He revolutionized the world of dance by honoring the African American experience, but his journey was not without its struggles.
This is the story of Alvin Ailey.
This is the story of Alvin Ailey.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00Choreographers start with an empty space, a body, a tomb, he's like carve this space.
00:24I love creating something where there was nothing before.
00:31I was born in the depression in 1931, rural country, tough times.
00:35The first 12 years of his life, it was him and his mother, you know, traveling through various small towns of Texas, just the two of them.
00:45There was no father figure in his life. He is in the fields with his mother, picking cotton.
00:50So there is this sense of an incredible economic vulnerability.
01:01When I was 14, I discovered Leviticus.
01:03And it touched something in me, but there was no Mardi Gras.
01:11The aha moment really comes with his completely serendipitous encounter with the legendary Katherine Dunham.
01:18He sees this poster and he's like, wait a minute, I have had yet to see black people on the stages of, you know, the halls of downtown LA.
01:26And he just, you know, enters the theater and recognized himself in so many ways.
01:48The time with Mr. Horton was really formative because Lester Horton,
01:52is himself, you know, a queer man, a choreographer who is running at that time,
01:58one of the first multiracial dance companies in the country.
02:02And so I think realizing a sense of possibility through Mr. Horton's own, you know,
02:07sort of space where everybody did a little bit of everything.
02:22He really finds his way into the kind of lead choreographer position a little bit by happenstance.
02:44And that is, of course, how he would frame it, being a rather humble person.
02:48But I think he was also ready for it.
02:50I think he had something to say.
03:01I wanted to do the kind of dance that could be done for the man on the streets, the people,
03:05that it was part of their culture and that it was universal.
03:21For Mr. Ailey at this time, you know, it's the 50s.
03:24There's a sense of possibility and progress, I think, in the ways that the civil rights movement is challenging
03:30so many things in kind of a legal setting.
03:32There's a real sense that, you know, there is space for us.
03:36Let's start creating our own things and let's start staging works that are meaningful to us.
03:50This is what he took up as his crusade.
04:04Alvin's protest was on stage.
04:06I want to feel all the anger and the sense of cursing at the outside world.
04:21This is sort of part of a Cold War strategy, really, to export some of these, you know,
04:27arts organizations overseas as a battle of kind of persuasion, let's say.
04:32And so the Ailey Company is used in this way to say, like, oh, look at the beautiful work
04:36that these individuals create and look at how we support them.
04:39And we would like to share these gifts with you.
04:50Alvin entertained my dreams that a black boy could actually dance.
05:17Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is one of the most important contemporary dance companies
05:22in the world.
05:24People were just, oh, my God, they'd never seen anything like it.
05:42People say, why is he doing that now?
06:02If you're a black anything in this country, people want to put you into a bag.
06:13His struggle, particularly with mental health and with some drug addiction.
06:18And I think all of that feeds into this kind of intense loneliness that he no doubt, you
06:25know, experienced.
06:28I think there was tremendous shame for him.
06:31Do you feel as though you had to sacrifice anything to stay in dance?
06:39Absolutely.
06:49Alvin Ailey has a passion for movement that reveals the meaning of things.
06:54His is a choreography of the heart.
07:17Alvin said that dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back
07:23to the people.
07:34I had my own ideas, not just to do a step, but to feel something.