"He made us believe that we were gods and goddesses, but also individuals," says Judith Jamison of Alvin Ailey, whom she celebrates in "Hymn" and whose company she now directs. He did this while being, always, horribly unsure of his own worth, and afflicted for much of his life with mental problems that would have derailed a less dedicated man.
Born in poor, rural Rogers, Texas in 1931, Ailey was the child of Lula Elizabeth Cliff, and the handsome Alvin Ailey, whom she married at 16. She gave birth to Alvin Jr. two years later. He was, according to biographer Jennifer Dunning, "a big baby," reluctant to walk on his own until he was more than 18 months old. A few months later his father fled the marriage, returning some years on, but this time it was Lula who took off, moving herself and the child to Wharton, Texas, where the two of them picked cotton.
More moves followed; the one stable point was the Baptist Church, where Ailey attended Sunday School and listened to the gospel services, and where he was baptized. When he was five, they moved to Navasota, a larger and more segregated Texas town, which nevertheless had a theater where he was exposed to blues singers and minstrel shows. He wrote and drew constantly, and stayed behind for nearly a year when Lula decided to move to Los Angeles.
They reunited there in 1942. In school, Ailey exhibited a gift for languages and began reading and writing poetry and singing. School field trips introduced him to such black stars as Lena Horne. He failed at tap-dancing, and discovered Central Avenue, which had theaters and movie palaces and cocktail lounges. Ailey watched top black vaudeville acts and films like "Cabin in the Sky" and "Stormy Weather." Remembered as a moody child, he made friends who shared his interest in the arts. But when his mother remarried, he was devastated.
At Jefferson High School he was taken to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, an adventure which set him in the habit of traveling downtown on weekends to pursue his interests in music and dance. He visited Katherine Dunham in her dressing room, soaking up the brilliant fabrics and energy of backstage life. At school he met Carmen de Lavallade, whose guardian owned a bookstore devoted to black writing and was related to the famous black ballerina Janet Collins. Performances Collins gave lured Ailey to Lester Horton's studio, where he watched for six months before he worked up the courage to take classes.
Dance is one of the last remaining arts in which knowledge is transmitted directly from generation to generation, artist to artist, often including the ultimate in phyical closeness -- actual physical contact. Lester Horton was a unique outpost of contemporary dance sensibility in Los Angeles, and one of the few teachers who welcomed nonwhite students. (Another was the ballet teacher Carmelita Maracci.) He created what became a real family for Ailey, allowing him to explore all his talents. But all too soon, on November 2, 1953, Horton was dead.
Alvin Ailey, at 23 barely out of his own apprenticeship with Horton's company, became its artistic director, choreographing a ballet based on Tennessee Williams's works and works of other artists, many of them savaged by the critics. After an appearance at Jacob's Pillow, a dance retreat in the Berkshires, Ailey auditioned for and won a role in a Broadway show, "House of Flowers," based on a Truman Capote story. From 1955 on, he made his home in New York, studying with every choreographer on the burgeoning scene: Hanya Holm, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Katherine Dunham, Charles Weidman, Karel Shook. After his show closed he lived on unemployment and the proceeds from teaching, soaking up the city's resources: films, poetry readings, new music, and dance and drama. The civil rights movement began to escalate, and Ailey found himself in a position to express its drama in theater and choreography. He danced in television shows and films, moving away from the experimental modern dance world and into the more glamorous precincts of Broadway. He worked as a lead dancer in the 1957 musical "Jamaica," choreographed by Jack Cole, and at the same time began preparing choreography of his own, with which he made his New York debut in 1958 at the 92nd Street Y.
