CBS News - Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater comes to BAM
CBS News New York's Chris Wragge speaks with Samantha Figgins, AILEY dancer and co-choreographer of The Holy Blues.
The Holy Blues
BK Magazine - The Alvin Ailey Company Comes Home Again
The great dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Brooklyn-based Evidence dance company Ronald K. Brown has a familiar story that echoes generations of artists dating back to Alvin Ailey’s professional debut as a performer on the Brooklyn Academy of Music stage in 1957. His relationship to dance, his way into the artform that would define his life, begins with Ailey himself. “The story is that when I was in the second grade, I went on a school trip to see the American Dance Theater, and then I went home and I started making dances,” the Bed-Stuy product tells me on a Wednesday afternoon in late May. We are on the phone, but I am in a conference room in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater on the far west side of midtown Manhattan. Brown skips ahead to the next crucial juncture in his Ailey lore, driving home the seismic, incalculable impact Ailey has had on the American modern dance landscape. “I was 21 years old and I was rehearsing at the Ailey school, and Mr. Ailey came and sat next to me and he asked, ‘Are you one of mine?’” And I said, ‘Mr. Ailey, I did not go to this school, but yes, I’m one of yours.’”