Edges of Ailey | Art & Artists

Sept 25, 2024–Feb 9, 2025

Southern Imaginary

A colorful, abstract landscape painting with a few trees scattered across a grassy field under a yellow-orange sky.

Southern Imaginary

“I’m Alvin Ailey. I’m a choreographer. I’m a Black man whose roots are in the sun and the dirt of the South.”

Ailey’s “blood memories” sprang from his childhood experiences living and being raised by his mother, Lula Cooper, in rural Texas. Their reality of working in homes and the fields—which was in large part defined by itinerancy, poverty, and widespread racism shared by many Black Americans in the South—had grown out of enslavement, sharecropping, and Jim Crow–era legislation. Ailey’s recollections of these years would become the foundation of his choreography. He saw an enduring spirit, a source of pride and creativity, and a profound sense of humanity in the people and places he remembered.

Through his extensive travels and touring, along with the imprints of Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, Ailey came to know the American South as inseparable from a larger southern imaginary, encompassing the Caribbean, Brazil, and West Africa. The mass marketing of calypso music and dance styles in the United States entertainment industry in the 1950s, like the flourishing of jazz in the 1920s, made a commodity of this rich culture while also providing Black performers with artistic opportunities and higher wages. He would enfold these diasporic entanglements into his dances through movement, ritual, culture, and mythology, all instigated by and imagined through the ingenuity and inventiveness of Black makers and communities.