Edges of Ailey with Juliana DeVaan

Welcome to the waitlist for Exhibits in New York, a forthcoming iOS app that lets you track and review shows around the city. While this newsletter typically shares just one image of something on view, this week we’re publishing our first longform interview with writer and historian Juliana DeVaan. If you like this project, consider sharing with a friend.

Jennifer Packer, Not Yet Titled, 2024.

Juliana DeVaan is a PhD candidate in United States history at Columbia University. Her most recent byline tackles the legacy of New York’s most notorious city planner, but I first found her work in this essay examining the divergent fates of Martha Graham and George Balanchine, two NYC dance giants who would inevitably cross paths with Alvin Ailey, the exalted choreographer anchoring The Whitney’s “Edges of Ailey” (through February 9th). In this chat, we talk Ailey’s arrival in New York, the show’s choice to highlight black visual arts rather than his specific work, and the eventual diminishment of the city’s avant-garde dance scene.

SH: Borrowing from your piece last year, dance in New York City featured two camps when Ailey arrived in the 1950s: ballet led by George Balanchine and modern dance led by Martha Graham. Where does Ailey situate himself?

JD: Alvin Ailey comes to New York in 1954 to dance in the all black musical House of Flowers, which originally had choreography by George Balanchine and was overstuffed with the city’s top black dancers from ballet and modern dance. For example, Arthur Mitchell, who was the first black principal dancer with the New York City ballet, was in House of Flowers, and was actually Ailey's understudy.

So he's really coming to New York and lands straight in the middle of the dance world, though of course, it's quite segregated. In the fifties, you have this “Calypso craze”¹ which results in a ton of all black musicals and movies that these performers, including Alvin Ailey, feel ambivalent about, because, on the one hand, they're totally fetishizing and stereotyping black culture and art, but, on the other hand, are providing all these jobs for these amazing performers.

That said, modern dance is not segregated at this time. So it's through the House of Flowers cast that Alvin Ailey enters the modern dance world in New York. He takes classes with Martha Graham and with the New Dance Group, a foundational modern dance school that has its roots in the left-wing, 1930s moment. He also takes acting lessons with Stella Adler and acts in straight plays on Broadway, touching other areas of the performing arts world.

SH: Much of your work is interested in the institutional reasons why we remember who we remember. Who were the writers, critics, benefactors who made Ailey stick?

JD: I think Judith Jamison is the most important figure here. She was able to sort of take the reins of the company when Alvin Ailey declined and then passed away. The Ailey Company also had a really powerful and competent board of directors that was able to do fundraising and institution building. And Alvin Ailey, like both Martha Graham and George Balanchine, rode the winds of the Cold War, and was really able to get his company going in the sixties because of these State-sponsored tours around the world as part of broader Cold War cultural diplomacy.

SH: Ailey comes to New York from LA. What does he get out of New York that he doesn't get on the west coast?

JD: New York had this permeable boundary between high art and entertainment that LA didn’t have as much. Broadway was an engine for New York’s culture industry, as we saw with House of Flowers, that crossed concert dance and popular stages. Also, the dance world was just more robust in New York at the time. You have Graham, Balanchine, and countless other companies and studios. There are also more theaters that present dance, like City Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the 92nd St. Y, where Ailey first premiered his choreography in the city, the Henry Street Settlement (today Abrons Arts Center)--the list goes on.

The place where Ailey started his training, the Lester Horton Dance Theater, was a modern dance school and company, but LA didn’t have the same modern dance scene as New York. I might add that the Horton company was a very left-leaning, politically active space. Founders of the Mattachine Society, the first proto-gay rights organization, met at Horton’s studio, and Horton himself held what some say is the first fundraiser for a gay rights cause when he put on a series of benefit performances to pay for the legal fees of gay men who had been “entrapped” by police. Anyway, Horton’s company was one of the first integrated dance companies, and his dances addressed social themes. Ailey becomes the artistic director and choreographer of the Horton company when his teacher dies in 1953, but the draw of New York is too much, and he stays there after moving to perform in House of Flowers.

SH: Dance today, at least in the mainstream, seems so much more acrobatics/tricks based than what’s on view here. How has what is considered talent in dance changed?

