Judith Jamison 1943–

Dance choreographer, artistic director

At a Glance…

Parents Nurtured Jamison’s Dancing Spirit

Recruited by Agnes de Mille, then Alvin Ailey

Became Top Dancer in Ailey Troupe

Assumed Directorship of Ailey’s Dance Theater

Sources

Since 1989 Judith Jamison has been at the helm of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. As the company’s artistic director, she has blended her own standards of excellence with the late Ailey’s artistic genius, remaining true to his vision of having black dancers perform pieces about African culture and the African American experience. A protégée and friend of Ailey, Jamison strives to maintain his dance company and preserve his memory. Yet, she goes farther—challenging her dancers and exploring innovations in modern dance.

“People ask me, ‘What’s different? What are the changes you’ve made?”’ she revealed in an interview with Jennifer Dunning for the New York Times. “It’s an evolving situation. I want to sustain this company and not have it be a museum piece. I want to challenge the dancers and the audiences with as much diversity as possible.” In another Times article, Anna Kisselgoff observed, “There are signs that Miss Jamison wants to see the repertory tilt further toward formally oriented works that explore new ways of moving, to draw closer to what is happening elsewhere in modem dance.”

In 1965 Ailey discovered Jamison and asked her to become a member of his dance company. Always hungry to perform and to extend herself past her physical limits, the five-foot-ten, statuesque dancer was soon equated with an African goddess and applauded by audiences from Paris to Moscow to New York. She was a lead performer in Ailey’s company from 1967 to 1980, and Ailey choreographed some of his most famous works for her, most notably his dance Cry.

He also encouraged her development as a choreographer during the 1980s. Jamison remained Ailey’s friend even when she left his company to become a star on Broadway and dance with other companies. When Ailey became ill in late 1980s, he selected her to succeed him as artistic director of his company, which she did, even though she was in charge of her own budding dance troupe at the time.

Jamison’s dance career lasted almost 20 years; during that time, she learned more than 70 ballets. Aside from appearing primarily with Ailey’s company in the United States and around the globe, she guest performed with the

At a Glance…

Born May 10, 1943, In Philadelphia, PA; daughter of John Henry and Tessie Belle Brown Jamison; married and divorced Miguel Godreau (a dancer), 1972. Education: Studied dance with Marion Cuyjet Nadia Chilkovsky, Joan Kerr, Antony Tudor, and others; attended Judimor School of Dance, Fisk University, and the Philadelphia Dance Academy.

Dancer, choreographer, aristic director. First danced professionally in Agnes de Mille’s Four Marys, American Ballet Theatre, 1965; dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York, 1965–60; became lead dancer and toured in United States, Europe, and Africa; choreographed pieces for Ailey troupe, 1984—; director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, 1989—.

Performed as guest with the Harkness Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, and Dallas Ballet; had lead roles created for her in the Vienna Opera and elsewhere; choreographed her own ballets for various companies, including that of Maurice Bejart in Paris; starred on Broadway in Sophisticated Ladies; established her own dance troupe, the Jamison Project, in Philadelphia and Detroit. Choreographed works include Divining and Just Call Me Dance, both 1984; Time Out and Time In, both 1986; Into the Life, 1987; Tease. 1988; forgotten Time and Read Matthew 11:28, both 1989; Rift, 1991; and Hymn, 1993. Author, with Howard Kaplan, of Dancing Spirit, 1993.

Awards: Dance Magazine annual citation, 1972; Key to the City of New York, 1976; distinguished service award from Harvard University, 1982, and from the mayor of New York City, 1982; Philadelphia Arts Alliance Award; Candace Award, National Coalition of 100 Black Women; several honorary degrees.

Addresses: Office —Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, 211 West 61st St., 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10023.

American Ballet Theatre, the Harkness Ballet, and other companies in the United States and overseas. She also went on tour in Africa with the U.S. State Department as a sponsor and danced at several presidential inaugurations.

“I’m standing on Alvin’s shoulders,” Jamison reflected in her 1993 autobiography Dancing Spirit; but after his death, she found that “the horizons [had] become broader.” Under her direction, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has taken on new dancers and varied its programs; in addition, Jamison has introduced a choreographic style that is different from Ailey’s. As Kisselgoff observed in the New York Times, “The contemporary pieces are cool; the older ones simmer and come to a boil. Miss Jamison has added some new ingredients, but she has, so far, stirred the right brew.”

