Alvin Ailey
Alvin Ailey (1931–1989) was a dancer, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Ailey School in New York City. His work fused theater, modern dance, ballet, and jazz with Black vernacular, creating choreography that helped to spread global awareness of Black life in America. His choreographic masterpiece Revelations is recognized as one of the most popular and most performed ballets in the world.
Born in Rogers, Texas, Ailey studied a wide range of dance styles and techniques—from ballet to Native American—inspired movement studies—at Lester Horton’s school, one of the first racially integrated dance schools in the United States. Horton mentored Ailey, and after Horton died in 1953, Ailey became director of the Lester Horton Dance Theater and began choreographing his own works. The following year, he moved to New York City, where he performed in four Broadway shows, including House of Flowers and Jamaica.
He founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater to uplift the African American experience while enriching and preserving the legacy of modern dance. He also created ballets for other companies, including the American Ballet Theatre, Royal Danish Ballet, London Festival Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, and Paris Opera Ballet. Ailey established the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center (now The Ailey School) in 1969 and formed the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble (now Ailey II) in 1974. He was a pioneer in promoting arts in education. In 1989, he founded AileyCamp, a summer day camp for children to explore their creativity through dance and the arts.
Ailey collaborated with many artists, including Romare Bearden, Duke Ellington (elected to the Academy in 1970), Langston Hughes, and Mary Lou Williams. As was common at the time, Ailey kept his sexuality private, but he expressed aspects of his identity through his art. His choreographed ballets incorporated imagery associated with both male and female homosexuality, often juxtaposing same-sex partnering with religious symbolism and hypermasculine archetypes. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968, the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1977, a Kennedy Center Honors in 1988, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2014.