JD: Yeah, I think the demands of the dancer in the later 20th century start to require more and more athleticism, flexibility. I don't want to say technique, because that term can mean anything, right? Like Ailey didn’t necessarily have great technique according to today’s standards. I do think competition dance has catalyzed a style of dance that requires more of the dancer in terms of numbers of turns, length of your extension, flexibility, but that has also been the case in ballet in the later 20th century. William Forsythe demanded a lot of his dancers in terms of flexibility. Just look at Sylvie Guillem! And there were some idiosyncratic Balanchine dancers who were super flexible, like Allegra Kent. I just think that the style of modern dance that Ailey was working in prioritized expressiveness and narrative over extreme athleticism. Though, of course, just look at Cry, Ailey’s solo work originally choreographed for Judith Jamison–that requires stamina.

Also, choreographers make work specifically for the dancers they're working with. Dudley Williams was a big Alvin Ailey dancer, who came from the Martha Graham Dance Company, and the works Ailey made for him are super virtuous in terms of that expressive torso that a Graham dancer has, the flexibility, the core strength.

SH: You have a review coming out on Alvin Ailey. What did you know about him before you started working on it?

JD: I trained in Horton technique, so I have that physical background. And I read all the biographies of Ailey. I think my favorite one is by Jennifer Dunning. She followed Ailey doggedly for decades, and knows the ins-and-outs of his repertory and personal history.

SH: When you enter the exhibit, it’s not a chronological timeline or deep dive on his work. You see the videos of his performance up top and then it's his influences that actually fill the room. What do you think is lost/gained from that choice?

JD: I feel that by eschewing a chronological timeline, the curators of the exhibition miss out on exploring Ailey’s complex character and how he related to his political moment. Ailey was, at core, what I would call a midcentury, racial liberal. He wanted to elevate “black art” to the status of “high art” and help create a world in which Black artists could make “art” not “black art.” He also maintained an integrated company even when it was not fashionable during the Black Arts Movement–what the historian James Smethurst has deemed the aesthetic wing of Black Power–in the late-1960s and 1970s. Universalism was an important principle for Ailey; art should resonate with people regardless of their race or ethnicity. In the postwar years, most people agreed with Ailey. Today, that idea is not as fashionable. We are interested in articulating difference and the ways in which identity shapes our experience. The exhibition, I found, did not respect the idiosyncrasy and historical specificity of Ailey’s beliefs, instead shoehorning his mid-century ideas into a 21st century framework.

SH: By did not respect, do you mean that his views were misrepresented or simply obfuscated by the structure of the show? I take your point that the tensions between Ailey, his peers, and our contemporary sensibilities are minimized regardless.

JD: I think obfuscated is the right word, yes. There are places in the wall text throughout the exhibition where Ailey’s ideas are mentioned briefly–for example, maintaining an integrated company and believing in the power of universalism–but they are overpowered by blanket statements about social movements including Black power and gay liberation. How do Ailey’s ideas relate to these movements? Not as harmoniously as the exhibition would lead you to think. And, I might say, the wall text is quite hard to see because it is so small and surrounded by so much art!

Edges of Ailey was also frustrating to me because, as the title suggests, I felt like Ailey and his dances were pushed to the side in favor of visual art. The main room is so sumptuous, painted that dark red and covered in paintings and sculptures–so many it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s an amazing display of work by black artists across so many genres, but as someone who cares about dance, I do wish that dance, specifically, had been integrated a bit more.

I generally find that dance is difficult for students to access, because they feel like they don't have a way in. They know how to read a film, or they know how to interpret a painting, or listen to a piece of music and say, “Oh, yeah, I can tell, that sound represents sadness.” But with dance, they see movement and don't really know how to interpret it. And so I always appreciate when dance is in a museum space, because a really good exhibit will give you the information necessary to interpret what you are looking at and formulate your own ideas. I felt, unfortunately, like Edges of Ailey didn't help people understand dance in any new way. The dance was subsumed by the cornucopia of visual art on display.

SH: That said, you can still go see the Ailey company, catch a talkback.

