We can all agree that it was, and still is, a shame that Alvin Ailey died in 1989, and had not lived to present day. Would another Revelations-esque dance have come from his mind? Would the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater branch off to new heights or platforms?  All of these things and many more we will never know. Still, speculation is fun, so here we are with this.

One of Ailey's objectives with creating his American Dance Theater was to show the world what it meant to be Black, through dance. His dances don't seem to cover or translate to current events much as satire or as critique. This does not mean that Ailey would not have come up with some sort of critique of current events. Just two years after his passing, Rodney King, a taxi driver in Los Angeles, was ruthlessly beaten by a group of police officers after a high-speed car chase. Four of them were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and excessive force. All four of them were acquitted, which likely sparked the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, in which 53 people were killed.

Would Ailey have possibly commented on that incident with dance? It would be interesting to see how he would interpret the supposed racism of the court system and the seemingly unfair advantages police have over civilians only because they are policemen.

A good 20 plus years after the King trial, police brutality has come back into the national spotlight, with incidents like Ferguson, Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin causing ruckus all over the nation. And now with the sentencing of an Oklahoma policeman to 18 counts of felonies including 4 of rape and 4 of forced oral sodomy, would Ailey comment on that? Would he again try to give rise to the need to monitor police officers more harshly for their actions? Would he still give a voice to let the nation know of the disadvantages Black men and women face in life and in the courts? Would he dare comment on how finally now it seems that something is being done about this inherent racism in this country?

Who knows? Wouldn't it be cool to find out?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb1WywIpUtY
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/11/us/oklahoma-daniel-holtzclaw-verdict/

 The Oregonian reviewed the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater when it came westward in 2011. The reviewer mostly had positives to say about the company. One of the most present sentiments was that the dancers all looked very professional and deserving to be in the company. They all seemed to instinctively know which moves came after the next, looking natural, in terms of motion and movement.

At the time, the company was changing artistic directors, and this was apparently all too obvious from the selected pieces. The reviewer almost makes some of the whole performance seem somewhat campy because of the obviousness of what transpired onstage was a metaphor for what was happening offstage.

 Still, the reviewer could not get enough of the dancers. It seemed like the only thing that was wrong with the dancers themselves was one of them seemed to be a bit melodramatic in one of his solos. A bit. Other than that the performance of Night Creatures, Uptown, Dancing Spirit, Anointed, Passing, Sally Forth, 52 and counting, In/Side, and Revelations left nothing but appreciation for the company Ailey founded and its meaningful dancers, dances, and performances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXiqAshNlzw 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mARDDW61i0Y
http://www.oregonlive.com/performance/index.ssf/2011/03/revelations_review_alvin_ailey.html

 In 2005, Thomas DeFranz of Theatre Journal, wrote an article about the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater praising the groundbreaking work the troupe has done for African Americans in the United States. His main idea to the piece was that by making his company one that did not focus on a specific style or technique of dance, Ailey was able to transform his company into transcendent performers who are able to subjectively take black culture and rewrite its stereotypes as well as show what it really means to be a Black person or African American in the United States, through "mastery of form" and "deformation of mastery".

One of Ailey's main goals in creating his dance company was to create a troupe whose essence was and radiated being Black. Most of dance up to that point was White people of European decent. They dominated the dance scene. This was not the case with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The men: Black. The women: Black. These men and women danced to great bounds to show America, and the world what it truly meant to be Black, what it truly had meant to be Black, and what it truly will mean to be Black.

 This did not necessarily mean to only perform dances that were Ailey's or to only perform dances of other Black artists. Ailey and his company recreated dances of Dunham, Sokolow, and Shawn. They did this not only because Ailey respected the work of his predecessors, but to show the world that Black performers could also perpetuate these roles in a masterful sense. They were able to bring justice to those choreographers while still being Black and not the traditional White. They were able to make these pieces even greater by showing that they could be performed by all, and still have the same if not greater impact because they were performed by Black artists.

http://kg6ek7cq2b.search.serialssolutions.com/?genre=article&atitle=Composite%20Bodies%20of%20Dance%3A%20The%20Repertory%20of%20the%20Alvin%20Ailey%20American%20Dance%20Theater&title=Theatre%20Journal&issn=1086332X&isbn=&volume=57&issue=4&date=20050101&aulast=DeFrantz%2C%20Thomas&spage=659&pages=659-678&sid=EBSCO:Project%20MUSE:edspmu.S1086332X05406594 

Composite Bodies of Dance: The Repertory of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Author: DeFrantz, Thomas

Journal:Theatre journal (Washington, D.C.)

ISSN:0192-2882

Date:01/01/2005

Volume: 57 Issue: 4 Page: 659-678

http://www.alvinailey.org/about/alvin-ailey-american-dance-theater/current-repertory/dance-performances-current-repertory

Ailey lived through a lot of significant cultural events in his lifetime. He was born in the middle of the Great Depression, which must have just been peachy for his single, teenage mother. Just before adolescence struck Ailey, the Second World War started, and soon after that the United States entered the war. Ailey probably witnessed not only the racism aimed toward Blacks and African Americans at the time, but also the undue racism and internment of Japanese people across the States as well. After the war ended, it was not long until the Civil Rights Movement started, beginning with the Supreme Court's famous ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. This was the beginning of the eventual overturning Jim Crow laws and segregation as a whole in the United States. At this time (1954), Ailey was in New York, just finishing his run with the (ahead of its time in terms of integration) Lester Horton Dance Company.

