Judith Jamison, a majestic dancer who became an international star as a member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and who directed the troupe for more than two decades, building it into the most successful modern dance company in the country, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 81.
Her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, was announced by Christopher Zunner, a spokesman for the Ailey company, who said she died “after a brief illness.”
At 5-foot-10, Ms. Jamison was unusually tall for a woman in her profession. “But anyone who’s seen her onstage is convinced she’s six feet five,” the critic Deborah Jowitt wrote in The New York Times in 1976.
“I was the antithesis of the small-boned, demure dancer with a classically feminine shape.” Ms. Jamison (pronounced JAM-ih-son) wrote in her 1993 autobiography, “Dancing Spirit.”
It wasn’t just her size and shape that were distinctive, however. She was a performer of great intelligence, warmth and wit.
“Jamison doesn’t show you steps, she uses them to show you a woman dancing,” Ms. Jowitt wrote. “This ability to maintain a human dimension and to project superhuman power and radiance is perhaps one of her most impressive skills.”
A ballet-trained dancer who wore her hair closely cropped, Ms. Jamison often inspired comparisons with the divine. “The prototype of countless carven and sculptured goddesses” was how Olga Maynard described her in a 1972 cover article for Dance magazine. (Ms. Maynard later wrote the 1982 biography “Judith Jamison: Aspects of a Dancer.”)
Clive Barnes of The New York Times wrote of Ms. Jamison, “She looks like an African goddess,” moving “in a manner almost more elemental than human.”
Mr. Barnes was reviewing the premiere of “Cry,” a 16-minute solo that Alvin Ailey choreographed for Ms. Jamison in 1972. She had joined the Ailey company in 1965 and had already distinguished herself in Mr. Ailey’s signature work, “Revelations,” by playing a woman in a baptism scene who holds a white umbrella high with one hand and undulates the opposite arm to mimic a rippling river. But it was “Cry,” an immediate hit, that made her a star.
At first wielding a long white scarf, Ms. Jamison suggested a series of female roles, from mother to servant to queen, and danced through pain into ecstatic freedom. The solo was a physical challenge — “as if you’re running around the block full speed,” she wrote — and a heavy symbolic lift. Mr. Ailey dedicated it “to all Black women everywhere, especially our mothers.”
“If I had been told that I was to represent every Black woman in the world, I would have dropped the cloth and left the stage immediately,” Ms. Jamison wrote of the burden of representation in “Dancing Spirit.”
But that was what she was often called on to do in appearances as a guest artist with the Vienna State Opera, San Francisco Ballet, Royal Swedish Ballet and other prestigious companies, usually performing “Cry.” It was, as Thomas F. DeFrantz wrote in “Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture” (2004), “a defiant interpolation of African American experience onto stage spaces typically empty of black bodies.”
And in 1976, when the ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov made a guest appearance with the Ailey company, he performed a duet with Ms. Jamison in a culturally significant pairing of Black and white, America and Russia. The duet, custom-made by Mr. Ailey, called “Pas de Duke,” was a playful exchange of techniques and style.
Ms. Jamison was the Ailey company’s celebrity and Mr. Ailey’s muse. But they had a sometimes stormy relationship, which she once compared to that between twins. “We could read each other’s minds” she told Ms. Maynard. “He was there as a guide, but he let me find my own way.”
Ms. Jamison stayed with the Ailey troupe until 1980, when she left to star in “Sophisticated Ladies,” a Broadway revue set to music by Duke Ellington. In his Times review of the show in 1981, Frank Rich called her “a mesmerizing incarnation of 1920s Cotton Club glamour.”
A Broadway career failed to follow, but in 1984 she began one as a choreographer, making “Divining” for the Ailey company. In 1988, she founded her own group, the Jamison Project. It didn’t last long. The following year, Mr. Ailey died of AIDS at 58, and Ms. Jamison took over as artistic director of his namesake troupe.
She inherited a company in its 31st year, with standing as a beloved national institution, but it had long been in financial trouble, partly because of Mr. Ailey’s drug addictions and mental health struggles. (In 1980, when Mr. Ailey had a mental breakdown and was arrested and hospitalized for two months, Ms. Jamison took over the directorship during his absence.)
