After Ailey: A Conversation

Adrienne Edwards: When I started to think about this show in 2018, I went to see a lot of Ailey performances. At one of them, a woman behind me was absolutely ecstatic in response to what she was watching. What I overheard made me wonder about the phenomenon that is the “Ailey experience” and, more precisely, about each of your first experiences with Ailey, whether it was with the man himself or with the company.

Brenda Dixon-Gottschild: This would have been in the early 1960s, at the beginning of the Ailey company. Their home base then was at the Clark Center, in the YWCA building at Eighth Avenue and Fifty-First Street, where I had been invited to present a dance I choreographed called “Lonely Woman,” in one of the center’s New Choreographers’ Concerts. So, I was back and forth to the Clark Center quite a bit, and what an experience it was to encounter the Ailey company. At the time, Ailey, Carmen de Lavallade, the glorious Thelma Hill, and Minnie Marshall were all dancing, and it was unlike any other company I had ever seen before as a young Black dancer—or really as a young anything dancer—–with its variety of body shapes and its groundedness, if you will. Back then, both Mr. Ailey and Thelma were performing with the ensemble, and in general, the dancing bodies of the 1960s were less streamlined, athletic, and balletic than they are now. The mere fact of the company’s existence offered a justification for the fact that I dance and I exist, and that there is a concert stage for people like us. 

At that time, because there were no university dance departments, we were New York dance junkies, going from one studio to another, taking classes, trying things. When I was nineteen, I took classes with Dorene Richardson at the New Dance Group. There I met Donya Feuer, who offered me a full scholarship to dance at her studio, which she had cofounded with Paul Sanasardo. Loretta Abbott was a student there, and she suggested that I might be interested in going with her to Mary Anthony’s studio. James Truitte, whom I knew as Jimmy, regularly took Mary’s Saturday morning class because her teaching was great for long bodies, and Jimmy and I both had long, lyrical arms and legs. It was Jimmy and Mary who said to me, “Oh, you should be an Ailey dancer.” I didn’t think I had the quickness or rhythm for it; after all, I’d started dance late, at age fifteen. But Jimmy arranged a one-on-one rehearsal audition for me with Mr. Ailey, and so there we were, just Mr. Ailey and me, in a room on a Saturday afternoon; I don’t even remember where it was. He taught me, I realized later, a piece from Revelations, “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.” I was so nervous, and I was to learn the combination and perform it without music. It was a disaster. But I will always appreciate Jimmy for doing that for me.

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar: I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, in a segregated, all-Black community. I was what would be the equivalent of a street dancer, performing in clubs and revues. It wasn’t until I was a student at the University of Missouri at Kansas City in the early 1970s that I realized I could major in dance, something that I had loved to do all my life. That is when I started learning about concert dance and training in ballet and modern dance. I read Dance Magazine, and I joined Black Exodus, an all-Black dance company organized by fellow university student Milton Myers. Ailey was the buzz, and we read everything we could about his company. When they came to perform in Kansas City, in 1971 or 1972, I went to see them—Judith Jamison, John Parks, Sylvia Waters. I was blown away, but it was clear to me that I’d never be able to do what they were doing. I did not have the flexibility or the physicality or that kind of training.

So, I continued to learn and absorb as much as I could about Mr. Ailey and the Black dance community. I looked to where I might fit in, because I knew that no one was ever going to come see me lift my leg in the air. But they might come see me in the other forms that I grew up doing—–working with strippers, exotic dancers, flash acts. When I saw some of the works of Mr. Ailey, such as Blues Suite, Revelations, and particularly Masekela Langage, they showed me the possibility of what I could do. They gave me a sense of story and activism and societal commentary. I later took a class at the Wolf Trap/American University Summer Program, and Loretta Abbott and Al Perryman were my teachers there. I fell in love with both the Ailey and the jazz aesthetic, but I knew my body didn’t have the lines or physicality required to pursue those directions.

Kyle Abraham: My first exposure to the company was watching the Ailey dancers perform Ulysses Dove’s Vespers on the PBS special Two by Dove. Seeing that performance in my first year of dancing—like Brenda, I started dance late, during my senior year of high school—I was so empowered to think about the possibilities of making dance and the power of dance vocabulary in a way that extended beyond what I knew from my experience thus far.

When I think about Mr. Ailey and his legacy, I think about his generosity, which extended to the idea of repertory and bringing in artists such as Jawole. Generosity is also what led him to start a school, which is what gave me the most immersive connection to Ailey that I had in my early dancing years. The summer I turned nineteen, I attended the Ailey summer program; it was 1996, the same summer that Ulysses passed away. Being in the studio where Two by Dove, and Vespers in particular, was filmed was a very special and powerful experience for me.

