Debbie Allen

Actress, dancer, choreographer. Born January 16, 1950, in Houston, Texas, the third child of Pulitzer-winning poet Vivian Ayers, and dentist Arthur Allen. Allen was three when she began taking dancing. By the age of four she had become determined to be a professional performer, and her parents enrolled her in dance classes at the age of five.

Allen's parents divorced in 1957, leaving mother Vivian as the main caregiver for Debbie and her siblings. Under Vivian's watchful eye, the Allen children were expected to complete writing assignments to encourage their creativity, and each of them had to perform household chores to establish independence. Debbie's mother also taught her children to try new things. In 1960, on a whim, Vivian took Debbie and her siblings to live with her in Mexico. "She didn't know anybody in Mexico," Debbie later recalled in the Washington Post. "She didn't speak Spanish. She was looking for another level of experience...I respect that so much."

After nearly two years in Mexico, Allen and her family returned to Texas, where the 12-year-old Debbie auditioned for the Houston Ballet School. Although her performance was good enough for admission, the school denied her entry based on the color of her skin. A year later, a Russian instructor at the school who saw Debbie perform secretly enrolled the aspiring dancer. By the time the admissions department discovered the situation, they were so impressed with her skills that they let Allen stay in the program.

But that wouldn't be the end of Allen's segregation struggles. At 16, during what she believed was a successful audition for the North Carolina School of the Arts, she was chosen to demonstrate technique for other prospective students. Later, however, her application was rejected because her body was "unsuited" for ballet—a criticism often used to discourage black dancers.

The rejection hit Allen hard, and for the duration of high school, she focused mainly on her studies. An honor roll student, Allen entered Howard University, and graduated cum laude from the institution in 1971, with a degree in drama. She headed straight for Broadway after college, and in 1972 she landed several chorus roles, eventually making appearances on television, in commercials and series.

In 1979, Allen had a brief moment in the spotlight when she landed a small part in Alex Haley's epic TV mini-series,Roots: The Next Generation, which discussed race relations in America. But Allen hit it big in 1980, after she starred in a Broadway revival of West Side Story as Anita. Her performance earned her a Tony nomination, and the critical acclaim neccessary to land a role as a dance instructor in the movie Fame (1980). Fame won several Academy Awards, and helped launched a dance fad across the U.S. The wild success of the film evolved into a sucessful television spin-off in 1982, in which Allen also co-starred. For her role as choreographer on the show, Debbie snagged three Emmy awards for choreography.

After Fame was canceled, Allen headlined Bob Fosse's revival of the musicalSweet Charity, for which she was honored with a Tony award. Then in 1988, Allen stepped behind the camera to direct The Cosby Show spinoff, A Different World. (Her sister, Phylicia Rashad, had starred as mother Clare Huxtable in the popular The Cosby Show franchise.) Allen boosted the show to the top of the ratings, continuing to produce and direct the sitcom until its finale in 1993.

In 2001, Allen opened the Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Los Angeles, California. The nonprofit school offers a comprehensive dance curriculum for students ranging in age from four to 18, regardless of financial status.

Allen has received several honors for her work, including an honorary doctorate from the North Carolina School of the Arts— where she had originally been rejected. She also earned a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Women in Radio and Television.

Allen is married to former NBA star Norm Nixon. They have two children.

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Born: January 5, 1931 
 

Rogers, Texas 
Died: December 1, 1989 
New York, New York 
African American dancer and choreographer

 Alvin Ailey founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and won international fame as both a dancer and choreographer, a creator and arranger of dance performances.

Rough beginning

Alvin Ailey Jr. was born to Alvin and Lula Elizabeth Ailey on January 5, 1931, in Rogers, Texas. He was an only child, and his father, a laborer, left the family when Alvin Jr. was less than one year old. At the age of six, Alvin Jr. moved with his mother to Navasota, Texas. As he recalled in an interview in the New York Daily News Magazine, "There was the white school up on the hill, and the black Baptist church, and the segregated [only members of one race allowed] theaters and neighborhoods. Like most of my generation, I grew up feeling like an outsider, like someone who didn't matter."

In 1942 Ailey and his mother moved to Los Angeles, California, where his mother found work in an aircraft factory. Ailey became interested in athletics and joined his high school gymnastics team and played football. An admirer of dancers Gene Kelly (1912–1996) and Fred Astaire (1899–1987), he also took tap dancing lessons at a neighbor's home. His interest in dance grew when a friend took him to visit the modern dance school run by Lester Horton, whose dance company (a group of dancers who perform together) was the first in America to admit members of all races. Unsure of what opportunities would be available for him as a dancer, however, Ailey left Horton's school after one month. After graduating from high school in 1948, Ailey considered becoming a teacher. He entered the University of California in Los Angeles to study languages. When Horton offered him a scholarship in 1949 Ailey returned to the dance school. He left again after one year, however, this time to attend San Francisco State College.

