Alvin Ailey
Alvin Ailey
Alvin Aileywas an African-American choreographer and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. He is credited with popularizing modern dance and revolutionizing African-American participation in 20th-century concert dance. His company gained the nickname "Cultural Ambassador to the World" because of its extensive international touring. Ailey's choreographic masterpiece Revelations is believed to be the best known and most often seen modern dance performance. In 1977, Ailey was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. He...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChoreographer
Date of Birth5 January 1931
CityRogers, TX
CountryUnited States of America
We still spend more time chasing funds than we do in the studio in creative work.
The creative process is not controlled by a switch you can simply turn on or off; it's with you all the time.
It will take very sophisticated marketing to achieve our aim of bringing more black people into the theater.
No matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it is not enough.
If you live in the elite world of dance, you find yourself in a world rife with racism. Let's face it.
I always want to have more dancers in my company.
I'm attracted to long-legged girls with long arms and a little head.
Lena Horne is the sweetest and most adorable woman in the world.
My lasting impression of Truman Capote is that he was a terribly gentle, terribly sensitive, and terribly sad man.
Racism tears down your insides so that no matter what you achieve, you're not quite up to snuff.
One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people.
My feelings about myself have been terrible.
I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation.
DeFrantz's study...is not the first book about the protean Ailey, who was born in hardscrabble Texas in 1931 and died in 1989 after creating close to 80 works. But it is perhaps the most comprehensive, combining biography, criticism, the analysis of dance criticism, and a sort of corporate history, siting the now firmly established Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in the international cultural landscape.