Quotes About Alvin Ailey

“All my life I've been fascinated by the precipice in all of us. When you come to it, you either choose to fall or you don't
Alvin Ailey”

— Kathy Petrakis

“I'm born originally in Toronto, and I have what I call my 'Fame' story. I took a Greyhound bus and went to Alvin Ailey and received Dunham, Horton, Graham technique there, but I could never take my eyes off of Balanchine doing 'Nutcracker'; to me he's the best who ever did it.”

— Laurieann Gibson

“I am trained, and I did do 'The Nutcracker' in its right form, but at the time, they told me I was black and I'd never be in 'Swan Lake.' I went through all those prejudices in the ballet community, and I still emerged wonderfully trained and found my way to Alvin Ailey where there were familiar faces.”

— Laurieann Gibson

“I wanted to be an Ailey dancer. I would watch Alvin Ailey videos over and over, and I'd picture myself doing that. I was obsessed with it.”

— Robert Battle

“I danced growing up. I had two friends of mine that, actually, one of them wound up dancing with Alvin Ailey.”

— Lisa Ann Walter

“My dad is a director/producer and my mom is a dancer; she performed with Alvin Ailey, but I didn't even think about becoming an actress.”

— Sanaa Lathan

“As long as there are dancers around who love to dance, there will be an Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. We miss him so much, but he's alive as soon as you see a dancer hit the stage.”

— Judith Jamison

“The way Alvin Ailey has transformed modern dance and dance in general is the fact of variety. It's a cornucopia of ways to move. There are choreographers in the company as - as diverse, as different from each other as Donald McKayle and Bill T. Jones, or Jawole Zollar and John Butler, Lar Lubovitch, you know, and Judith Jamison.”

— Judith Jamison

“Boy-before intense anxiety had crushed his chances for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and sent him into the awful mental decline in which he'd been made a vampire.”

— Anne Rice

“After all these years of saying the same thing about the Alvin Ailey company - terrific dancers, awful repertory - I'm finally accepting the inevitable: I'm not going to change my mind, and they're not going to change their ways. And why should they, given their juggernaut success all over the world?”

— Robert Gottlieb

“DeFrantz's study ... is not the first book about the protean Ailey, who was born in hardscrabble Texas in 1931 and died in 1989 after creating close to 80 works. But it is perhaps the most comprehensive, combining biography, criticism, the analysis of dance criticism, and a sort of corporate history, siting the now firmly established Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in the international cultural landscape.”

— Alvin Ailey

“When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time.”

— Wynton Marsalis

“I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn't care, I was free.”

— Madonna Ciccone