(Reuters) – Judith Jamison, an acclaimed dancer and choreographer who for two decades was artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, died on Saturday in New York at the age of 81.
His death occurred after a brief illness, according to a post on the company’s Instagram page.
Jamison grew up in Philadelphia and began dancing at the age of six, she said in a 2019 TED talk. She joined Ailey’s modern dance company in 1965, when few black women were prominent in American dance, and performed there for 15 years.
In 1971, she released “Cry,” a 17-minute solo that Ailey dedicated “to all black women around the world, especially our mothers,” and which became a signature of the company, according to its website.
Ailey said of Jamison in her 1995 autobiography that “with ‘Cry’ she became herself. Once she found this contact, this release, she poured her being into everyone who came to see her perform.”
Jamison performed on Broadway and formed her own dance company before returning to serve as artistic director of the Ailey company from 1989 to 2011.
“I felt prepared to carry (the company) forward. Alvin and I were like parts of the same tree. He, the roots and the trunk, and we were the branches. I was his muse. We were all his muses,” she said. he said in the TED talk.
Jamison received a Kennedy Center Honor, a National Medal of Arts, and many other awards.