Press Coverage

September 22, 2020

CBS 2 New York - Performing Artists In NYC Finding Ways To Return To The Spotlight As Shutdown Continues

Thousands of creative artists are fighting for their survival as the entertainment industry remains mostly shut down, but new ways of working are starting to pop up, along with a stronger push for federal relief. A New York City rooftop becomes a stage. No curtain rises, but the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns for a season that debuts new works and reinvents classics like “Pas de Duke,” as in Duke Ellington, by putting them online. The videos were filmed atop landmarks, like the Woolworth Building.

September 16, 2020

Dance Spirit - College Reunion, Dancer Edition: Three Cover Stars Reflect On How College Launched Their Pro Careers

Today, Zoey Anderson, Corey John Snide, and I are all professional dancers thriving in the industry. But we were once anxious, excited young college students in NYC, hoping to make it big. The three of us graced the September 2013 Dance Spirit Higher Ed Issue cover together. Anderson graduated from Marymount Manhattan College in 2015, the same year Snide graduated from The Juilliard School; I completed the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program in 2016. Recently, we reconnected to talk about how we've grown over the years.

August 21, 2020

The Guardian - Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Shelter Review - Moves With Our Times

Some dances seem timeless; Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter seems perennially timely. Created in 1988 in response to homelessness on the streets of New York, the piece was taken into the repertory of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1992. Zollar adapted it for her company performances in New Orleans, post-Katrina, and the Ailey company revived it again in 2017. Now showing in the online Ailey All Access season, it has become newly urgent during the coronavirus crisis.

August 20, 2020

Good Morning America - Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Pivots To Virtual Ballets During Pandemic

Artistic director Robert Battle discusses the dance company's pandemic pivot and debuts the company's new film, "Wade In the Water."

August 09, 2020

The New York Times - Robert Battle Likes To Cook, And Connect

Since the pandemic lockdown in March, Battle has been consumed with keeping the company in shape until its dancers can safely return to the stage. From Aug. 6-12, a collaboration among Battle, his predecessor, Judith Jamison, and the choreographer Rennie Harris will stream on Ailey All Access. Battle has recently been considering the organization’s role in the Black Lives Matter movement. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of, before it was a hashtag or a movement, that the Ailey company was demonstrating that Black lives matter in all of the work that we do,” he said. “But it’s almost not enough to live it. You have to say it expressly, that this is what we do and we are in solidarity. It’s not that we need to reinvent the wheel, but we need to roll it.”

August 06, 2020

Town & Country - Amazing Grace - Still, We Dance: An Ode To The Deliverance And Joy Of Self-Expression

Every year, in theaters and concert halls around the globe, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater takes audiences to church. Not just any house of worship, but the working-class, Black, Southern temples of rural Texas. The gospel they see and feel is Revelations, the company’s signature dance, which has been staged more often than the troupe’s other celebrated works, for some 25 million fans. This year Revelations turns 60, and it has lost none of its incantatory power.

July 23, 2020

Texas Monthly - How Alvin Ailey's 'Revelations' Has Helped Me Find My Way Back To Texas

One warm spring day in the late nineties, I walked hand in hand with my father as he led our family— my mom, my three siblings, and me—into Houston’s Jones Hall for an Alvin Ailey performance. At eight years old, I was more excited to be wearing my new theater dress for all of Houston to see than I was for the show itself. But that excitement quickly evolved into wonder. I don’t recall the name of the performance we saw, but I distinctly remember feeling admiration and reverence for what the dancers were doing in front of me. Before that day, I’d never seen such a large group of professional Black dancers on stage. Experiencing this performance in my youth was significant; it told me that my people were everywhere, and capable of doing everything.

June 29, 2020

CBS New York - All These Years Later, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Continues Spreading Message Of Inclusion

While protests across the country call for racial justice, an organization in New York City has been spreading a message of inclusion for decades. And they’ve been doing it through dance. CBS2’s Jenna DeAngelis has more on the work of Alvin Ailey. A powerful video was created in the midst of protests, following the death of George Floyd. It featured poetry, paired with a universal language, which at times, says more than words. “We. Dance.” by Hope Boykin. “This was my form of protest. This was the way that I could say it best to honor the organization that had started doing this more than 60 years ago,” Boykin said.

June 22, 2020

The New Yorker - Solo Acts

...At the end of May, in a commission from the Guggenheim’s “Works & Process” series, Jamar Roberts produced an extraordinary five-minute dance titled “Cooped.” He choreographed, designed, directed, performed, and shot (on an iPad) this “fever dream,” alone, in a basement, surrounded by shadows that seem to close in on him—an effect ingeniously created by a floor lamp and a flashlight. The tense music was composed, arranged, and performed (remotely) by David Watson (bagpipes) and Tony Buck (drums).

June 20, 2020

CNN - Dance Troupe Tells The Story Of Massacre Of 300 Black Americans

Tulsa's 1921 massacre involved white mobs killing 300 black residents in their uniquely prosperous community. That painful chapter in American history was the focus of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater this season, before it was sprupt interrupted by covid-19 shutdowns. Now with this renewed attention on the Tulsa massacre, the dance group is streaming its Greenwood story starting this week. Artistic Director Robert Battle discusses Donald Byrd’s Greenwood.