JD: Yes! The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs in New York all the time. And they also tour around the world. The first concert dance I ever saw was Revelations on tour in Seattle, which I believe is the case for many people. Talkbacks are great, as are lecture demonstrations. I love when companies get funding to go to schools and do presentations where they can talk to students and explain the process and ideas behind a dance. But generally, I think dance lacks a public education program. Youtube is honestly the best thing we have!

SH: Do you have any general recommendations for Youtube?

JD: Sometimes I search “Gene Kelly best performances” just to remind myself of the time when musicals were amazing.

SH: What about books?

JD: I think with regards to Alvin Ailey, there's a children's book about him and that's part of the reason why he is so popular. But the problem with writing about dance is that there's either dance criticism, or there are academic books, with very few pieces of writing that are somewhere in between. You either get incredibly intense critical dance theory or dance history, or you get a 750 word review of something that you maybe have time to go see in person.

In New York, I'd recommend anyone under the age of 30 to check out 30 under 30 tickets at the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. City Center also has deals for young people–the Ailey company performs at City Center.

It's a cruel irony that ballet is the easiest dance form to see. Lincoln Center has its own complicated history because it’s implicated in Robert Moses's urban renewal of San Juan Hill, but it is this fantastic public-ish place where you can go see opera, ballet, the Philharmonic, for relatively affordable prices because these big institutions are well endowed. You can see the high arts of quote, unquote Western Civilization for much cheaper than avant-garde or experimental work happening in smaller venues.

SH: Alvin Ailey dies in 1989. How is he first remembered?

JD: Ailey is a canonical figure in the history of American dance. He is on par with Martha Graham. His company still exists as an institution that is far more successful than the Martha Graham Dance Company. Revelations is the most seen piece of American modern dance in history. I think the company says that more than 23 million people have seen it. That's astounding. So he's remembered as the embodiment of black dance in America.

At the time of his death, there were some company members and dancers more generally, who were frustrated with him for not being open about the cause of his death being AIDS. He was very much of an earlier generation that was less interested in naming their sexuality, or being visibly out of the closet. That is very much a post-Stonewall change. In the late 20th century people started to believe that the correct political gesture for their moment was to say, “look at me, I'm out and I'm proud.” And Ailey was more interested in privacy and the ability to have a professional life and a private life that didn't have to be interlocking. So I think at the moment of his death, some people were a bit frustrated with him and wondered why he didn’t take on a more activist role.

SH: Where does the avant garde in dance go post Ailey?

JD: In the 1990s, people start to refer to “downtown dance,” which mostly happens in downtown Manhattan, but actually is all over the city. It’s the type of dance that is still happening within and around the many alternative spaces that pop up in the 1960s, 70s, 80s in New York. Places like Movement Research, Danspace Project, the Kitchen. But New York is a completely different place by the 1990s than it was in that period in the 1960s and 1970s when dance flourished. It is way more expensive. There's municipal policy prioritizing private development and the real estate industry over public housing. And of course the world of dance has been totally obliterated by AIDS. A whole generation dies. David White, who was the executive director of Dance Theater Workshop, which we now know as New York Live Arts, said that the twin shadows of Reaganomics and the plague hovered over the late 20th century avant-garde.

You also cannot ignore breaking and hip-hop which emerges in the 1980s. For a brief moment in the early part of the decade, the breakers, graffiti artists, emcees from the Bronx and Brooklyn appear in the avant-garde scene downtown, but quickly transition into the commercial world of entertainment. In 1981, for instance, the Rock Steady Crew appears with Fab 5 Freddy at the Kitchen, and the dance critic Sally Banes is writing about break dance in the Village Voice, but by 1984, Lionel Richie is performing with break dancers at the Olympics in Los Angeles.

And then you get into the 21st century, and you know, dance looks completely different. It's much more commercialized. And we have competition dance, So You Think You Can Dance, now TikTok, all these commercial outlets for dance.

SH: Thank you so much for doing this. The newsletter typically runs with one selection from the exhibit. Do you want to pick it?

JD: Not Yet Titled by Jennifer Packer.

1. Mass marketing of Caribbean folk music in music, film, and theater in the late 1950s. The figure to think about here is Harry Belafonte.