Early career

For a time Ailey danced in a nightclub in San Francisco, California, then he returned to the Horton school to finish his training. When Horton took the company east for a performance in New York City in 1953, Ailey was with him. When Horton died suddenly, the young Ailey took charge as the company's artistic director. Following Horton's style, Ailey choreographed two pieces that were presented at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Massachusetts. After the works received poor reviews from the festival manager, the troupe broke up.

Despite the setback, Ailey's career stayed on track. A Broadway producer invited him to dance in House of Flowers, a musical based on Truman Capote's (1924–1984) book. Ailey continued taking dance classes while performing in the show. He also studied ballet and acting. From the mid-1950s through the early 1960s Ailey appeared in many musical productions on and off Broadway, among them: The Carefree Tree; Sing, Man, Sing; Jamaica; and Call Me By My Rightful Name. He also played a major part in the play Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright.

In 1958 Ailey and another dancer with an interest in choreographing recruited dancers to perform several concerts at the 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association in New York City, a place where modern dances and the works of new choreographers were seen. Ailey's first major piece, Blues Suite, was inspired by blues music. The performance drew praise. Ailey then scheduled a second concert to present his own works, and then a third, which featured his most famous piece, Revelations. Accompanied by the elegant jazz music of Duke Ellington (1899–1974), Revelations pulled the audience into African American religious life.

Established own dance company

In 1959 Ailey established the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a group of eight black dancers. One year later, the theater became the resident dance company at the Clark Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. By the mid-1960s Ailey, who struggled with his weight, gave up dancing in favor of choreography. He also oversaw business details as the director of his ambitious dance company. By 1968 the company had received funding from private and public organizations but still had money problems, even as it brought modern dance to audiences around the world. Ailey also had the leading African American soloist (a person who performs by oneself) of modern dance, Judith Jamison (1944–). Having employed Asian and white dancers since the mid-1960s, Ailey had also integrated (included people of different races) his company. In 1969 the company moved to Brooklyn, New York, as the resident dance company of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, an arts center with three theaters.

In the early 1960s the company performed in Southeast Asia and Australia as part of an international cultural program set up by President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963). Later the company traveled to Brazil, Europe, and West Africa. Ailey also choreographed dances for other companies, including Feast of Ashes for the Joffrey Ballet and Anthony and Cleopatra for the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center in New York City. Ailey worked on projects with other artists, including one with Duke Ellington for the American Ballet Theater. For Ailey the decade peaked with the performance of Masekela Language, a dance based on the music of Hugh Masekela, a black South African trumpeter who lived in exile for speaking out against apartheid (South Africa's policy of separation based on race).

Ailey's Cry

By the late 1970s Ailey's company was one of America's most popular dance troupes. Its members continued touring around the world, with U.S. State Department backing. They were the first modern dancers to visit the former Soviet Union since the 1920s. In 1971 Ailey's company was asked to return to the City Center Theater in New York City after a performance featured Ailey's celebrated solo, Cry. Danced by Judith Jamison, she made it one of the troupe's best known pieces.

Dedicated to "all black women everywhere—especially our mothers," the piece depicts the struggles of different generations of black American women. It begins with the unwrapping of a long white scarf that becomes many things during the course of the dance, and ends with an expression of belief and happiness danced to the late 1960s song, "Right On, Be Free." Of this and of all his works Ailey told John Gruen in The Private World of Ballet, "I am trying to express something that I feel about people, life, the human spirit, the beauty of things.…"

Later years

Ailey suffered a breakdown in 1980 that put him in the hospital for several weeks. At the time he had lost a close friend, was going through a midlife crisis, and was experiencing money problems. Still, he continued to work, and his reputation as a founding father of modern dance grew during the decade.

Ailey received many honors for his choreography, including a Dance magazine award in 1975; the Springarn Medal, given to him by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1979; and the Capezio Award that same year. In 1988 he was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors prize. Ailey died of a blood disorder on December 1, 1989. Thousands of people flocked to the memorial service held for him at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

For More Information

Ailey, Alvin, with A. Peter Bailey. Revelations: The Autobiography of Alvin Ailey. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Pub. Group, 1995.

Dunning, Jennifer. Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996.

Probosz, Kathilyn Solomon. Alvin Ailey, Jr. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.

