Alvin Ailey (1931 – 1989) was a dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City in 1958 as a haven for nurturing Black artists and expressing the universality of the African-American experience through dance.
Ailey’s work fused theater, modern dance, ballet, and jazz with Black vernacular. His Revelations is recognized as one of the most popular and most performed ballets in the world.
Ailey’s dance company came into being piece by piece and person by person. What might a history look like that traced the full trajectory of each?
Using Ailey and the company he founded as a case study, Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit will present an online seminar on Wednesday, October 30th, that lays out their methodology of radical accounting, through which they unpack the complexity and historical contingency of the arts ecosystem of which Ailey was a part.
The event will be presented online by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
The virtual seminar begins at 5 pm EST and will be hosted on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive a confirmation message with attendance information. The in-person reception starts at 4:30 pm and the seminar will begin at 5 pm.
Photo: Revelations “Take me to the Water” performed by Alvin Ailey Dance Theater in 2011 at Lincoln Center.
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