From Dance Muse to Mentor

She has been called an ebony goddess, the ancestral earth mother, the black Venus of dance. Judith Jamison, former star of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and for the past decade its director, invites such mythical comparisons. Once a gangly kid, she grew into a vision of grandeur: nearly 6 feet tall--though even when seeing her stride onstage barefoot, you’d swear she was taller. She has winglike arms and never-ending legs, rich mahogany skin, strong features that can be best described as sculptural.

All of which stood in glaring contrast to the prevailing ideal of the dancer in the ‘70s, when Jamison shot to fame with Alvin Ailey’s “Cry,” the searing solo by which she will be forever defined. Jamison was a full-bodied woman with close-clipped hair, while at the time what the public adored was the pale, petite ballerina, preferably a foreign one. Jamison’s stardom was unprecedented. Here was a modern dancer, a black dancer, an American dancer, swept to the bosom of both critics and audiences. (Her recent tribute at the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington will be broadcast by CBS on Wednesday.)

Jamison’s art was equal parts body and spirit. The long, sweeping legs, the appearance of unstoppable spontaneity and keen musical alertness were accompanied by a sense that there was something larger than the audience, larger than herself, that was moving her. That somewhere up above the lighting grid the Holy Ghost was giving her breath.

Jamison, 55, sits in a cluttered office in a corner of the Ailey headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Dressed head to toe in black, with pewter braids coiled in a tight topknot, she is every inch the imposing figure of her youth. The Ailey organization, which she took over after Ailey’s death in 1989, encompasses not only the extremely busy 31-member company, but also the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center school and the junior company, the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble.

Ailey and Jamison Became Inseparable

Ailey and Jamison came from different eras and different backgrounds, but when he took her under his tutelage, the two became inseparable. Ailey, who grew up poor in rural Texas and didn’t dance until he was 18, founded his pioneering, primarily African American company in 1958 as a repository for not only his own works but for other choreographers’ work as well. He cultivated a repertoire of unheard-of variety: the contemporary dance styles of Lester Horton and Martha Graham, as well as jazz works and those drawing on classical ballet training.

Many of Ailey’s works drew on the African American experience; “Revelations,” the company’s resonant, never-outmoded signature piece, is informed by the sanctuary offered in the church of his youth.

“The connection with ‘Revelations’ was instant,” Jamison says, “and that Alvin could express what I had experienced growing up in Philly and what he had experienced in Texas just spoke to me about the unity of the black church.”

Jamison came from a pious, blue-collar background in Philadelphia. “I really felt a connection to something higher than me--God, a higher being, bigger than myself--always.

“A sense that I was taken care of.”

She was pigeon-toed as a toddler and wore corrective shoes. Her mother enrolled her awkward daughter in dance classes when Jamison was 6. There, she found a way to be at ease with limbs that were so hard to control.

Still, as a student at the Philadelphia Dance Academy in 1964, when Jamison heard about an evening master class with renowned choreographer Agnes de Mille, she tried to beg off. A friend urged her to go. After the class, De Mille asked her startled student to come to American Ballet Theatre and create a role in her newest work, “The Four Marys.”

The ballet told of a white man who falls in love with one of his fiancee’s four slaves (the Marys of the title, all performed by black dancers). Carmen de Lavallade, a onetime member of Ailey’s company, was also one of the Marys.

“She was this great majestic creature,” De Lavallade recalls of 20-year-old Jamison. “She didn’t look like anyone else; she didn’t move like anyone else. She could be magnetic, flowing, strong but also very soft. She just pulled you into her world.”

Nevertheless, after the run of “The Four Marys,” American Ballet Theatre had no further use for her.

Jamison says she wasn’t overly discouraged. “I’ve never felt shut out of anything,” she says. “My mentality is, ‘Wait, there’s going to be another wind blowing through the trees.’ ”

She got a summer job and didn’t dance for months. Finally, she auditioned for a spot in a TV special Donald McKayle was choreographing. She was politely dismissed.

Jamison left the studio so stunned by that sudden, deadly “thank you very much” that she didn’t recognize the man who passed her in the hall. The man who called her two days later to offer her a job in his company. Alvin Ailey.

Spirit and Power of Solo Work ‘Cry’

Her extraordinary height and idiosyncratic way of moving made her a difficult tool for choreographers. She acknowledges she was never a very flexible dancer, and lyricism was not her strength. But her theatrical flair, musicality and charismatic presence were unmatched. In 1975 Ailey forever enshrined her with the grueling 16-minute “Cry,” dedicated to “all black women everywhere--especially our mothers.” With its images of scrubbing floors, mourning fallen sons and being shaken by the spirit, the work framed Jamison as an icon.

Ailey created other works for Jamison, notably the vampy “The Mooche” and “Pas de Duke,” set to the music of Duke Ellington, a special-occasion piece with which she returned to American Ballet Theatre to dance with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Other choreographers gravitated to her: John Butler, the Hamburg Ballet’s John Neumeier, Belgium’s Maurice Bejart.

Jamison left Ailey in 1980 to star on Broadway in “Sophisticated Ladies,” then formed the Jamison Project to pursue choreography. As it became clear Ailey was growing ill, she rejoined the company shortly before his death and held his hand as he died.

Gradually, she settled into her responsibilities--as shrink, den mother, hand-holder, money magnet (her reputation has powerful marketing value) and watchdog. She has put her mark on the company in elevating women to many key positions, in hiring young virtuosos, in seeking cutting-edge choreography

She typically spends hours in rehearsal with the dancers.

“The studio is a very sacred place,” she says. “We’re dealing with spirit in dance. We’re not just dealing with physicality. . . .

“That’s the dilemma of the dancer today,” she continues. “. . . I don’t want to see you ‘technique’ onstage. I want to see you combine yourself and the technique and transcend them both.”