The one-night-only opening performance at City Center will include Here. Jamison may not be performing herself this year, but her particular brand of majestic sinuousness will dazzle audiences when Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater celebrates its fiftieth anniversary-and Jamison’s twentieth as artistic director-with a special performance tonight to kick off their five-week New York season.
Illustrated with sixty photographs, Dancing Spirit is a candid and immediate self-portrait of a unique American artist whose work has left an indelible mark on the world of dance.“People come to see beauty, and I dance to give it to them,” Judith Jamison once said. And Jamison talks frankly about the price exacted by a dancer's nomadic life-rootlessness, fleeting relationships, the obsession with physical beauty. Dancing Spirit contains vivid portraits of many artists Jamison has worked with including Agnes de Mille, Alvin Ailey, Jessye Norman, Geoffrey Holder, Carmen de Lavallade, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, to name only a few. Now, with Anchor's paperback publication, an even wider audience can trace the steps of her career: her early years in Philadelphia, where she began studying dance at the age of six, her discovery by Agnes de Mille years of frustration and struggle in a field that favored petite, fair, White women her legendary collaboration with Alvin Ailey her work on Broadway in the musical Sophisticated Ladies the formation of her own company, the Jamison Project, and her retum to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as artistic director after its founder's death in 1989. Last November, Doubleday published Dancing Spirit, this remarkable woman's autobiography.
Her commanding physical presence and extraordinary technique have made her not only a superstar of American dance and an innovator in her field, but also an inspiration to African Americans, to women, and to people of all origins around the world. Judith Jamison is, in every sense, a towering figure.
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