Edges of Ailey

Sept 25, 2024–Feb 9, 2025

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Throughout Alvin Ailey’s life, Black women were a constant presence and source of inspiration, whether they were fellow dancers and collaborators, such as Maya Angelou, Carmen de Lavallade, Katherine Dunham, Judith Jamison, Pearl Primus, and Sylvia Waters, or admired performers listed in his notebooks and letters, such as Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, Leontyne Price, and Bessie Smith.

Chiefly among them was his mother, Lula Cooper, who raised him on her own and whose love and perseverance he honored through his 1971 dance Cry, a birthday gift to her. Ailey described Cry as a “tribute to the tenacity and the strength and the beauty . . . and the power of Black womanhood.” The solo—first premiered by Jamison—paid homage to the labors, hopes, and challenges of Black women. It would become an emblem and heirloom for dancers in the company, with each new performer bringing a new sensibility and dimension to the dance. With dances like Cry, Quintet (1968), Mary Lou’s Mass (1971), and The Mooche (1975), Ailey sought to render Black women—as dancers, icons, and emblems of beauty and determination—as individual and multifaceted, often by way of troubling, reclaiming, or rectifying the stereotypes and caricatures that sought, or functioned, to limit them.

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Edges of Ailey

Black Women

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Geoffrey Holder, Portrait of Carmen de Lavallade, 1976

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