Edges of Ailey

Sept 25, 2024–Feb 9, 2025

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Water is a recurring and important motif in Alvin Ailey’s choreography and writings. References to oceans and rivers denote on one hand the Middle Passage of enslavement—the violent extraction of Black people from West African countries to the Americas—and on the other the possibility of salvation through ablutions, the custom of washing one’s body or parts of it.

Moving from Texas to Los Angeles in the early 1940s, Ailey and his mother, Lula Cooper, were among the six million Black people who traveled from the rural American South to urban areas across the northern and western United States during the Great Migration. Migrants sought to escape the racial violence and economic precarity of Jim Crow apartheid policies, although rampant segregation and inequity persisted in the North.

Despite these forces, Black life and culture flourished in urban cultural hubs, and it was in Los Angeles where Ailey had his first encounters with live dance and entertainment, seeing the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Jack Cole, and Duke Ellington, and becoming enamored with the dynamic rhythms and representation of Black dancers in Katherine Dunham’s Tropical Revue (1943). Through his high school friend turned collaborator, Carmen de Lavallade, Ailey became involved with Lester Horton, who became his mentor, as an artist and gay man, and whose racially integrated, unorthodox modern dance company deeply informed Ailey’s choreographic sensibility. In 1954 Ailey moved to New York, another epicenter of Black creativity, to begin rehearsals for the Broadway musical House of Flowers (1954).

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Edges of Ailey

Black Migration

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Paul Waters, Beautiful Life, 1969

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