Alvin Ailey
Alvin Ailey (born January 5, 1931 in Rogers , Texas , † December 1, 1989 in Manhattan , New York ) was an American dancer and choreographer .
Life
Alvin Ailey was an African American dancer and modern dance choreographer . He founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater . At 58 he died of AIDS .
Ailey was born to his then seventeen year old mother, Lula Cooper, in Rogers, Texas. His interest in dance developed early on. In 1943 he moved to Los Angeles with his mother . Once there, he immediately began taking dance lessons from the choreographer Katherine Dunham and later from Lester Horton. In parallel with these classes, Ailey attended college courses in Romance languages. Ailey has also been enrolled several times at the University of California at Los Angeles , Los Angeles City College and the University of California at Berkeley . He studied the texts of authors such as James Baldwin , Langston Hughes , and Carson McCullers . Nevertheless, Ailey was particularly enthusiastic about Horton's choreographies. These were based on classical plays, pictures by Paul Klee , poems by Garcia Lorca and the music by Duke Ellington and Igor Stravinsky, as well as Mexican concerns. When Lester Horton finally died in 1953, Ailey succeeded him at the age of 22. He became the director and choreographer of the Lester Horton Dance Theater. Within a year he created three new works for Horton's company: Creation of the World , According to St. Francis , and Mourning Morning .
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
In 1958, Ailey founded his own dance company in which he mainly employed African-American people. One of his most important productions was Langston Hughes Jericho-Jim Crow (1964).
The international tours of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, sponsored by the US authorities, made modern dance more popular around the world. One result of these tours was Ailey's choreographic masterpiece Revelations , based on Ailey's personal experience of growing up an African American in the south. The piece is one of the best known and most watched modern choreographies.
Ailey was memorialized by renaming West 61st Street (between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue in New York City) to "Alvin Ailey Way"; The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was also located here between 1989 and 2005, when it moved to a newer and larger building between West 55th Street and Ninth Avenue. In 1988 Ailey also received an award from the Kennedy Center . In 2014, Ailey was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom .
See also
literature
- Alvin Ailey, A. Peter Bailey: Revelations: The Autobiography of Alvin Ailey . Carol, Secaucus, New Jersey 1995, ISBN 1-55972-255-X .
- Thomas F. DeFrantz: Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-515419-3 .
Web links
- American Ballet Theater biography
- Kennedy Center biography
- Body and Soul: The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from the Smithsonian Institution
- NPR: Holiday Dance at the Alvin Ailey Theater
- Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jennifer Dunning: Frail, Strong and Dance Incarnate . In: New York Times , October 23, 1996, p. 2. Retrieved October 3, 2006.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ailey, Alvin |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American dancer and choreographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 5, 1931 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rogers , Texas |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 1, 1989 |
| Place of death | Manhattan , New York |