Parents Nurtured Jamison’s Dancing Spirit

Jamison was born on May 10, 1943, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to John Henry Jamison and Tessie Belle Brown. She credits her parents for the start of her spiritual journey toward the arts and for her pride in her African American heritage. Though she and her older brother grew up in a racially mixed, blue-collar neighborhood, their parents exposed them to Philadelphia’s thriving black community. Aware of their daughter’s restless energy from a very early age, Jamison’s parents enrolled her in the Judimar School of Dance, where she gave her first dance recital at the age of six.

Jamison went to Judimar for 11 years, while simultaneously attending regular public school. At Judimar, she studied ballet, tap, acrobatics, jazz, and primitive dance with a variety of teachers, including her earliest mentor, Marion Cuyjet. Jamison recalled in Dancing Spirit that Cuyjet “created a world for young black children that encompassed more than dance.” Jamison also remembered the impact of seeing a lecture-demonstration given by anthropologist and dancer Pearl Primus. “She had gone to the [African] homeland, which impressed me,” Jamison noted in her autobiography.

After graduating from Judimar and Germantown High School, Jamison took a year off before going to college. Then, at the suggestion of Cuyjet, she enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, on a physical education scholarship. But apparently Fisk was too conventional a place for an individualist like Jamison. “During halftime at basketball games I danced on pointe,” she wrote in Dancing Spirit. “People thought I was totally nuts.… They didn’t know what to make of me.” After three semesters, she transferred to the Philadelphia Dance Academy, which offered her more opportunity to challenge herself as a dancer.

Recruited by Agnes de Mille, then Alvin Ailey

While studying in Philadelphia, Jamison took a class with a guest teacher, choreographer Agnes de Mille, who promptly offered her a role in a ballet she was choreographing for the American Ballet Theatre. “I said yes,” Jamison wrote in her autobiography. “I knew Agnes de Mille and her history and I knew the Ballet Theatre and their[s]. I had pictures of the dancers all over my bedroom wall.” Called The Four Marys, the ballet was performed in 1965 at New York City’s Lincoln Center and at the Chicago Opera House. Afterward, Jamison stayed in New York and frequented audition halls, looking for parts. At an unsuccessful audition for a role in a Harry Belafonte television special, she attracted the interest of Alvin Ailey, who several days later asked her to join his Dance Theater. Commenting on the years she spent working with Ailey, she revealed in Dancing Spirit, “My relationship with Alvin was based on total awe of his accomplishments as a director, choreographer, and human being.”

Jamison first danced with Ailey’s company in the ballet Congo Tango Palace, which was performed at the Harper Theatre Dance Festival in Chicago in 1965 and 1966. She traveled continually afterwards, appearing onstage across America, Europe, and Africa as Ailey’s company gained worldwide attention. “We did six weeks of one-night stands on our bus tours,” Jamison explained. “Alvin would teach us a half-dozen dances in two weeks.” When the Ailey company temporarily broke up in Barcelona, Spain, because of lack of funding, Jamison took time off and appeared in a Senegalese movie. She rejoined the company later in 1967 and went on tour with them in Europe.

Became Top Dancer in Ailey Troupe

Jamison’s height and strength, coupled with her ability to express a wide range of emotions, made her a preferred dancer; she performed key roles with the Ailey company, as in the famous solo Cry, which premiered in New York in the spring of 1971. Of that performance Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times, “For years it has been obvious that Judith Jamison is no ordinary dancer.… Now Alvin Ailey has given his African queen a solo that wonderfully demonstrates what she is and where she is.… Rarely have a choreographer and dancer been in such accord.”

In 1980 Jamison left Ailey’s troupe to star with Gregory Hines on Broadway in Sophisticated Ladies. Jamison also appeared with other dance companies and with leading male dancers, including Mikhail Baryshnikov. In addition she choreographed her own ballets for various companies, including that of Maurice Bejart in Paris, had lead roles created for her in the Vienna Opera, and taught dance classes at Jacob’s Pillow in Massachusetts.

Of her decision to leave the Ailey troupe, she wrote in her autobiography, “I had finished doing my work dancing with the company. I wanted to try something else.” Yet Jamison’s ties to Ailey were not completely severed when she went out on her own. Prior to Ailey’s death, Jamison explained to Olga Maynard in Aspects of a Dancer, “Alvin and I have this love-hate thing, a relationship that I think we both appreciate, if neither of us truly understands it.” In 1984 she choreographed her first piece, Divining, at Ailey’s suggestion, and periodically returned to perform an occasional piece with the company.

