Alvin Ailey was born on January 5, 1931 and was was an American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has become one of the most renowned dance companies in the world. Ailey’s work fused theater, modern dance, ballet, and jazz with Black vernacular, creating hope-fueled choreography that continues to spread global awareness of Black life in America.
As a child in the violently racist and segregated south, during his youth Ailey was barred from interacting with mainstream society. Looking for greater job prospects, Ailey’s mother departed for Los Angeles in 1941. He arrived a year later, enrolling at George Washington Carver Junior High School, and then graduating into Thomas Jefferson High School. In high school, Ailey discovered his homosexuality, which added another layer of difference and isolation to his already racially segregated experience. Thus, “like many young gay men eager to corral the sensual impulses of the body, he turned to dance study.
Ailey studied a wide range of dance styles and techniques — from ballet to Native American inspired movement studies — at the Lester Horton Dance School, which was one of the first racially integrated dance schools in the United States.
In 1969, Ailey founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center with the famed Martha Graham Dance Company principal and choreographer Pearl Lang as his co-director of the school. Their aim was to provide access to arts and dance to under-resourced communities. They started off in Brooklyn with 125 students. A year later the school relocated to Manhattan behind the Lincoln Center complex. In 1984, Denise Jefferson assumed directorship. Under her leadership, the school developed a Bachelor of Fine Arts Program in partnership with Fordham University in 1998.
Ailey died from an AIDS-related illness on December 1, 1989, at the age of 58. On December 9, 1989, over 4,000 mourners attended his funeral at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The funeral, which lasted two hours, featured his friend Maya Angelou reading an oral interpretation of her poem “For Alvin Ailey,” drumming by Max Roach.
