Judith Jamison was 20 and desperate to dance.
It was 1965 and she had come to New York to be a professional dancer. She was shy, unsure of herself, but she was supported by her family back in Philadelphia and braced by her 14 years of ballet training. But no company would take her. Despite her supple, elegant body, she was, at 6 feet in pointe shoes, too tall. She was also, she had found, too dark.
Arthur Mitchell, a black man, had stardom in George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet by then. But distinguished danseurs of any color were scarce. Would-be ballerinas were not. A tall black girl would stick out in the ballet blanc world of the corps.
To survive, Jamison took a job operating the water flume ride at the New York World’s Fair, and was about to abandon her dream when she heard about an audition for a TV musical. It was being conducted by Donald McKayle, who had given nudges to other black dancers.
Jamison showed up in a demure leotard and leg warmers, looking like a sleek exotic bird among the Broadway gypsies in their fish-net stockings and false eyelashes. Jamison quickly realized she had no grasp of the flashy show- dancing style. McKayle kindly rejected her.
Humiliated, Jamison ran from the stage, stumbling into a man. Three days later, the man called. He said his name was Alvin Ailey and he wanted her to dance in his company.
Ailey had built a company unlike any other. It was multiracial, and its expressive, theatrical dances reflected the traditions of Ailey’s own upbringing in Texas, refracted through the influences of social dances as disparate as the Philippines and Harlem, and the works of seminal modern choreographers such as Katherine Dunham and Lester Horton.
The lives of Jamison and Ailey were to be closely intertwined for the next 15 years. The complex Ailey would become her father-figure, the biggest influence on her career; she would become his most important dancer.
From 1965 to 1980, Jamison danced for Ailey, rising to what would be called prima ballerina status in a classical company. He created some of his greatest works for her, notably the tour de force Cry. Over those years, Jamison left several times, in 1980 to join the Broadway show Sophisticated Ladies and in 1988, to start her own touring company, The Jamison Project. But always, she came back to Ailey.
On Dec. 1, Ailey died at age 58, after a long illness. Two weeks later, Jamison was named his successor. No one was surprised, least of all Jamison herself.
“We had talked about it once, only once, several years ago,” she says. “I knew it was what I had to do. Alvin nurtured me, took care of me and gave me so much. Now, he’s given me this great gift. And I’m going to take care of it.”
Jamison is sitting in a friend’s Manhattan apartment. She says, with a smile, that she’s bone tired. But no edges look frayed. At 46, her famous elongated face has the serene beauty of a Modigliani madonna. Her short hair is touched at the temples with gray. She’s offhandedly chic in a black sweater and men’s tuxedo pants, her long legs punctuated by strong, bare dancer’s feet, curled like commas. In repose, as in motion, she commands the space around her.
The only thing that hints at the frenzy of her life is her datebook, spread open before her. It’s jammed with appointments and timetables detailing her own whereabouts and that of her two companies. She heads the Jamison Project until she can merge it into the Ailey company. Both are currently on national tours.
The Jamison Project appears on Friday and Saturday at the Watson B. Duncan Theatre in Lake Worth. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater comes to the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts in Miami Beach Feb. 27 to March 4.
Jamison still dances with the Project (she’ll perform at Duncan in Read Matthew 11:28). She is a choreographer (on the program will be her works, Forgotten Time, Time Out, Teas and the first piece she did for Ailey, Divining).
But increasingly, Artistic Director is her premiere title. And she’s acutely aware of the responsibility. “This company was always like a family to me,” she says, “so this is really a family responsibility. I have many good people to help me. Anyone who was ever in the company still is, in some way. You never really leave Alvin.”
THE PRODIGAL DANCER
Yet several times in her career, Jamison was compelled to do just that. Though the Ailey company, formed in 1958, has always enjoyed mass popularity, it has endured many financial crises that several times led Ailey to disband the troupe and sent Jamison on aborted detours to the Harkness Ballet and Broadway.
Her relationship with Ailey was not a simple one of muse and mentor. Ailey had a patriarch complex, and Jamison, who was insecure about her looks and intimidated by the other Ailey dancers, spent much of her career in constant search for Ailey’s approval.
“Going into the Ailey company was like wearing a size 50 shoe. Everything was too big for me,” she says.