By 1960, Ailey had already started his own dance company and had already choreographed many dances and had many performances, but this was the year he created Revelations, his masterpiece. This was a very hostile time in the United States. This was right in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, when players like W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King Jr. were fighting to bring equality to America not just for African Americans but for all peoples of different creeds, skin colors, and religions. This dance, centered around Ailey's experiences growing up as a black man growing up in the South not only became a hit among Blacks an African Americans, but also among other minorities and among whites. This dance was so well liked that it eventually became the most performed dance in all of dance history.

Unfortunately for Ailey, he was also part of the AIDS epidemic of the 80's. Starting in 1981, after 5 gay men were all entered in an area hospital with the same lung condition, the CDC made a report documenting the first appearance of AIDS in the United States. Many thousands died from the condition, mostly affecting gay men. Two famous men to die of AIDS related complications in the 80's were actor Rock Hudson and pianist Liberace. In 1989, a year after receiving honors from the Kennedy Center for the Arts, Ailey died of AIDS related illness.

http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movementhttps://www.aids.gov/hiv-aids-basics/hiv-aids-101/aids-timeline/
http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/people/2015/03/11/23-celebrities-who-lost-their-battle-aids

This is the face of one of the most influential choreographers in the history of modern dance. This is one of the most recognized African-Americans in all of dance history. This is the creator of the most performed dance in all of dance history. THIS. IS. Some kid from a small city in Texas called Rogers.

Born in January of 1931, Alvin Ailey Jr. grew up in the middle of Texas, raised by a teenage mother who's husband left her shortly after his namesake was born. Alvin was raised a Southern Baptist, and was very heavily influenced and enamored with the music he heard in church services and in the dance halls around his neighborhood. He and his mother moved out West to Los Angeles, California just before Ailey was a teenager. This is where he would meet Lester Horton, who introduced him to dance.

Having no prior dance experience, Ailey was somewhat timid about dancing with Lester Horton and his dance company. It did not take long after dancing with Horton that Ailey was thrown into the spotlight, with his muscular build and seemingly intuitive knack for dancing. Only after a year of studying with Horton was Ailey a member of his dance company in 1950.

Shortly after Horton's death in 1953, Ailey was in New York and worked for some time on Broadway shows. It was also during this time that Ailey trained with other modern dance icons such as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. In 1958 Ailey formed his own dance company and changed the face of modern dance. His company, much like his first teacher's, was heavily integrated and featured many African Americans and performed many dances that were pertinent to African American culture and other minority culture.

His masterpiece, Revelations, is the most performed dance in the history of dance, surpassing shows such as The Green Table, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker. The performance is full of imagery and sounds of the South, very much reflective of Ailey's upbringing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtJzqfWOhCE



Ailey was committed to not only performing original works, but was also very willing to perform dances of other new choreographers as well as perform dances from older choreographers whom Ailey held in respect.

Ailey opened the Alvin Ailey Dance Center in 1969 in New York City. This was his school where he wanted anyone interested in dance to come to learn: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, European, American, everyone was welcome to learn, saying "Dance is for everybody. I believe that the dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people." And this was not just a place to learn modern dance. Ballet, tap, jazz, modern dance, and others were, and still are, being taught there, now named the Ailey School.

For all of his contributions to the arts, Ailey was awarded with the Kennedy Center Honors in 1988. In the following year, Ailey met his untimely death on the first of December, due to complications from AIDS. The Ailey School lives on as well as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

http://www.biography.com/people/alvin-ailey-9177959#final-years
http://www.glbtqarchive.com/artsindex.html
http://www.alvinailey.org/listing/repertory_piece/4/113

Hey everybody!

Thanks for coming to my blog! It really means a lot to me!

If you couldn't already tell, this is a blog dedicated to the dance choreographer Alvin Ailey and his life and works. Before I get into his life and his accomplishments, I'd like to take a moment to talk about why Ailey is the subject of my blog.

It seems weird that Ailey would be the subject of my blog. I have almost nothing in common with they man. I'm white, he's black. I'm from Indiana, and he's from Texas and grew up in California. He's a dancer and choreographer, I'm a biology student. We do have one thing in common though: we love the sound of  music.

This type of music may not be the first thing that's on my iPod's playlist, but I love choral music of any kind. Many of his dances incorporate music with beautiful singing in them, ranging from blues, to jazz, to spirituals and hymns, reflective of Ailey's Southern Baptist roots. Spirituals have a rich history of having some of the richest chords in choral music, and it always makes my heart melt to hear a chorus of 40 people belting out singing together in harmony. When I first saw a recreation of Ailey's Revelations, (which I'll talk more of shortly), I couldn't help but be overwhelmed by the shear force of the spectacle of the visual performance of the dancers as well as the background music that only made the dancers that much more powerful. It seemed as if the movement was set to the music in the most professional and perfect way imaginable. I may not love dance as much as Ailey, but I love what he can do with music to make dance so moving (pun somewhat intended).

Also, the city he was born in is the same as my last name, so that's cool.

http://www.alvinailey.org/about/people
https://vimeo.com/96629532