Growing up in Albany, DuBois A’Keen developed a complicated relationship with his hometown. It is the city that produced Ray Charles and provided the template for the Civil Rights Movement, but it was also segregated, impoverished and confining for a Black boy with creative leanings. A’Keen couldn’t wait to flee to the big city.
Baltimore-native Jessica Amber Pinkett returned to the Kennedy Center this week for the annual performances of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. It’s her fourth season with the company but her first after taking a few years away to study film and rekindle her love for dance.
Fox 5 hosts interview Ailey dancers, Samantha Figgins and Michael Jackson Jr. They will be in town for their performances at The Kennedy Center from February 4-9.
Where is the dance field headed next? The dancers, choreographers, directors, and companies on our annual “25 to Watch” list offer heartening, imaginative, exciting possible answers to that question. Whether or not you’re already familiar with these up-and-comers, our editors and contributors from across the dance world predict that we’ll be hearing a lot more from these artists on the verge of a breakout in 2025 and beyond.
In 1949, as legend has it, Alvin Ailey, then a young gymnast, followed school buddy and fellow future dance icon Carmen de Lavallade to the famed Lester Horton “Dance Theater” on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. It was a simple gesture that would lay the groundwork for the future of American concert dance. After Horton’s unexpected death, Ailey took over the Horton company for a while before starting the eponymous Alvin Ailey Company in New York, forming a beautiful, long and deeply intersectional lineage that incorporated dance, art, and innumerable interconnected histories culminating in the very first exhibit of the archival record of the Alvin Ailey Company, a show five years in the making and currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art.
Dancer and choreographer Judith Jamison had her own divine grace on stage. As the former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, she could communicate through movement what poets do in words. "We just happen to be very blessed because we've been given the gift of dance," she said in 1991.
The version we know today of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, presented continuously for more than six decades on stages around the world, is only about half the length it was when it premiered in 1960. Nine songs, originally performed live, were cut from the score in order to tighten the production for a tour of Asia and Australia, sponsored by the U.S. government while John F. Kennedy was president.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has officially kicked off its holiday season at New York City Center. Choreographer Hope Boykin, who was a principal dancer for the company, is premiering her new work.
She is transcendent and glowing: a mysterious woman in white. Standing center stage in a bandeau top with a strip of transparent fabric hanging down her front, and wide, loose pants, she remains still and rooted. This dancer, the mother god of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace, anchors the stage with a quiet strength as the sound of Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” builds, calling her body — and with it her costume, its fabric swelling and dipping like waves — to action.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs on The Kelly Clarkson Show, celebrating 25 years of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace.