Judith Jamison was born in 1944 in Philadelphia and showed an early passion for dance, taking lessons from age 6. She trained in many dance styles including ballet, jazz, modern and African dance. Jamison joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1965 where she became a star, originating roles in many of Ailey's famous works. When Ailey fell ill in 1989, Jamison took over as artistic director of the company, leading it for over 20 years while maintaining its diversity and universal appeal. Jamison was a pioneering African American dancer who helped bring dance to broader audiences and nurtured many young dancers through her leadership of the Ailey company.

1. Exploring Judith
Jamison

2. Born May 10, 1944, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Jamison grew up, she told Newsweek, in "a
household of people who sang and played the
piano. So I came from a disciplined house. You
don't arrive to places late, you are polite, you do
unto others as you would have them do to you."
Her mother was a teacher, her father a sheet-
metal worker and part-time musician who
supported his daughter's passion for dance
because he thought it might help her work off the
energy that built up as a result of her
generally hyperactive nature.

3. Jamison started dance lessons at age six at the
Judimar School of Dance in Philadelphia. She also
took piano lessons from her father and played the
violin well enough to join a local orchestra in her
teens. One other influence was the Mother Bethel
African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, where
Jamison remained a frequent attendee even after
she rose to the top of the dance world. Founded by
breakaway Methodist preacher Richard Allen in
1787, Mother Bethel was a historic institution rich
in African-American culture and history.

4. Jamison got the attention of teachers and had top-
flight teachers from the start, winning a place in a class
taught by top choreographer Anthony Tudor when she
was ten. As a young woman Jamison immersed
herself in the arts, going to museums and attending
operas and plays, but dance was her greatest
passion.
(Anthony Tudor was an English Ballet
choreographer that is generally accepted to be
one of the great originals of modern dance
forms. Along with George Balanchine, he is
seen as a principal transformer of ballet into a
modern art.)

5. African-American dancers were still rare at the
time, but the walls of Jamison's bedroom were
festooned with pictures of ballerinas and modern
dancers of all backgrounds. She sought out a
broad variety of dance training that would benefit
her later on, focusing on classical ballet but also
studying tap dancing, Afro-Caribbean and jazz
dance, modern dance, and acrobatics. She
appeared in the role of Myrtha in the French
ballet Giselle when she was 15.

6. Her next big break came when she
auditioned for a dance part in a television
special starring actor Harry Belafonte. The
audition did not go well. But Ailey, who was
looking on, saw in Jamison a dancer who
could realise his powerful choreographic
visions of African-American life.

7. Almost immediately, Jamison began to tour
with Ailey's company, travelling in 1966 to
Europe and then to the World Festival of
Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. The
experience was an eye-opener for Jamison.
"Everybody was there - from [poet] Langston
Hughes to [choreographer] Katherine
Dunham to [bandleader] Duke Ellington to
[Senegalese] President Senghor," she told
Suki John of Dance Magazine.

8. She became celebrated for her energetic
grace and riveting stage presence and
inspired many of Ailey's new dances

9. Ailey's famous dances, such as the Ellington-inspired Pas
de Duke, Blues Suite, and Revelation (which Jamison
began learning the day she joined the AAADT), came
alive anew when Jamison danced them. In Pas de Duke,
Jamison often appeared in a duet with ballet star Mikhail
Baryshnikov. Revelation, drawing on the religious life of his
family in rural Texas during his childhood, was Ailey's most
famous piece, and Jamison brought a power and spirituality
to the work that made her an audience favourite. In 1969,
Jamison joined the AAADT as it became the first American
dance company in decades to tour the Soviet Union and
was greeted with enormous ovations there.

10. The creative relationship between Jamison and
Ailey reached a new level with Cry (1971), a solo
piece the choreographer created for Jamison.
"That dance - 15 minutes of movement - embodied
400 years of Black women's pain, passion,
and perseverance, and elevated Judith Jamison to
the ranks of modern ballet superstardom," noted
Asha Bandele of Essence. Cry became Jamison's
trademark, but after she took the reins at the
AAADT she encouraged younger dancers to bring
their own interpretations to the work rather than
trying to duplicate her style.

