Alvin Ailey

Alvin Ailey Jr. was born on the fifth of January 1931 at Rogers, Texas — a small east-central Texas tenant-farming town — the only child of Alvin Ailey Sr. — a Black tenant-farmer who left the household when Alvin was three months old — and Lula Elizabeth Cliff Ailey, a domestic. He was raised by his mother through the early years across the cotton-and-corn fields of the Texas Brazos-River valley.

The mother and son moved to Los Angeles in 1942 when Alvin was eleven. He was placed at the Twelfth Street Elementary School at Los Angeles and at the George Washington Carver Junior High School and the Thomas Jefferson High School at Los Angeles.

He was introduced at fourteen in 1945 to the Lester Horton Dance Theater at Los Angeles by his Jefferson High School classmate Carmen de Lavallade — under the principal post-Denishawn-and-pre-Martha-Graham Los Angeles modernist-dance choreographer Lester Horton. Horton was the principal racially-integrated modernist-dance teacher of the post-war American West Coast and the principal mentor of the Ailey early career.

He trained at the Lester Horton Dance Theater from 1945 to 1949 and joined the Horton company in 1950 as the principal male dancer.

He succeeded Lester Horton as the artistic director of the Horton Dance Theater on Horton’s death on the second of November 1953 — at twenty-two — and directed the company for the following two years through 1955.

He moved to Manhattan in 1954 with Carmen de Lavallade at the time of the Horton company tour to New York City for the Broadway production of House of Flowers — the Truman Capote-Harold Arlen musical at the Alvin Theatre. Ailey was the principal Black-American dancer in the original House of Flowers cast.

He took further dance training at the Manhattan Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, and Lester Horton studios across the closing years of the 1950s.

He founded on the twenty-first of February 1958 the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Ninety-Second Street Y Kaufmann Concert Hall — the principal Black-American concert-dance company of the post-war period. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater opened with the Ailey solo programme Blues Suite, on the Black-American Saturday-night juke-joint blues tradition.

He completed in 1960 the principal choreographic work of his career — Revelations, a thirty-six-minute Negro-spirituals dance suite in three sections: Pilgrim of Sorrow (on the spirituals of the slave period); Take Me to the Water (on the post-Reconstruction baptism rite); and Move, Members, Move (on the closing post-Emancipation hymn-and-march tradition). Revelations premiered at the Ninety-Second Street Y on the thirty-first of January 1960 and has been performed at every Alvin Ailey company programme since.

Revelations is at this day the most-performed concert-dance work of the twentieth century — performed at over four hundred and twenty thousand consecutive performances by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater alone, and at countless additional performances by the principal American and European concert-dance companies of the period.

He choreographed across the following thirty years over seventy-nine concert-dance works at the Ailey company — including Cry (1971), Hymn (1986), and Memoria (1979) — and trained the principal Black-American post-war modernist-dance generation: Judith Jamison, Donna Wood, and the Ailey company successors.

He died at Manhattan on the first of December 1989 of complications of AIDS, at fifty-eight.

He is honored here as the choreographer of Revelations.