Ailey, Alvin Jr.

Impact on the world

Founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958 specifically to create opportunities for Black dancers systematically excluded from major ballet and modern dance companies, going on to choreograph 'Revelations' in 1960, a piece set to African American spirituals that remains, more than six decades later, recognized as one of the most popular and most frequently performed ballets in the world; in 2008 the U.S. Congress passed a resolution designating his company a 'vital American cultural ambassador to the World,' and in 2014 President Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Life & background

Born in Rogers, Texas in 1931 and raised partly by a single mother who relocated the family to Los Angeles in search of better opportunity, Ailey attended segregated schools and discovered live Black performance at the Lincoln and Orpheum Theatres, where he saw Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday among others; a 1945 performance by Katherine Dunham's company, seen when he was 14, sparked his first real interest in dance as a possible career, though he did not commit seriously to the art form until 1949, when classmate Carmen de Lavallade brought him to study under choreographer Lester Horton, whose Melrose Avenue studio was among the first racially integrated dance schools in the country. After Horton's death in 1953, Ailey took over choreographing for Horton's company before moving to Broadway, performing in productions including 'House of Flowers' alongside de Lavallade, and in 1958 founded his own company specifically because he recognized how few opportunities existed for Black male dancers within the field's established institutions. His signature work, 'Revelations,' drew on his own childhood memories of Texas and the rhythms of the Black church to become one of the most enduring pieces in American dance, and his company toured internationally for decades, including a 1962 tour spanning thirteen weeks and thirteen countries and a 1966 appearance at the same Dakar World Festival of Negro Arts where Dunham had represented the United States; Ailey also maintained close professional ties with Duke Ellington, choreographing several pieces set to his music. Though widely celebrated for transforming American dance, Ailey concealed his homosexuality throughout his life amid the open homophobia of his era, a private struggle his biographers note he never resolved even as his public career flourished; he founded a school in 1969 to train future generations of dancers and died in 1989 at 58, having built, in the words of one historian, one of the first successful modern dance repertory companies dedicated to preserving the work of multiple Black choreographers under one roof.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; Alvin Ailey official website; EBSCO Research Starters; Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing; National Museum of African American History and Culture archive