Edges of Ailey | Art & Artists

Sept 25, 2024–Feb 9, 2025

Black Spirituality

Two shirtless individuals draped in a red cloth, one looking upward with a halo-like headpiece, the other looking downward, both against a dark background.

Black Spirituality

Reflecting upon the importance of the divine in his choreography, Alvin Ailey remarked, “My roots are also in the Gospel church, the Gospel churches of the South where I grew up. Holy blues, paeans to joy, anthems to the human spirit.” Most notably in his iconic Revelations (1960), Ailey drew upon his childhood experiences of Sunday services, spirituals, and baptism in rural Texas. Black churches, like the ones Ailey and his mother attended, have been foundational to Black social, political, and educational life in the United States.

Ailey’s interest in the ecstatic aspects of spiritual experience also went beyond the Black church of the American South. Like anthropologist and choreographer Katherine Dunham, who was a practitioner of Haitian vodou, he found special resonance in Brazilian candomblé, an African diasporic religion that combines spiritual influences from West Africa—including the Fon, Yoruba, and Bantu—with Roman Catholicism. The particular songs, devotional rituals, ways of moving, and distinct garb associated with candomblé and vodou exemplified endurance, imagination, and sociality in contrast to extreme subjugation.

Throughout his life, Ailey was inspired by the breadth and diversity of Black spiritual practices. If faith was a bedrock of belief in either freedom or salvation, fervor—or soulfulness—would be one proof of its existence. Ailey sought to re-create an outpouring of feeling, a sense of theatricality, and emphatic storytelling by informing the content of several dances he choreographed for his company, like Revelations (1960), Hermit Songs (1961), Mary Lou’s Mass (1971), and Hidden Rites (1973), and his engagements with theater and opera, such as Leonard Bernstein’s Mass (1971) and Four Saints in Three Acts (1973).