Under her leadership, the company not only came out of debt for the first time; it also grew in size and budget and became even more popular, keeping up a nearly unparalleled schedule of national and international tours. In 2005, it opened the Joan Weill Center for Dance, a sleek, multistory headquarters in Midtown Manhattan with a claim to being the largest building in the country devoted exclusively to dance.
As director, Ms. Jamison maintained classics by Ailey (“Revelations” above all) while adding works by a wide range of choreographers, including those of Ronald K. Brown, whom she particularly championed, and a few of her own. Though some of her choreographic choices were faulted by critics as not rising to the level of her dancers, company members thrived under her leadership.
“What is most touching, and most revelatory of Jamison’s genius as a director is how deep the quality goes,” the critic Joan Acocella wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. “New dancers, regular dancers, people that nobody’s making a fuss over, are performing at eight hundred kilowatts.”
“They are spontaneous, relaxed, human, and they are wholly inside the dance,” she continued. “Someone has given them to themselves, and that person has to be Jamison.”
Judith Ann Jamison was born in Philadelphia on May 10, 1943. Her father, John Henry Jamison, was a sheet metal engineer who had dreamed of becoming a classical pianist. Her mother, Tessie Bell Brown, sometimes taught elementary-school drama. Both parents were from the South — he from North Carolina, she from Florida — and they met in Philadelphia while singing in the choir of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. They raised Ms. Jamison and her older brother, John Jr., in the largely white Germantown section of Philadelphia, exposing them to as much music as they could.
An energetic child, Ms. Jamison began studying ballet at 6 with Marion Cuyjet, whose Judimar School of Dance was one of the rare places where Black children could get classical training. “And from 6 to 17, I danced straight through,” Ms. Jamison told The Times in 1972.
She attended Fisk University, a historically Black institution in Nashville, but after three semesters she decided that she wanted to be a professional dancer and transferred to the Philadelphia Dance Academy (which later merged into the University of the Arts).
During a master class, the eminent choreographer Agnes de Mille noticed Ms. Jamison and invited her to perform in “The Four Marys,” a dramatic work that de Mille had made for American Ballet Theater with roles for four Black maids. (One was played by a dancer Ms. Jamison idolized: Carmen de Lavallade.) But after a few Ballet Theater performances, there were virtually no opportunities for a Black ballerina in 1964. That summer she worked at the New York World’s Fair, operating a log flume ride.
Then, after trying out unsuccessfully for a television special starring Harry Belafonte, Ms. Jamison got a call from a choreographer who had watched the audition. It was Alvin Ailey, and he asked her to join his company.
She stayed there for 15 years, except for nine months from 1966 to 1967, when the Ailey company, out of money, temporarily disbanded and Ms. Jamison performed with the Harkness Ballet, another Manhattan troupe. In 1967, when the State Department sent the Ailey company on a tour of nine African countries, Ms. Jamison found the experience revelatory. Jomo Kenyatta, the president of Kenya, told her that she looked like a noble Masai. “It made me proud,” she told The Times in 1972.
In 1972, she married the former Ailey member Miguel Godreau. The marriage was annulled in 1974, and Mr. Godreau died in 1996. No immediate family members survive.
Ms. Jamison served as an adviser to the National Endowment for the Arts from 1972 to 1976. After being recognized with Kennedy Center Honors in 1999, she received the National Medal of Arts and the Handel Medallion, the highest cultural award from New York City, among other honors.
In 2010, the first dance series ever presented at the White House kicked off with a tribute to Ms. Jamison. Michelle Obama, the first lady, noted that before she and President Barack Obama had moved into the White House, they had just one piece of art on their walls: a photograph of Ms. Jamison in “Cry.”
Ms. Jamison thought of her artistry in almost spiritual terms.
“I don’t think that I move the way that I move just because I’ve trained for years, or because I have long arms or something,” she told The Times in 1976. “I believe that there’s a special gift God gave me, and that I’m using it.”
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