11. The 1970s were a growth period for American
dance, and Jamison constantly travelled, gave
interviews, and was featured in new
productions. In 1980, Jamison decided to strike out
on her own. Taking a starring role in the Broadway
musical Sophisticated Ladies, she performed as
a soloist with other ballet companies and also
returned to the Ailey troupe. With Ailey's support,
she began to develop her own skills as a
choreographer. Two of her works,
1984's Divining and 1988'sTease, were performed
by AAADT. In 1988 she founded a dance company
of her own, the Judith Jamison Project.

12. Choreographed works include Divining and
Just Call Me Dance, both 1984; Time Out
and Time In, both 1986; Into the Life, 1987;
Tease, 1988; Forgotten Time and Read
Matthew 11:28, both 1989; Rift, 1991; and
Hymn, 1993. Author, with Howard Kaplan, of
Dancing Spirit, 1993.

13. Her plans took a sharp turn, however, when Ailey
revealed to her, in the midst of
the hustle and bustle of a tour, that he was
seriously ill. "We were in St. Louis when Alvin
decided to tell me that he wasn't well, and that he
wanted me to take over the company," Jamison
recalled to Joy Duckett Cain of Essence. "He's
asking me, and I'm going, 'Oh, yes, sure,' without
batting an eye - and without thinking of just how
tremendous the responsibility was." Jamison was
at Ailey's bedside when he became a casualty of
the AIDS epidemic in December of 1989.

14. The shift from dancer and choreographer to artistic
director was challenging for Jamison - and not
because it was hard for her to give up dancing.
Looking at videotapes of her performances, she
realized that she had been near the end of her
performing career. Learning the art of administration,
however, was a new stage in Jamison's career as
she brought in dancers from her own troupe to
replace some Ailey stalwarts. Jamison faced
pressures from advisers who wanted her to take the
company in new directions or, conversely, maintain
its repertory unchanged as a shrine to Ailey's career.
She carefully steered a middle course.

15. One aspect of Ailey's legacy that Jamison
maintained was its diversity and
its aspiration toward universal appeal. Assistant
director Masazumi Chaya was of Japanese
background, and as the company's repertory grew
under Jamison, dancers attempted works with a
variety of subject matter. "I've had angry letters
from people who felt that all our dancers should be
Black," Jamison told Bandele. "But the company is
the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. And while
we're here to celebrate the Black experience,
we're not here to be exclusionary about who can
do that with us. Being inclusive is part of our
African tradition."

16. Indeed, Jamison sometimes gave the AAADT
a populist orientation. American young people who
were unable to name any other dance company
became familiar with the AAADT after an American
Express commercial featuring the company was
broadcast on television during the Academy
Awards ceremony. "To get young people to a live
concert, we first must go where they are the most:
in front of computers and televisions," Jamison
pointed out to Suki John of Dance Magazine.

17. Under Jamison's astute financial leadership,
the company prospered. She presided over
an entire Manhattan building that was home
to two Ailey companies, 200 classes a week,
and numerous other projects and
workshops.

18. "People ask me, 'What's different? What are the
changes you've made?"' she revealed in an
interview with Jennifer Dunning for the New York
Times. "It's an evolving situation. I want to sustain
this company and not have it be a museum piece. I
want to challenge the dancers and the audiences
with as much diversity as possible." In another
Times article, Anna Kisselgoff observed, "There
are signs that Miss Jamison wants to see
the repertory tilt further toward formally oriented
works that explore new ways of moving, to draw
closer to what is happening elsewhere in modern
dance."

19. By the early 2000s, Judith Jamison was an
icon of American dance. Among her long list
of awards was a Kennedy Center Honor in
1999, where she received a prize that Ailey
himself had been awarded earlier, and
where she shared a stage with another idol,
singer Stevie Wonder. President George W.
Bush awarded National Medals of the Arts to
her and to the Alvin Ailey Dance
Foundation in 2001, marking the first time
the medal had gone to a dance organisation.

20. She continued to nurture young dancers and
to exert positive force on the American arts
scene.

21. In her autobiography, Dancing Spirit, Jamison
summed up her philosophy about what it means to
be a dancer: "You have to be desperate, as though
you were catching your breath.... You want to eat
life, so you have to be famished all the time, not
physically, but in wanting to know and in wanting to
absorb and in exploring and stepping out over the
edge, sometimes by yourself.... Dance is bigger
than the physical body.... When you extend your
arm, it doesn't stop at the end of your fingers,
because you're dancing bigger than that; you're
dancing spirit. Take a chance. Reach out. Go
further than you've ever gone before."