Alvin Ailey
1931 — 1989 · Founder of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; Revelations carried the spirituals of his Texas childhood to more people than any modern dance ever made
Alvin Ailey was born on the fifth of January 1931 at Rogers, Texas, the only child of Lula Elizabeth Ailey, who raised him alone through the cotton country of the Depression — the church services and juke joints of those years became what he called his blood memories. They reached Los Angeles in 1942, and in 1949 his classmate Carmen de Lavallade brought him to Lester Horton's studio — one of the first racially integrated dance schools in America. He joined Horton's company in 1953, and when Horton died that November, Ailey, at twenty-two, became its artistic director.
New York took him in 1954, dancing beside de Lavallade in House of Flowers on Broadway. On the thirtieth of March 1958, at the 92nd Street Y, he gave the first concert of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, premiering Blues Suite — and on the thirty-first of January 1960, on the same stage, came Revelations: Pilgrim of Sorrow, Take Me to the Water, Move, Members, Move. Set to the spirituals of his childhood, it has been performed continuously ever since, seen by more than twenty million people — widely held the most-seen work of modern dance in the world.
He built an institution that outlives him: the State Department sent the company through Southeast Asia and Australia in 1962; the roster was integrated from the start of the decade; the Ailey School opened in 1969; and in 1971 he made Cry on Judith Jamison, dedicated to all Black women everywhere — especially our mothers. Seventy-nine ballets in all, and a company he insisted was never a repository for his work alone. The Kennedy Center honored him in December 1988.
He died at New York on the first of December 1989, at fifty-eight. He asked that his illness be announced as a blood disorder, to spare his mother; his death is now openly acknowledged as AIDS-related, and the company he built says so with the same love that filled St. John the Divine with four thousand mourners. Judith Jamison took up the company, and in 2014 the nation gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Honored be Alvin Ailey, who turned blood memory into a dance the whole world knows.
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