When Alvin Ailey founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the age of 27, in 1958, he wanted to create a company dedicated to exploring and expressing the Black experience through dance. His seminal works include the joyous Blues Suite, set to traditional blues music sung by Brother John Sellers, about men and women in the rural Depression-era Texas of his childhood spending a night out drinking and dancing; 1971’s Cry, an emotional birthday gift to his mother; and his most famous piece, 1960’s Revelations, a celebration of the “blood memories” of his youth, set to spirituals, song-sermons, gospel, and holy blues. When he died in 1989, he had choreographed 79 narrative works. More importantly, he’d brought performers and choreographers of color—and the stories that resonated with them and their audiences—into mainstream classical and modern dance.
Ailey was also a lover of music, literature, and visual art, and he often looked to his creative contemporaries for inspiration. It’s an aspect of his work that will be showcased in “Edges of Ailey,” an expansive new survey opening on September 25 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Along with daily live performances, the exhibition will include paintings, sculptures, photographic works, prints, videos, and texts by other artists who collaborated with or influenced Ailey, from legendary contralto Marian Anderson and writer James Baldwin to artist Romare Bearden and choreographer and former Ailey dancer Carmen de Lavallade. The artworks will be assembled thematically around ideas that Ailey touched on in his choreography, from the experiences of Black migrants to Black spirituality, creativity, and liberation.
Judith Jamison joined Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1965 and served as one of its most prominent soloists for 15 years. Before his death, Ailey appointed her artistic director. During her 21 years at that post, she choreographed an array of repertory works, organized a 50-city global tour in honor of the company’s 50th anniversary, and worked tirelessly to build upon Ailey’s legacy of championing and performing the work of new choreographers. In 2004, Jamison secured its permanent home on the west side of Manhattan, and in 2011 she moved into her current role as artistic director emerita.
Among the new generation of choreographers that’s shaped Ailey’s repertory is Kyle Abraham, who first worked with Ailey II (AADT’s second company, which was founded in 1974 to showcase early-career dancers) in 2010 and has since set an additional three works on the main company. Since 2006, Abraham has run his own contemporary company, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, creating and performing works that explore themes like mass incarceration, social justice, and the intersection of race and sexuality and collaborating with visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Glenn Ligon and musicians like the jazz pianist Robert Glasper.
Here, Jamison and Abraham, who both contributed to the Whitney exhibit, discuss Ailey’s impact and why his legacy is very much alive.
Judith Jamison: When I first joined Ailey in 1965, one of the questions I got asked was “How did you feel when you walked in the door?” But how do any dancers feel when they go into their first thing? All of a sudden, I was working with [the modern-dance choreographer] Anna Sokolow, and somebody else was working with [the postmodern dancer and choreographer] Rudy Perez. Everybody likes to sit on “This is a Black company,” but people don’t know that Ailey was a repertory modern-dance company and that all these choreographers were invited. Our protest was exactly what we were doing onstage. Our bodies told the truth about what it is to be an artist.
KYLE ABRAHAM: When I choreograph for the Ailey company, the idea of legacy is really present. I also consider Ailey’s audience. I remember making my first work for the company, Another Night, which premiered in 2012. I used [drummer] Art Blakey as a reference and set it to his version of [Dizzy Gillespie’s jazz classic] “A Night in Tunisia.” I wanted to celebrate the culture in our world. I remember talking to Masazumi Chaya [the dancer and former Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater associate artistic director] about ideas I had around a work that ended up becoming Untitled America. It looked at the cyclical nature of families in the prison system. He told me, “You want to first think of just making an introduction to the company with our audience before you hit them over the head.” I went from making a work celebrating us to then asking, “How can I get a political message to a larger audience? How I can introduce myself and then continue to think about the reach of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater?” When I went in to make my most recent work with Ailey, Are You in Your Feelings?, I had made several works for ballet companies by that point using popular music—and, in some cases, hip-hop music. For whatever reason, people considered doing that in ballet spaces to be revolutionary. In the Ailey company, there have already been several dances where you see some of that ballet vocabulary. There are very famous images of you doing an arabesque with Mikhail Baryshnikov. So I thought, how can I bring this level of respect and connection to the ballet idiom to contemporary and modern dance while looking at the largesse of the Ailey repertory and their audience?