From the beginning, Ailey didn’t know how to use “this girl, like a long drink of water,” as he called her.
In 1967, Ailey gave Jamison her first solo in a minor work, Reflections in D and a part in his masterwork Revelations. (Both will be danced in Miami Beach.) But she remained a cipher in his eyes — until the company toured Africa.
There, audiences responded to her jubilant style and her powerful, earthy beauty. The president of Kenya told Ailey she reminded him of his favorite wife and asked to keep her.
Suddenly, at 23, for the first time in her life, Jamison became aware of her uniqueness. And Ailey realized what a gem he had.
He began to create works on her, such as Masekela Langage. The work, set to music by Hugh Masekela, is staged in a squalid saloon. The theme, the despair of black people in a contemptuous white society, is easily translatable from Masekela’s South African milieu to an American one.
The piece, which will be performed in Miami Beach, was a landmark for Jamison; the exalted dancer/choreographer union she longed for finally had begun. Her body complemented his choreography, but her own persona always emerged.
“Judith Jamison is a terribly powerful dancer, a terribly powerful personality,” Ailey once said. “She challenges and in a way she intimidates the choreography.”
In the early ’70s, Jamison was eclipsed by a pretty, lyrical dancer named Sarah Yarborough, who personified Ailey’s idealized infatuation with ballet dancers. Jamison felt neglected, her career on a plateau.
But just as she felt most forsaken, Ailey made the solo masterpiece Cry for her. Ailey drew on his memories of his mother working as a cleaning woman, her posture and gestures, to create a wrenching portrayal of black woman’s servitude that became a metaphor for any oppression.
The creation was such a combustible collaborative effort that whenever Cry was performed, it was impossible to see where Ailey left off and Jamison began. “It was more than a dance. It was an experience,” Jamison says.
NEW CHAPTER BEGINS
Cry made her a star, and it signaled a turning point for Ailey. Soon after, his company finally achieved a financial stability, and he opened his school.
Ailey continued to create works for Jamison — the lyrical Lark Ascending, Passages and the jazzy Mooche — and her star ascended with guest appearances. In 1980, looking for new outlets, Jamison left the company for Broadway’s Sophisticated Ladies. But always, that cosmic tie to Ailey tugged her back.
In 1984, when she expressed a desire to choreograph, Ailey, who had encouraged the works of young artists, let her create Divining on his dancers. Jamison has since created many works for other companies.
The seeds for her administrative succession were sown when Jamison came back as rehearsal director during a China tour. Recently, she was associate artistic director on the company’s 30th anniversary tour.
Now, when Jamison talks about Ailey, it is with devotion, but colored with a distancing subjectivity. Her days as a psychology major at Fisk University bubble to the surface when she trains her eye on her own life. “For some, Alvin was the father; for others, the lover,” she says. “There was a strong empathy between us. If I had been a man, I would have been his best friend.”
She feels a duty toward his memory. “People have criticized his ballets as too commercial, too black, but they transcend that,” she says. “At one time, this was the only modern dance company that said something about the black tradition — and now the second wave is maintaining that tradition.”
Ailey disliked his work being pegged as “black dance.” “Is a work I do to Bach black just because I do it?” he once asked. But he acknowledged his heritage was at its essence.
“Alvin constantly threatened to take Revelations out of the repertory,” Jamison says. “But he knew he couldn’t. Audiences need to keep seeing it; we need to keep dancing it.”
But, she adds: “This will not become just a shrine. It must breathe and evolve, just like the ballets themselves. Five different women have danced Cry, but it still has its original pain and humanity. A company is a living thing. I come to this job with that vision.”
She has specific goals that extend Ailey’s dream. She wants to expand Ailey’s community outreach programs with lectures, master classes and school performances. “It’s more important to bring dance to those who’ve never seen it before than to the elite,” she explains.
She intends to maintain the “old guard” repertory but keep mining the lode of young choreographers, such as Garth Fagan, Ralph Lemon and Donald Byrd.
She says she sometimes feels Ailey is there, at her shoulder, still guiding her. “I go into the school and I expect to see Alvin walking around. It’s not darkness now. He left us with a light because he wanted us to continue with humor and light.”
But, she adds with a smile, she’s not intimidated any more. “I don’t feel like I’m stepping into his shoes,” she says. “I’ve got my own shoes to wear and they’re big enough.”
