For a while I went each December to see Alvin Ailey with a few friends. For a while I was also taking classes at their huge school in the west 50s right near where J. teaches. It’s one of those things you can’t let go of if you’re like me – even if you only do it a few times, the fact that anyone can walk in on off the street and take a class with these world class artists. 

Shortly after quarantine, the Ailey company put out a short video of a few of their dancers doing parts of “Revelations,” Ailey’s masterpiece and tribute to the gospel tradition, in isolation. I must have watched it twenty times. Here were these beautifully trained bodies, living in tiny apartments or in a little back yard with a kid or a dog, doing that characteristic reach. Since then they’ve put out a range of gems from their archive as a “digital season” and now, this, a blending of different performances of “Revelations” in the almost sixty years since its creation. 

I got more curious about Ailey this year when I finally read Isabel Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration. She talks about the many artistic greats whose lives and work were made by the migration. Ailey was one of them. Born in 1931 in Rogers Texas, his family was part of the lesser-known branch of the migration, of African-Americans from Louisiana and Texas out to California. In Rogers, the church and its music were his only refuge; in L.A. he saw the Katherine Graham company perform. He went on to study dance, join the Horton company and perform on Broadway before starting his own company. Even after the creation of “Revelations” and other masterpieces It struggled financially for many years until it was aided by a wildly successful tour of the Soviet Union where they once received 30 curtain calls.  

Ailey died in 1989, at age 58, during one of the worst years of another pandemic. Reportedly he asked that the cause of death not be listed as AIDS in order to protect his mother.