Jamila Wignot: I first encountered the Ailey company through my college’s Black student organization, which had gotten tickets for an Ailey performance on campus. I was familiar with the company by name, and that was about it; I hadn’t really been exposed to any sort of dance forms. I walked into the theater with no expectations, except that it was going to be a night of concert dance. Revelations was the dance that stood with me; as Jennifer said, I felt something kind of flowing through the dancers. The experience of the saga unfolding before me was visceral and impactful.

When I started to dig into Ailey’s own words and experience as part of my research for my film Ailey, I learned that he had gone to junior and senior high schools that exposed him to art, music, and dance. He was a teenager when he encountered Dunham, and she was something entirely new to him. The profound jolt he experienced in recognizing that what Dunham was presenting was something both different and familiar gave him a sense of possibility. Likewise, when I saw the Ailey performance in college, I felt as if something in the world had opened up. There was a diversity of dancing bodies on the stage, in terms of actual body types but also skin tones and hairstyles and hair textures. Something about possibility was represented on that stage. That night I became a super, fan of the company—although, interestingly, I don’t think I was curious to know more about its founder at that point.

Aimee Meredith Cox: I grew up in Cincinnati in the eighties, and I was determined to become a world-renowned Black ballerina. It was very naive. I studied at a little storefront dance school where you took ballet for a half hour, then jazz, and then tap. I excelled in ballet, and I really loved the way ballet felt in my body, even though I had a sort of love-hate relationship with it. When I was about eleven or twelve years old, my dance teacher told me that she thought I had outgrown her training, and she recommended that I study at the University of Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music.

I enrolled in the school’s pre-professional ballet program. After my first year, I was at the barre during class, and I saw the most elegant human being I’ve ever seen in my life. He was a tall, graceful man, and when he walked, he looked as though he were gliding on water. It was James Truitte, although at the time I had no idea who he was. My story is not a story of a Black community or a Black family in Cincinnati that knew Ailey. We knew the Dance Theatre of Harlem. 

I thought Mr. Truitte was this otherworldly, mesmerizing figure who haunted the hallways of the university. We were terrified of him, because he never spoke to us. When I would peek into his classes, I didn’t know what the Horton technique was. I had never danced barefoot. But I watched the dancers making these shapes, and there was percussion, and I thought, “Oh, my God, this is amazing.” In the summer, I took a few classes with Mr. Truitte. He was difficult. He was hard. I thought he was cold. I didn’t understand who he was. Now I look back and one of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t develop a relationship with him. 

Fast-forward, I took a year off from college, and I was dancing in New York on a scholarship at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. I was trying to make my body a ballet body. My body didn’t want to do that, but my spirit did. At the end of the summer, Lowell Smith said to me, “Baby, this is not going to work for you. You need to go to Ailey.” So, I auditioned for Ailey and was on scholarship there for a while, and then I was asked to join the second company. What I learned at Ailey was training in a different sense; it was this sort of ethnographic social training that was like an excavation of lineage. Dancing with Ailey disrupted the binary between the individual and the cultural, and it taught me what it means to be of a Black American lineage that has roots in the South but also has diasporic tentacles all over the globe. It made me really consider what we think of as innate—what we should know just by virtue of being Black and living in a Black body—and what we think of as something that we are trained into. All these things were kind of battling within me the whole time that I was dancing in the second company.

Claire Bishop: I have to confess, when I first saw the Ailey company perform, it was not love at first sight. I’m going to be upfront about this because learning to respect and understand Ailey’s work has been a process for me, and gradually I’ve come to love it. Ailey was not a part of the air that I breathed growing up in the United Kingdom, so it was seeing Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities in 2017 that first brought me to Ailey. Paramodernities is a series that draws on the work of six modern choreographers: Ailey, George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Bob Fosse, Martha Graham, and Vaslav Nijinsky. The performance I attended, Paramodernities #3 (A Response to Ailey), was held in the rotunda of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. Five dancers performed a deconstructed and remixed Revelations, subtitled The Afterlives of Slavery, and Tommy DeFrantz gave a searing lecture performance. The whole thing was so powerful, and I wondered, “Why don’t I know Ailey? Why have I never heard of Revelations? What vacuum in my education led to this?”

So, I took myself to see Revelations at City Center that Christmas, and I have to confess it struck me as corny—all the long skirts, the hats, the fans. It just didn’t speak to me. At the same time, I saw that it was speaking to the audience, and I realized that I needed to learn more. In the spring of 2023, Adrienne and I taught a graduate seminar on Ailey at the Whitney and the CUNY Graduate Center, and as a result of this, I’ve since come through to the other side. Now I see that Ailey stands for an important counter to the Cunningham-Judson lineage, which is what we are force-fed as the dance history that matters for contemporary art. For me, Ailey has opened up a whole other vector of performance and a way of relating to popular music, the body, and Blackness that I think is really valuable.

This is a short excerpt of a longer conversation published in the exhibition catalogue Edges of Ailey.