#blackchoreographer

Wow! Peaceful journeys to the regal trailblazing dancer #JudithJamison, who transitioned today at age 81. She was stunning and showed us the power of dance and beauty of Black bodies in rhythmic motion! Soar Queen!

Her passing ends an already unusually awful week that started with #QuincyDelightJonesJr also leaving this realm and the death of democracy with the re-election of a demon as the next U.S. president. Sheesh.

VIA @NYTIMES: Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey Dancer of ‘Power and Radiance,’ Dies at 81

She became an international star as a member of the company and later directed it, guiding it out of debt and boosting its popularity.

Judith Jamison, a majestic dancer who became an international star as a member of #AlvinAiley 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.”

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/09/arts/dance/judith-jamison-dead.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

Photo credits (©) Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, Inc. and Smithsonian Institution:

1.) Judith Jamison in Geoffrey Holder’s The Prodigal Prince (1967), photo by Jack Mitchell

2.) Judith Jamison in Alvin Ailey's Cry (1971), Photo by R. Faligant

3.) Judith Jamison in Alvin Ailey's Cry (1971), photo by Jack Mitchell

4.) Judith Jamison in John Butler's Facets (1972), photo by Jack Mitchell

5.) Judith Jamison photo by Andrew Eccles.