Judith Jamison
Tall, powerful, and charismatic, Judith Jamison (born 1944) was a featured dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (AAADT) from the late 1960s through the 1980s. She took over as artistic director of the company following Ailey's death in 1989 and has become generally recognized as one of the most important figures in modern American dance.
One of Ailey's most famous dance pieces, "Cry," was created with Jamison in mind. That dance evoked the condition of African-American women, and Jamison and Ailey formed something of a creative partnership for many years as she realized his choreographic visions. Yet Jamison was also a versatile dancer who was open to numerous influences, and after Ailey's death she was instrumental in maintaining the variety and universality of appeal that were the AAADT's trademarks.
Attended Famed Black Church
Born May 10, 1944, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jamison grew up, she told Newsweek, in "a household of people who sang and played the piano. So I came from a disciplined house. You don't arrive to places late, you are polite, you do unto others as you would have them do to you." Her mother was a teacher, her father a sheet-metal worker and part-time musician who supported his daughter's passion for dance because he thought it might help her work off the energy that built up as a result of her generally hyperactive nature. Jamison started dance lessons at age six at the Judimar School of Dance in Philadelphia. She also took piano lessons from her father and played the violin well enough to join a local orchestra in her teens. One other influence was the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, where Jamison remained a frequent attendee even after she rose to the top of the dance world. Founded by breakaway Methodist preacher Richard Allen in 1787, Mother Bethel was a historic institution rich in African-American culture and history.
Jamison got the attention of teachers and had top-flight teachers from the start, winning a place in a class taught by top choreographer Anthony Tudor when she was ten. As a young woman Jamison immersed herself in the arts, going to museums and attending operas and plays, but dance was her greatest passion. African-American dancers were still rare at the time, but the walls of Jamison's bedroom were festooned with pictures of ballerinas and modern dancers of all backgrounds. She sought out a broad variety of dance training that would benefit her later on, focusing on classical ballet but also studying tap dancing, Afro-Caribbean and jazz dance, modern dance, and acrobatics. She appeared in the role of Myrtha in the French ballet Giselle when she was 15.
Graduating from high school two years later, Jamison was at first seduced by the lure of professional objectives. She enrolled at Fisk University in Tennessee, intending to study psychology, but she lasted only three semesters. Returning home, she enrolled at the Philadelphia Dance Academy (now part of the University of the Arts).
Taking a wide variety of courses that included one in the highly complex system of dance notation, Jamison once again got noticed. When Agnes de Mille, a highly popular choreographer who was the niece of film impresario Cecil B. DeMille, taught a master class at the school, she was impressed by Jamison's dancing and invited her to take a role in a new ballet to be staged at New York's Lincoln Center. That did not immediately launch Jamison's career; she worked as an amusement-park ride operator at the 1964 New York World's Fair before getting her next big break. That came when she auditioned for a dance part in a television special starring actor Harry Belafonte. The audition did not go well. "I was never very good at picking up that one-two-three showgirl stuff," Jamison recalled to Octavio Roca of the San Francisco Chronicle. But Ailey, who was looking on, saw in Jamison a dancer who could realize his powerful choreographic visions of African-American life.
Traveled to Africa
Almost immediately, Jamison began to tour with Ailey's company, traveling in 1966 to Europe and then to the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. The experience was an eye-opener for Jamison. "Everybody was there—from [poet] Langston Hughes to [choreographer] Katherine Dunham to [bandleader] Duke Ellington to [Senegalese] President Senghor," she told Suki John of Dance Magazine. "There were dance companies from all over the diaspora." Jamison danced with the Harkness Ballet while the still struggling AAADT took a break from performing, but she signed on for good when it got a new lease on life in 1967. Before long, Jamison was taking starring roles with the company. She modestly attributed that to her height; at five feet, ten inches tall, with what she described to Judith Mackrell of England's Guardian newspaper as "an inseam that went on forever," she stood out from a sea of petite dancers and was a natural for solo roles. But there was more to it than that.
Ailey's famous dances, such as the Ellington-inspired Pas de Duke, Blues Suite, and Revelation (which Jamison began learning the day she joined the AAADT), came alive anew when Jamison danced them. In Pas de Duke, Jamison often appeared in a duet with ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov. Revelation, drawing on the religious life of his family in rural Texas during his childhood, was Ailey's most famous piece, and Jamison brought a power and spirituality to the work that made her an audience favorite. In 1969, Jamison joined the AAADT as it became the first American dance company in decades to tour the Soviet Union and was greeted with enormous ovations there.
