Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Rehearsal Director and Guest Artist Matthew Rushing discusses his ties to the Los Angeles area, how he started dancing and the programming for Ailey’s engagement at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion April 3-7.
On Saturday evening (March 23), the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will dance a dance about circles. It's a dance about time, and evolution, and what changes and, of course, what stays the same. It's about destiny and journeys and how fate makes all of those things flop on top of each other in a precise but messy Venn diagram. As the lead dancer in "EN," New Orleans-born Michael Jackson, Jr. will be performing right in the center.
Danica Paulos, who's now in her fifth season with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, moves with captivating grace and power onstage. And when she's not wowing in-person audiences, the multitalented artist is mesmerizing Ailey's online followers: A gifted photographer, she regularly posts beautiful images of her coworkers to the @alvinailey Instagram page, which she's run for the past two years. We caught up with Paulos to talk about her diverse interests— and find out how she's helped shape AAADT's digital presence.
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre has been creating transcendent moments for 60 years, and one of its newest voices is that of dancer and choreographer Jamar Roberts.
In the sun-soaked foyer of Atlanta's National Center for Civil and Human Rights, a tall, lean young man guided about 40 dance students last month as they learned an excerpt from Alvin Ailey's masterpiece Revelations. Christopher R. Wilson, a native of Augusta, Georgia, and a first-year member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, moved with ease and elegance between lines of young dancers, calling directions in a voice that matched the choreography's rhythm and cadence.
Christopher Wilson was 11 years old when he sat mesmerized at the Fox Theatre watching a performance of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Today, some 12 years later, he's come full circle.
The New York City-based Alvin Ailey Dance Theater held a public workshop Wednesday night, giving local dancers across South Florida a chance to learn some of the company's iconic choreography.
Dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey gathered a handful of modern black dancers in 1958 to perform with him at New York’s 92nd Street YM-YWHA. It was here that the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, as well as Ailey’s vision for a more inclusive world of the art form, was born. Since then, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has grown to include 32 dancers who have gone on to perform more than 235 works for an estimated 25 million people across six continents. This season, the dance company celebrates its 60th anniversary.
Check out this weekend's edition of UPFRONT Inside Atlanta's Entertainment Industry. It features Ray Cornelius' one-on-one interviews with actress-singer-director Brely Evans, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre performer Christopher R. Wilson and Shelbia Jackson, Executive Director of the DeKalb Entertainment Commission.
Three dancers from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater company came to Boston this week to teach at local schools ahead of their North American Tour, which arrives in Boston in May. The schools were the Boston Arts Academy, the Richard J. Murphy School, in Dorchester, the Kennedy Day School, in Brighton, and the Boston Renaissance School, in Hyde Park. Through the support of the Celebrity Series of Boston, Chalvar Monteiro, Samantha Figgins, and Solomon Dumas traveled to the schools to teach students of various ages and skill sets. The education included Ailey-style dance, as well as history of the late Alvin Ailey, who made it his mission to bring dance to everyone and make it accessible to the underprivileged.