Artistic Director Emerita, Judith Jamison sits with Tamron Hall to discuss the AILEY Documentary, the 50th anniversary of Alvin Ailey’s beloved Cry, and the highly anticipated 2022 US Tour, kicking off Philadelphia.
Celebrating 10 years as the artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Battle says he is most proud of the chances he has taken.
The documentary "Ailey" tells the story of the late Alvin Ailey, who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958. Host Robin Young speaks with the film's director Jamila Wignot and Judith Jamison, a dancer and artistic director emerita of Alvin Ailey's company.
Join us for a conversation with living legend, Judith Jamison. Ms. Jamison is the Artistic Director Emerita for Alvin Ailey.
Every year, in theaters and concert halls around the globe, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater takes audiences to church. Not just any house of worship, but the working-class, Black, Southern temples of rural Texas. The gospel they see and feel is Revelations, the company’s signature dance, which has been staged more often than the troupe’s other celebrated works, for some 25 million fans. This year Revelations turns 60, and it has lost none of its incantatory power.
If life were normal this spring, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater would be on the road performing its annual national tour. They'd be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the company's signature work, “Revelations”, described by The New York Times as “modern dance's unquestionably greatest hit.”
Since Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater began rolling out its online programming in March, I've been waiting for Ailey's always uplifting "Cry" to make an appearance. It arrived, approximately, just in time for Mother's Day. Ailey created this bracing 16-minute solo in 1971 as a birthday present to his mother, dedicating it to "all black women everywhere - especially our mothers."
Judith Jamison is one of the most accomplished modern dancers and choreographers of all time. After joining the @Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1965, she achieved international fame and went on to earn the Kennedy Center Honor and a National Medal of Arts. Although she is now the Artistic Director Emerita at Alvin Ailey, to up and coming Ailey dancers like Khalia Campbell, she is simply Ms. Jamison. In this episode of Thank You Notes, Khalia reads a thank you note to Ms. Jamison.
After 48 years with the celebrated Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, both as performer and choreographer, Masazumi Chaya is hanging up his dancing shoes. The Japanese-American artist will start the new year by retiring as the modern dance company's artistic director. But the man known as "The Keeper of the Flame" to some colleagues is working until his very last day with the renowned dance troupe, whose members will celebrate his legacy with a special evening of performances on Sunday at New York's City Center. He got his nickname for preserving the New York City-based company's repertoire and for training generations of dancers through the past three decades.
For 47 years, Masazumi Chaya has overseen Alvin Ailey's dancers - and now he's ready to move on. Masazumi Chaya, a doctor and nurse's son from Japan, expected to go to medical school. But at 17, he took a jazz-dance class and started performing on TV shows there. By 21, he wondered just how good a dancer he really was. He wanted to test himself - so he went to New York.