Understanding Alvin Ailey
Dance Is A Chance You Take
“Dance is a kind of calling. It’s a chance you take.”
– Alvin Ailey
People who think they don’t like dance see Alvin Ailey’s company and realize they not only like dance, they love it. But why? How can the movement that came out of one man’s experience and life story ignite the same inner spark in people generation after generation—even 35 years after his death?
The answer is simple: it’s real. And Alvin Ailey knew exactly what it took to strip away his pride and insecurities to tell an honest story. An evening in the presence of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is two hours of witnessing human bodies transmit something real, something true, something that feels like my soul understands your soul.
Today, in our ultra-tech-connected yet humanly disconnected society, two hours of uninterrupted emotional relationship quenches our loneliness and relieves our sense of alienation. Even if you don’t understand the movement, you feel it.
Alvin Ailey knew movement brought people together. He knew the role of the dancer—and, later, the choreographer—was to be a messenger of Spirit. So, he told the truest stories he could through his body. He taught other dancers to do the same. When we watch Ailey dancers perform, we’re watching them in absolute vulnerability, stripped of pride, of insecurities, transmitting the truth of the human experience. Joy, suffering, humor, hunger, ecstasy, jealousy, love, pain—all expressed through sublimely trained bodies, each one called to dance.
WHO IS ALVIN AILEY
Alvin Ailey was born on January 5, 1931, in Rogers, Texas, a small rural town in the segregated South. His childhood was cotton fields, not enough food, never enough shade, but always church on Sunday. River baptisms, the Holy Ghost spirit, songs. “It was a time when people didn’t have much,” Ailey said, “but they had each other.” His mother moved them to California to help with war efforts in the 1940s, but his memories of early life in Texas stowed away. Eventually, these remembrances became Revelations, Ailey’s masterwork portraying African-American cultural heritage, rooted in soul, soil, and song.
For context, Revelations was one of the first authentic, dignified portrayals of the African-American experience on a national concert stage. Before Ailey recreated the jubilation, sorrow, and hope of his childhood community, Black culture had mostly been parodied in minstrelsy at the national level. The power of Revelations struck a deep chord around the country, and then around the world. It remains one of the most beloved contemporary American dances of all time.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs Revelations in both the Feb. 18 & 19 concerts.
THE ALVIN AILEY STYLE OF DANCE: Fusion of Contemporary, African, Ballet, Street
Everything changed for Ailey in California. At Thomas Jefferson High School in LA, he met a mythical creature named Carmen De Lavellade, a young Black dancer studying ballet. Ailey fell in love with her, and followed her to choreographer Lester Horton’s contemporary dance studio. The fated convergence of De Lavellade, Ailey, and Horton set the course of contemporary American dance. It’s one of those historical flashpoints where we can say, “American dance is what it is today because these people met at this moment and worked together.”
Horton trained Ailey in the freeform, expressive movement style of contemporary dance, and partnered him with De Lavellade for some of Horton’s most memorable works. Another key influence entered Ailey’s life at this time—the queen herself, Katherine Dunham.
Dunham was both a scholar and a dancer. She’d traveled throughout the African Diaspora to collect ancestral sacred dances and reclaim them for African-Americans. Ailey responded immediately to these Afro-Caribbean dance techniques, and we see his extraordinary use of spinal flexion, jumps, and articulated arm movements across his choreography.
Horton died suddenly one night of a heart attack (at a mere 47 years old), sending Ailey and De Lavellade in a tailspin. The gap Horton left behind forced Ailey to fill it, and he stepped in as director of the company. Ailey’s choreographic career began.
Eventually, Ailey left California for New York, landed some Broadway shows, and realized he wanted to start a new kind of dance company dedicated to uplifting the African-American experience. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was born. The company blended Ailey’s dance influences with his cultural roots and personal life experiences to create a soul-stirring style of dance that required a level of athleticism that had never been seen.
In a short time, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater proved itself as one of the most impressive, important, and uniquely American artistic achievements of the 20th century.
Do not miss your chance to see this company during its Peace Center engagement. Alvin Ailey and his legacy dance company are so much more than people performing steps to music. Their story is the story of the American soul, of American music, of American creativity redefining and revolutionizing “the norm.” Dance is a chance you take. Ailey took it so that we can all feel the power of connection only the body can transmit.