Martha Graham

“I wanted to begin not with characters or ideas, but with movements . . .I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge.”

–Martha Graham

Martha Graham’s impact on dance was staggering and often compared to that of Picasso’s on painting, Stravinsky’s on music, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s on architecture. Her contributions transformed the art form, revitalizing and expanding dance around the world. In her search to express herself freely and honestly, she created the Martha Graham Dance Company, one of the oldest dance troupes in America. As a teacher, Graham trained and inspired generations of fine dancers and choreographers. Her pupils included such greats as Alvin Ailey, Twyla Tharp, Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, and countless other performers, actors, and dancers. She collaborated with some of the foremost artists of her time including the composer Aaron Coplandand the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Born in 1894 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Graham spent most of her formative years on the West coast. Her father, a doctor specializing in nervous disorders, was very interested in diagnosis through attention to physical movement. This belief in the body’s ability to express its inner senses was pivotal in Graham’s desire to dance. Athletic as a young girl, Graham did not find her calling until she was in her teens. In 1911, the ballet dancer Ruth St. Denis performed at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles. Inspired by St. Denis’ performance, Graham enrolled in an arts-oriented junior college, and later to the newly opened Denishawn School. Denishawn was founded by Ruth St. Denis and her husband Ted Shawn to teach techniques of American and world dance. Over eight years, as both a student and an instructor, Graham made Denishawn her home.

Working primarily with Ted Shawn, Graham improved her technique and began dancing professionally. In “Xochital”, a dance made specifically for her by Shawn, Graham danced the role of an attacked Aztec maiden. It was the wildly emotional performance of this role that garnered her first critical acclaim. By 1923, eight years after entering Denishawn, she was ready to branch out. She found her chance dancing in the vaudeville revue Greenwich VillageFollies. At the Greenwich Village Follies, Graham was able to design and choreograph her own dances. Though this work provided her with some economic and artistic independence, she longed for a place to make greater experiments with dance. It was then that she took a position at the Eastman School of Music, where she was free of the constraints of public performance. At Eastman, Graham was given complete control over her classes and the entire dance program. Graham saw this as an opportunity to engage her best pupils in the experiential dance she was beginning to create.

These first experimentations at Eastman proved to be the sparks of a new mode of dance that would revolutionize theories of movement in all of the performing arts. For Graham, ballet’s concern with flow and grace left behind more violent traditional passions. Graham believed that through spastic movements, tremblings, and falls she could express emotional and spiritual themes ignored by other dance. She desired to evoke strong emotions, and achieved these visceral responses through the repetition of explicitly sexual and violently disjunctive movements. Beginning with her Eastman students, she formed the now famous Martha Graham School for Contemporary Dance in New York. One of the early pieces of the company was “Frontier” (1935), a solo performance about the pioneer woman. This piece brought together the two men who would be close collaborators throughout her life. Isamu Noguchi, the Japanese-American sculptor, created a sparse and beautiful design that replaced flat backdrops with three-dimensional objects. Together Graham and Noguchi revolutionized set design through this inclusion of sculpture. “Frontier” also included the sound design of Louis Horst, a close friend and strong influence throughout Graham’s life.

Soon after “Frontier”,Graham brought a young ballet dancer named Erick Hawkins into the company. Together they appeared in one of her major works, “American Document” (1938). For the next ten years he would remain with the company and perform in many of her great pieces. The most famous work from this period was “Appalachian Spring” (1944), for which Aaron Copland wrote the score. In 1948 Graham and Hawkins married, but the marriage was short-lived. They continued to work together for a while and then made a permanent break. After this break, Graham plunged deeper into her work and in 1955 presented the world with one of her greatest pieces, “Seraphic Dialogue”. “Seraphic Dialogue” was a powerful and moving version of the story of Joan of Arc. Throughout Graham’s career she would return again and again to the struggles and triumphs of both great and ordinary women. Despite her age, she continued to dance throughout the 60s. It was not until 1969 that Graham announced her retirement from the stage.

For Graham, however, life away from dance was impossible. Though no longer able to perform she continued to teach and choreograph until her death in 1991. It is nearly impossible to track the influence of Martha Graham. Everyone from Woody Allen to Bette Davis cites her as a major influence. She is universally understood to be the twentieth century’s most important dancer, and the mother of modern dance. She performed at the White House for Franklin Roosevelt, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor. She was the first choreographer to regularly employ both Asian- and African-American Dancers. Her contributions to the art of stage design and dance production are countless. Martha Graham’s continued experimentation and her constant attention to human emotion, frailty, and perseverance, is one of the greatest individual achievements in American cultural history.