JJ: Whenever we toured, Alvin used to tell us, “Wherever you go, don’t just get on the stage and dance. Find out who you are dancing for. Talk to somebody who doesn’t know anything about dance. Because otherwise, what’s the point?”
KA: At A.I.M, we have this work called An Untitled Love. It’s a celebration of the people who raised me—not only my parents but those aunts and uncles who aren’t blood relatives that you still call family. When we tour it, we try to set up a Black-history tour of each city we perform in. We also have conversations with the local communities as best we can. We go into the barbershop, like, “Oh, I’m a choreographer. I got a show in town. You want some tickets?”
JJ: What you’re doing is magnificent. You’re giving a message with the same kind of strength as if you were yelling, but it’s done so subtly. Audiences from a long time ago will say to me, “Oh, now I get what you were talking about.” If they didn’t get it that first time, there’s always an open space in your work for people to receive it.
KA: Definitely. It should be a conversation.
JJ: Alvin used to say you want to educate, entertain, and uplift an audience. He’d say they paid their hard-earned money to come and see you for one night, so turn it out, please, and do whatever you can to communicate your excellence and what you have to say about this world. People used to say to Alvin, “Are you political?” And he would say, “As soon as I walk out onstage, I’m political—just by me being a Black man.”
KA: I think it’s interesting trying, as a performer, to find that honesty and humanity while also showing up. If you are struggling mentally or emotionally, how can you put pieces of that into something that might heighten the work? That’s part of the joy of what dancers do.
JJ: When we were working with Mr. Ailey, he knew how to use that. He knew you so well that he could tell if you were tight that day or if you were overjoyed. All of that was taken into consideration. … Still, I didn’t really know Alvin outside of his role as a company leader. He was very private. We could usually tell through movement whether he was all right or not. If he gave you something ridiculously hard, he was in a really bad mood. If he invited you in, it would be in the back corners of, say, Madrid, after a performance, in the alleyways where the most fabulous flamenco was going on. That’s how you knew him. Once, when we were on tour in Africa, I was listening to him speak before the curtain went up on this little tiny stage. I got electrocuted; I put my hand on the wrong wall backstage. But we were listening to what he had to say about his creativity, the audience’s creativity, and the reciprocity of what’s going to happen next, and it meant the world to us because we had just heard him speak so many truths.
KA: “Edges of Ailey” is a space for the public to come and witness our culture in totality. When I think about the breadth and expansiveness of the visual art world, that’s what Mr. Ailey was doing in dance. I see his legacy as one that represents not only a time capsule for history but where there’s always been a passion around ideas of hope. This exhibition allows us to look at where we’ve come from, where we are going, and all of the spaces in between.
JJ: In Masekela Langage [which draws parallels between South African apartheid and the racial violence of 1960s Chicago], Alvin reveals all the ways we can be, right? All of it isn’t hopeful, but I think he covered a lot of emotion—everything from being totally sinful and loving it in Blues Suite to the joy of being in church in Revelations. So he does lift us up and entertain us, but he also shows us everything. He was carrying a lot with him. I almost can’t imagine him revealing himself that much in his work, and he paid a price for being that way. You could see the joy in him, in those eyes, in that cackle he used to do. But you could also see the pain and the tears. He covered a scope, and he made us feel it.
KA: I remember some of the works that you commissioned while you were artistic director. You brought in Shapiro and Smith’s Fathers and Sons. You had someone like [the choreographer] Donald Byrd make something and gave dancers in your company the opportunity to choreograph as well. This is what gives someone like me that aha moment to say, “Let me look at the dancers in my company and see who might be a choreographic voice.” It’s through your legacy that a lot of choreographers like me are able to dream.
JJ: The space at 405 West 55th Street was Alvin’s dream. If I could leave a building, then somebody else could leave something even bigger. It’s not even a matter of size. It’s a matter of creativity. It’s a matter of a Kyle, who comes with new ideas and ways of putting things, of connecting dance with the world. That’s what Mr. Ailey was about. Period. He left something that said, “This is open to you. It’s your world.”
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will return to New York City Center on December 4 with its annual, five‐week holiday season, presenting world premieres and new productions by a number of choreographers for whom Alvin Ailey paved the way. Tickets go on sale September 10, and a national tour to over 20 cities will kick off in February.
