Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater & Ailey II
Judith Jamison 1943-2024
Opus 3 Artists is deeply saddened by the passing of dance legend Judith Jamison. A celebrated dancer and choreographer, and leader of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater for 21 years, she was the guiding force that kept the company thriving through many eras. Through her unwavering vision and collaboration, Opus 3 had the privilege of bringing the company’s performances to audiences across North America and around the world. We are truly honored to have worked alongside her.
Judith Jamison, who became an international star with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, first as a majestic dancer and then as the troupe’s director, building it into the most successful modern dance company in the country, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 81.
Her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, was announced by Christopher Zunner, a spokesman for the Ailey company, who said she died “after a brief illness.”
At 5-foot-10, Ms. Jamison was unusually tall for a woman in her profession. “But anyone who’s seen her onstage is convinced she’s six feet five,” the critic Deborah Jowitt wrote in The New York Times in 1976.
Ms. Jamison (pronounced JAM-ih-son) acknowledged in her 1993 autobiography, “Dancing Spirit,” that “I was the antithesis of the small-boned, demure dancer with a classically feminine shape.”
But it wasn’t just her physical presence that was distinctive; she was a performer of great intelligence, warmth and wit.
“Jamison doesn’t show you steps, she uses them to show you a woman dancing,” Ms. Jowitt wrote. “This ability to maintain a human dimension and to project superhuman power and radiance is perhaps one of her most impressive skills.”
A ballet-trained dancer who wore her hair closely cropped, Ms. Jamison often inspired comparisons with the divine. “The prototype of countless carven and sculptured goddesses” was how Olga Maynard described her in a 1972 cover article for Dance magazine. (Ms. Maynard later wrote the 1982 biography “Judith Jamison: Aspects of a Dancer.”)
Clive Barnes of The Times wrote of Ms. Jamison, “She looks like an African goddess,” moving “in a manner almost more elemental than human.”
Mr. Barnes was reviewing the premiere of “Cry,” a 16-minute solo that Alvin Ailey choreographed for Ms. Jamison in 1972. She had joined the Ailey company in 1965 and had already distinguished herself in Mr. Ailey’s signature work, “Revelations,” by playing a woman in a baptism scene who holds a white umbrella high with one hand and undulates the opposite arm to mimic a rippling river. But it was “Cry,” an immediate hit, that made her a star.
At first wielding a long white scarf, Ms. Jamison suggested a series of female roles, from mother to servant to queen, and danced through pain into ecstatic freedom. The solo was a physical challenge — “as if you’re running around the block full speed,” she wrote — and a heavy symbolic lift. Mr. Ailey dedicated it “to all Black women everywhere, especially our mothers.”
“If I had been told that I was to represent every Black woman in the world, I would have dropped the cloth and left the stage immediately,” Ms. Jamison wrote of the burden of representation in “Dancing Spirit.”
But that was what she was often called on to do in appearances as a guest artist with the Vienna State Opera, San Francisco Ballet, Royal Swedish Ballet and other prestigious companies, usually performing “Cry.” It was, as Thomas F. DeFrantz wrote in “Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture” (2004), “a defiant interpolation of African American experience onto stage spaces typically empty of Black bodies.”
And in 1976, when the ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov made a guest appearance with the Ailey company, he performed a duet with Ms. Jamison, custom-made by Mr. Ailey, in a culturally significant pairing of Black and white, America and Russia. The duet, “Pas de Duke,” was a playful exchange of techniques and style.
Ms. Jamison was the Ailey company’s celebrity and Mr. Ailey’s muse. But they had a sometimes stormy relationship, which she once compared to that between twins. “We could read each other’s minds” she told Ms. Maynard. “He was there as a guide, but he let me find my own way.”
Ms. Jamison stayed with the Ailey troupe until 1980, when she left to star in “Sophisticated Ladies,” a revue set Duke Ellington’s music that opened on Broadway the next year. In his Times review of the show in 1981, Frank Rich called her “a mesmerizing incarnation of 1920s Cotton Club glamour.”
A Broadway career failed to follow, but in 1984 she began one as a choreographer, making “Divining” for the Ailey company. In 1988, she founded her own group, the Jamison Project. It didn’t last long. The next year, Mr. Ailey died of AIDS at 58, and Ms. Jamison took over as artistic director of his namesake troupe.
She inherited a company in its 31st year that had standing as a beloved national institution but had long been in financial trouble, partly because of Mr. Ailey’s struggles with drug addiction and mental illness. (In 1980, when Mr. Ailey had a mental breakdown and was arrested and hospitalized for two months, Ms. Jamison took over the directorship during his absence.)
Under her leadership, the company not only came out of debt for the first time; it also grew in size and budget and became even more popular, keeping up a nearly unparalleled schedule of national and international tours. In 2005, it opened the Joan Weill Center for Dance, a sleek multistory headquarters in Midtown Manhattan with a claim to being the largest building in the country devoted exclusively to dance.
As director, Ms. Jamison maintained classics by Ailey (“Revelations” above all) while adding works by a wide range of other choreographers, including Ronald K. Brown, whom she particularly championed, and a few of her own. Some of her choreographic choices were faulted by critics as not rising to the level of her dancers, but the members of the company thrived under her leadership.
“What is most touching, and most revelatory of Jamison’s genius as a director, is how deep the quality goes,” the critic Joan Acocella wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. “New dancers, regular dancers, people that nobody’s making a fuss over, are performing at eight hundred kilowatts.”
“They are spontaneous, relaxed, human, and they are wholly inside the dance,” Ms. Acocella continued. “Someone has given them to themselves, and that person has to be Jamison.”