The creative relationship between Jamison and Ailey reached a new level with Cry (1971), a solo piece the choreographer created for Jamison. "That dance—15 minutes of movement—embodied 400 years of Black women's pain, passion, and perseverance, and elevated Judith Jamison to the ranks of modern ballet superstardom," noted Asha Bandele of Essence. Cry became Jamison's trademark, but after she took the reins at the AAADT she encouraged younger dancers to bring their own interpretations to the work rather than trying to duplicate her style.
In 1972 Jamison won the Dance Magazine Award, a prestigious annual prize, and she was named by President Richard Nixon as an advisor to the National Council on the Arts. She married fellow Ailey dancer Miguel Godreau that year, but the marriage ended in divorce. The 1970s were a growth period for American dance, and Jamison constantly traveled, gave interviews, and was featured in new productions. Ailey was unusually open to featuring the work of choreographers other than himself, and Jamison appeared in dances by Talley Beatty and other rising creative figures.
Starred in Sophisticated Ladies
In 1980, Jamison decided to strike out on her own. Taking a starring role in the Broadway musical Sophisticated Ladies, she performed as a soloist with other ballet companies and also returned to the Ailey troupe. With Ailey's support, she began to develop her own skills as a choreographer. Two of her works, 1984's Divining and 1988's Tease, were performed by Ailey's organization, and other companies as far afield as Caracas, Venezuela, and Brussels, Belgium, also mounted productions of her works. In 1988 she founded a dance company of her own, the Judith Jamison Project.
Her plans took a sharp turn, however, when Ailey revealed to her, in the midst of the hustle and bustle of a tour, that he was seriously ill. "We were in St. Louis when Alvin decided to tell me that he wasn't well, and that he wanted me to take over the company," Jamison recalled to Joy Duckett Cain of Essence. "He's asking me, and I'm going, 'Oh, yes, sure,' without batting an eye—and without thinking of just how tremendous the responsibility was." Jamison was at Ailey's bedside when he became a casualty of the AIDS epidemic in December of 1989.
The shift from dancer and choreographer to artistic director was challenging for Jamison—and not because it was hard for her to give up dancing. Looking at videotapes of her performances, she realized that she had been near the end of her performing career. Learning the art of administration, however, was a new stage in Jamison's career as she brought in dancers from her own troupe to replace some Ailey stalwarts. Jamison faced pressures from advisers who wanted her to take the company in new directions or, conversely, maintain its repertory unchanged as a shrine to Ailey's career. She carefully steered a middle course.
One aspect of Ailey's legacy that Jamison maintained was its diversity and its aspiration toward universal appeal. Assistant director Masazumi Chaya was of Japanese background, and as the company's repertory grew under Jamison, dancers attempted works with a variety of subject matter. "I've had angry letters from people who felt that all our dancers should be Black," Jamison told Bandele. "But the company is the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. And while we're here to celebrate the Black experience, we're not here to be exclusionary about who can do that with us. Being inclusive is part of our African tradition."
Troupe Appeared in American Express Commercial
Indeed, Jamison sometimes gave the AAADT a populist orientation. American young people who were unable to name any other dance company became familiar with the AAADT after an American Express commercial featuring the company was broadcast on television during the Academy Awards ceremony. "To get young people to a live concert, we first must go where they are the most: in front of computers and televisions," Jamison pointed out to Suki John of Dance Magazine. Under Jamison's astute financial leader ship, the company prospered. She presided over an entire Manhattan building that was home to two Ailey companies, 200 classes a week, and numerous other projects and workshops.
By the early 2000s, Judith Jamison was an icon of American dance. Among her long list of awards was a Kennedy Center Honor in 1999, where she received a prize that Ailey himself had been awarded earlier, and where she shared a stage with another idol, singer Stevie Wonder. President George W. Bush awarded National Medals of the Arts to her and to the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation in 2001, marking the first time the medal had gone to a dance organization. She continued to nurture young dancers and to exert positive force on the American arts scene. Jamison, who often said that if she had not become a dancer her second choice of career would have been airline pilot, surveyed the various sectors of the Ailey empire and remarked to John that "I'm a pilot at heart, and this is a great ship to be piloting."
Books
Jamison, Judith, with Howard Kaplan, Dancing Spirit: An Autobiography, Doubleday, 1993.
Smith, Jessie Carney, ed., Notable Black American Women, Book 1 Gale, 1992.
Periodicals
Daily News (Los Angeles), March 13, 2001.
Daily Telegraph (London, England), June 8, 2002.
Dance Magazine, December 1999.
Essence, June 1998; August 2003.
Guardian (London, England), September 6, 2001.
Newsweek, October 24, 2005.
Philadelphia Inquirer, May 10, 2004.
San Francisco Chronicle, February 10, 2002.