Assumed Directorship of Ailey’s Dance Theater

In 1988 she began auditioning dancers for her own troupe, the Jamison Project, which was based in Philadelphia and Detroit. Two premiere dances were created for the project, Forgotten Time and Read Matthew 11:28. When the company first performed them in Washington, D.C., Suzanne Levy observed in the Washington Post, “These 12 dancers have been coached by Jamison to give their all. Bodies are flung with fierce disregard for safety, limbs are stretched to improbable limits, stops are made with jolting abruptness, the movement is impossibly fast, yet, they do it, and they make it look exhilarating rather than dangerous.” Jamison planned to give tours, workshops, seminars, and lecture-demonstrations in each city. But before her project blossomed, Ailey died, and Jamison took up her position as artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She managed both companies for a time, but eventually hers merged with Ailey’s.

Jamison’s choreography has drawn both praise and criticism throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985 Dance Magazine called her “first foray into choreography, Divining, a deceptively simple exercise in strong, grounded movement to a live percussion score.… A fusion of traditional African motifs with the repetitive, simplified focus of post-modem dance, the work has more to it than meets the eye.” At the opposite pole, New York magazine termed it “a flimsy affair,” adding, “The piece doesn’t go on anywhere near long enough to build the hypnotic power it lays claim to.”

When the premiere of Jamison’s 1989 work Forgotten Time was performed at New York’s Joyce Theater, Jack Anderson wrote in the New York Times, “Ms. Jamison was at her choreographic best.… The work, for her full company, was notable for the beauty of its groupings and for the way it appeared to take place in some mysterious, transcendent realm.” However, he added that Jamison was “not always able to organize [her sequences] into choreographic structures” and suggested that “judicious editing would make some of her works even more striking than they now are.”

During the 1993-1994 winter performance of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Jamison presented a new work, Hymn, set to a monologue created by actor/writer Anna Deavere Smith. About the choreography of the piece, which was performed at the company’s 35th anniversary gala at City Center in New York City, Deborah Jowitt wrote in the Village Voice, “Jamison can make the whole stage boil with individual gestures or lock into exuberant, spine-rippling unison. She uses walking to reflect Ailey’s words about dance as a spiritual journey or interpolates familiar Ailey images … into her own solid patterns.” Anna Kisselgoff observed in the New York Times, “Hymn threatened to be all talk and little dance.… Yet, gradually and dramatically, [it] progressed into a convincing artistic statement of its own.… Ms. Jamison has choreographed pungent solos [and] captures the essence of some outstanding dancers.”

In her autobiography, Dancing Spirit, Jamison summed up her philosophy about what it means to be a dancer: “You have to be desperate, as though you were catching your breath.… You want to eat life, so you have to be famished all the time, not physically, but in wanting to know and in wanting to absorb and in exploring and stepping out over the edge, sometimes by yourself.… Dance is bigger than the physical body.… When you extend your arm, it doesn’t stop at the end of your fingers, because you’re dancing bigger than that; you’re dancing spirit. Take a chance. Reach out. Go further than you’ve ever gone before.”

Sources

Books

Clarke, Mary, and Clement Crisp, The History of Dance, Crown, 1981, p. 226.

Jamison, Judith, and Howard Kaplan, Dancing Spirit, Doubleday, 1993.

Maynard, Olga, Aspects of a Dancer, 1982.

Periodicals

Dance Magazine, March 1985; May 1991.

Detroit Free Press, March 18, 1990.

Detroit News, March 17, 1990.

Emerge, December/January 1994, p. 16.

Newsweek, March 16, 1981, p. 103; September 18, 1989.

New York, March 16, 1981, p. 43; February 12, 1990, p. 59.

New York Daily News, March 16, 1981.

New York Post, December 20, 1993.

New York Times, November 15, 1988; November 17, 1988; December 20, 1989; January 25, 1990, p. C18; December 2, 1990; December 23, 1990; December 10, 1993.

Publishers Weekly, August 9, 1993; October 18, 1993, p. 59.

Time, March 16, 1981.

Village Voice, December 21, 1993.

Washington Post, May 14, 1990, p. B7.

—Alison Carb Sussman