STORIES

Alvin Ailey’s dance choreography grew out of his early childhood in segregated rural Texas in the 1930s. He and his mother worked as domestic servants and picked cotton, moving from one town to another to find jobs. His famous works — Blues Suite and Revelations — portrayed dance, blues music, the church, and nighttime parties as a diversion for Black people from their daily lives of drudgery.

In his words, “I wanted to explore Black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation.”

I’m Debbie Allen, and I met Alvin Ailey my freshman year in college at Howard University when I went to the New London Dance Festival, and he changed my life — he and his entire company. I was trained with him, I learned his repertoire. And they wanted to take me on the road, but he said I was too young.

When I met him, I knew where I needed to go.

In 1949, Alvin Ailey studied at Lester Horton’s Dance Studio in Los Angeles, one of the early schools in the United States with a racially diverse group of students and teachers. That experience underscored for him the importance of a dance company whose artistic work and composition celebrated Black culture and reflected the diversity of America.

When Horton died unexpectedly in 1953, Ailey, who had only joined the company as a dancer that same year, took over as artistic director and choreographer. As a dancer, he performed in the Broadway shows House of Flowers starring Pearl Bailey and Diane Carroll, and Jamaica starring Lena Horne and Ricardo Montemagno. He also toured with Harry Belafonte, but Ailey felt the need to have his own company.

In 1958, he formed the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater after realizing that the work of other choreographers didn’t satisfy his expressive needs as a dancer. Although his early works were critically acclaimed and successful, the company struggled to book performances in its first 10 years.

His company’s international tours in the 1960s, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, were marked using the derisive term ethnic dance. The FBI reportedly surveilled the tours and threatened the company with bankruptcy if Ailey or his work on tour exhibited effeminacy or homosexuality, which they called “lewd and criminal.”

A successful tour of Russia in 1970 saved Ailey’s company, which he had announced would close that year. That tour was followed by a sold-out booking at a Broadway theater soon thereafter. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater became the resident company at New York City Center.

Although he reflected the African American experience in his dance, Ailey disliked being labeled a “Black” choreographer. He hired dancers based on talent and character.

“My dancers must be able to do anything,” he said. “I don’t care if they’re black or white or purple or green. I want to help show my people how beautiful they are. I want to hold up the mirror to my audience that says: This is the way people can be. This is how open people can be.”

His company performed not only Ailey’s nearly 80 works of choreography, but also the works of many other choreographers. Ailey created works for other major arts companies. A dance school, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, opened in 1969, and is now called The Ailey School.

Among the honors bestowed on Ailey are the Guggenheim Fellowship, a Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, the Kennedy Center Honors, and a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest honor for a civilian. He was inducted into Chicago’s Legacy Walk and San Francisco’s Rainbow Honor Walk.

Known for being a very private person, he was not open about his homosexuality. Although he died of AIDS at the age of 58 on December 1, 1989, the cause of his death was attributed to a blood disorder so that his mother would not suffer the stigma associated with a death from AIDS.

Alvin Ailey, we applaud you. We salute you. We will forever speak your name. You left for so many of us — millions of people around the world — a pathway to be courageous, to be creative, to be free, to be, to be.