now headed by one of his former dancers, Judith Jamison, has a regular season at City Center every December. The Alvin Ailey School, a new $6M structure, a short distance from Lincoln Center in New York City, has a curriculum of Horton and Katherine Dunham (African-Caribbean) techniques as well as other forms.
The annual February, U.S celebration of black history month finds the group on tour in the U.S. Residency programs in public schools across the U.S. will continue and a return to the Joyce Theater is scheduled for the Spring. With all the accomplishments of black choreographers in the U.S. Ailey stands the highest. His work has a reverence for his heritage, elegance, as well as a demand for the highest technical proficiency in performance.
Much of his material was collected by Sylvia Waters, one of his former dancers, who now heads Ailey II and is deposited at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, including films of his works. In addition, some material resides in the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City. The bulk of his papers and photos, lovingly collected by a volunteer, young white, widowed schoolteacher, Mickey Bord, who met Ailey as a young man and created an archive, have been given to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Best source for information is Jennifer Dunnings's Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance, (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996).