According to Dunning, dance was for Ailey "a way to communicate with whoever turned up to see his work, whether he was speaking about the power of the blues in black lives, the beauty of those lives, or, indirectly, about how it might feel to be an ugly duckling, an uncertain authority, or even, perhaps, a man considered not quite a man by virtue of his race and sexuality. Ailey understood more than most how universal specifics tend to be. . . . He wanted to show people, both black and white, how beautiful -- and how open -- [black dancers] could be." On that first 92nd Street Y program he premiered "Blues Suite," a dance set in a "sporting house," calling upon his memories of the roadhouses of Texas to create a work celebrating black culture. As one dancer said, "He had the knack of making you tear your guts out onstage. You really wanted to give it all you had."
Alvin Ailey's biography reads like the description of a great tree. He soaked up knowledge and inspiration from the culture that produced him, and produced leaves in the form of dances, branches that are the hundreds of dancers and choreographers who studied with him, performed with and for him, passed through his company and, ultimately, his school. He found a home for the company at a YWCA in Manhattan, paving the way for what became the Clark Center for the Performing Arts, a mecca for dancers.
From Ailey's legendary "Revelations."
On January 31, 1960, the Ailey dancers performed "Revelations" for the first time, at the Kaufmann Concert Hall of the 92nd Street YM-YWHA. Drawn from Negro spirituals, it was as sacred as "Blues Suite" was secular, and it knocked the audience out with its combination of jazzy steps and humorous portraits. Thirty-nine years and hundreds of performances later, it is still doing that, and regularly closes the bulk of shows in New York and on tour. A suite of dances, it shows us black men on the run from sins real and imagined, and black women in all their summer glory, celebrating their faith in a small, airless, Southern Baptist church, recreating, as Dunning observes, "the gestures and ceremony he remembered from his own baptism, exaltation rising up from the stirred waters of the snake-ridden pond back of the church in Rogers, Texas." Dunning's colleague at the New York Times, Anna Kisselgoff, has said the work "addresses itself to a universal expression of faith -- in religion perhaps, in faith in art itself."
The problem with creating a masterpiece right out of the gate is that you spend the rest of your life trying to top it. Ailey made dances to folk, modern, and classical music, to blues, and -- most famously -- to jazz, especially the work of Duke Ellington; he also choreographed to songs by Laura Nyro, Keith Jarret, and dozens more over 30 years.
The life of the Ailey company coincides closely with the fabled "dance boom," which was set off in the mid-'60s with the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts. Ailey was able to take his company on tour frequently, a mixed blessing; it made any kind of normal relationship or family life next to impossible. He was notoriously reclusive, and as the years passed became increasingly distracted, perhaps an indication of the psychological difficulties he was having. Although the company was a smash hit abroad, it was broke at home, putting continuous pressure on everyone involved. Wonderful new dancers like Judith Jamison and Dudley Williams joined the company; as Alvin approached 35, he danced less and less, with Williams taking over his roles. The company was in residence for a period at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but, after a smash Broadway season, it returned to Clark Center and began searching for a Manhattan base, settling for years in a studio on East 59th Street. In 1979, it found space in a spanking new high-rise overlooking Times Square, where it remained until moving, a decade later, into its current home on West 61st Street, behind Lincoln Center.
It was several years before he made another major work, but in 1984 he returned to his love of indigenous black music and choreographed "For Bird -- With Love," a tribute to jazzman Charlie Parker. The research for this work led him to form strong associations in Kansas City, Parker's birthplace, which culminated in the founding of the first AileyCamp and in Kansas City's becoming almost a "second home" for the company.
The troupe continued to tour and to grow; large grants became available. But the specter of AIDS loomed, claiming both administrators and dancers. Ailey won every award that the dance field and the country offers its artists, but his health began to decline. A huge project celebrating Katherine Dunham took its toll on everyone. Another jazz-biographical dance, "Opus McShann," mystified some viewers. Invited to the White House, Ailey struggled through the visit despite encroaching illness. Diagnosed with cytomegalovirus and suffering from an esophogeal ulcer, he spent months in the hospital, passing away on December 1, 1989. Maya Angelou, at his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, compared his death to the fall of a great tree.
By Elizabeth Zimmer