TODAY contributor Lilliana Vazquez gets a sneak peek into The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to experience what the life of a professional dancer is like. The famed dance company even teaches her how to bust a move or two.
In June, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performed over a dozen works at Lincoln Center. Now four of those performances - "Chroma" by Wayne McGregor; artistic director Robert Battle's "Takademe"; "Grace" by Ronald K. Brown; and Alvin Ailey benchmark "Revelations" - can be relived in theaters Oct. 22 with additional material, including interviews with dancers and Battle.
Courtney Celeste Spears - Audra Danielle Noyes is a young designer, having made her way nearly straight from her studies at Savannah College of Art and Design to Paris, where she cut her teeth at Lanvin and John Galliano. And so her Spring précis was one no doubt informed by her own experiences, which delved deeply into the metamorphosis of a young woman.
After countless hours in rehearsal, the stage can sometimes feel like a foreign country. Mirrors are replaced with blackness, your periphery is filled with light, and the floors, spacing and even the rosin feel different.
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is legendary and this New York based dance group are back in South Africa after 17 years! From a fabled New York City performance in 1958, led by Alvin Ailey and a group of young African-American modern dancers, the company has gone on to perform to 25 million people.
As you enter the theatre, you can already feel the electricity in the air. In the audience are many students and participants in dance groups, professional dancers, dance teachers and dance aficionados eagerly awaiting a performance by one of the world's leading and most revered dance companies: The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
The critically acclaimed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater company makes a historic return to South Africa for the first time in 17 years. Not only will they be performing two spectacular programmes in Johannesburg and Cape Town throughout September, they are also engaging local organizations and aspirant dancers with outreach programmes.
A day before the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater begin the South African leg of their international tour, the company's dancers taught a master class in Johannesburg's historic Soweto township on Wednesday. The dance company last visited South Africa 17 years ago, soon after the end of apartheid.
Eight professional dancers discuss the offstage interested that help them recharge.
She started dancing at the age of three and that was only because her mother went to a Target store and picked out a ballet outfit just to see how her toddler would look in it. For Courtney Celeste Spears, it's like she never took off the leotard.