Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has officially kicked off its holiday season at New York City Center. Choreographer Hope Boykin, who was a principal dancer for the company, is premiering her new work.
She is transcendent and glowing: a mysterious woman in white. Standing center stage in a bandeau top with a strip of transparent fabric hanging down her front, and wide, loose pants, she remains still and rooted. This dancer, the mother god of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace, anchors the stage with a quiet strength as the sound of Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” builds, calling her body — and with it her costume, its fabric swelling and dipping like waves — to action.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs on The Kelly Clarkson Show, celebrating 25 years of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace.
The life and legacy of Judith Jamison were celebrated on December 4 in New York City when Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater held an opening-night gala to kick off its season at New York City Center.
The world lost a great artist, but we did not lose her spirit,” said Phylicia Rashad of Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's late artistic director emerita. At last night's Opening Night Gala for the dance company, Rashad served as honorary co-chair alongside Gayle King and paid special tribute to Jamison: “Just as sure as if she was standing here, we feel Judith Jamison's strength and resolve, and we know what she would be saying. She would be saying ‘keep dancing, keep striving, keep teaching, keep reaching.’" And that, we certainly did.
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.
Alvin Ailey was a momentous figure in American dance. One of his most substantial and lasting achievements was to transform ideas of what a modern dance company could be, collapsing distinctions between diverse worlds like concert dance, jazz and Hollywood entertainment. He was also a transformational figure for the Black community: the dance institutions that he built in his lifetime – the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center – have cultivated generations of Black dance talent while sharing the experience of Black people in America.
At the edge of Manhattan, in an 18,000-square-foot gallery on the fifth floor of a bright asymmetrical building, is the first large-scale exhibition about the life and work of the groundbreaking Black American choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). This show is a long time coming, both for Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator Adrienne Edwards (who has been working on the show for about six years) and for fans of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, founded by Ailey in 1958 (I, for one, have been looking forward to it for months).
The sun sets, the moon rises and New York City is reborn. The night was a source of fascination for the choreographer Alvin Ailey. He understood its power, how bodies could soften in its shadows. It’s a time when some people “become their real selves,” he wrote in his notebooks in reference to his dance Night Creature. It’s no accident that Ailey, the subject of Edges of Ailey, a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, choreographed a performance to open Studio 54 in 1977.