Alvin Ailey’s impact on American dance is incalculable. So says filmmaker Jamila Wignot — and, really, anyone who knows anything about dance. The choreographer and founder of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, who died in 1989, was known for work that centered the Black experience. His landmark ballet Revelations set modern dance movement to gospel and blues music, dramatizing the grief and joy inherent in African-American spirituality.
Ailey, Jamila Wignot’s new documentary, explores the life that shaped the titan of 20th century dance, from his humble beginnings in rural Texas during the Great Depression to the loneliness that came with success. Despite his status as a cultural icon, Wignot tells GRAZIA, “I think his journey of becoming is not something that people are familiar with.” In a recent conversation, the director discussed her film, what she wanted to reveal about Alvin Ailey and her experience of his work.
For people who may be just discovering Ailey’s work through your film, how would you describe his impact on American dance?
Whoa! His impact on American dance is incalculable. He is in the pantheon of modern dance choreographers. I think he’s a part of a generation that’s in the kind of most traditional form of modern dance. He’s at the tail end of that. And I think Mr. Ailey offers, essentially, a new way of appreciating this dance form and a centering of a set of stories that hadn’t really been done. It’s not to say that nobody had done stories about Black life before, but he certainly offers something that comes from a deeply personal place, and it is highly stylized and highly theatrical. I think he is as invested in kind of putting on a show — which comes from his Broadway roots — as he is in the sort of formal requirements of modern dance. He just creates a bold, accessible, visceral experience with modern dance, and I think that speaks to the long-lasting impact of his company.
And people who are already fans? What’s in the film for them?
I think what’s interesting about Mr. Ailey is that even for people who are fans of his work — and I’m talking people who, like, they go to City Center every single year and they see multiple performances — his journey of becoming is not something that people are familiar with. Everybody knows that there’s this man, Alvin Ailey, and his name is on the company and he’s extraordinary. But I don’t think people understand the total experience of who he is, the kind of truly humble roots that he came from, the influences on his life, and of course the struggles that he endured. As he himself says, the kind of total sacrifice he made in service of this thing that now we sort of take for granted: The Ailey company will always be, won’t it? It’s that everlasting. And I think that required enormous sacrifice, as he says, to ensure that.
Going into this project, were there questions you had about Ailey? Things you wanted to find out or reveal about him?
Yeah, for me as a maker in a different form, I’m just always interested in process and influences. How did you…why dance? How did you get there? And then, why the kind of dance works that he did? What’s informing this work? I feel like I knew the work, but I didn’t have a sense of what the origins were. And the journey that the company took. And I also felt like he was a bit two-dimensional. At the start it’s just Mr. Ailey, and he’s a poster that hangs in the lobby of the studio, and he’s exceptional and extraordinary. I felt that as we started listening to him talk and once we started to get a sense of his…openness, his sensitivity, his aliveness to the world around him, his accidental encounters with beautiful artwork that then leads him to the next thing. Things about the journey that he went on that I just loved as I started to uncover it.
You mentioned the sacrifices he made, and there’s a clip early in the film of him talking about that. There’s also less about his personal life in the film than I would have thought. I’m assuming those two things are related.
Yes, that was certainly something that I also hadn’t anticipated. It became a challenge for the film in the sense that ultimately what we can do is show that. Just show it. There’s not much to unpack there. I think the lack of a personal life is because he didn’t invest time in cultivating one. In that piece of voiceover audio, he’s asked, “Did you have to sacrifice anything?” And he says, “Everything.” And then he lists off what the “everything” is, and the last line is, “Traveling six months out of the year is disastrous on personal relations.” And I think he means that in a total sense. He means there is not the capacity for intimacy of any kind, both romantic intimacy or just deep friendships with people you can call on. I think he allowed himself to be raised up to the position of leader. He lived his life as if that was the only way to achieve his ends. And so because of that there is this sense of both people being outside his personal life because he held them at by, and that becoming a self-fulfilling quality so that when he tries to open himself up, as Masazumi Chaya says — “Alvin invited me up to his apartment one time, and I said no.” So, then, why? That way in which he built himself at a remove, that’s the sort of comfort people had with him. There was some self-protection in that. There was some part of himself that he didn’t want people to have access to. Some of that is in the film. It’s not shame, he says it’s a kind of brokenness. Coming from where I came from and the contrast of that against where I ended up — he couldn’t reconcile his beginnings and his endings.
The other thing was, I didn’t really want to allow anyone to fully speculate on why that would be. It felt like that’s what I would end up with: a kind of roundtable discussion with people throwing darts and potentially missing the target. It was enough for me to think about, Wow, this extraordinary figure who gave so much, and yet at the center of that is this deep loneliness.
You spoke to so many people who worked with him over the years. What was the overwhelming impression they gave you of him?
The initial, sort of surface meeting with people is: Oh my god, he was amazing and we loved him! There’s all this joy and generosity. Judith Jamison talks about this grand embrace. But he wasn’t letting people embrace him back. He could give love but he wasn’t as able to open himself up to receive it.
Do you remember the first time you saw his choreography and your impression of it?
I do. I mean, of course, like everyone, Revelations stuck with me. I just remember the yellow section and feeling like, How did we get here? And feeling this emotional release and catharsis. And also being really amazed at, Oh, this is the stuff that can be onstage? I mean, I had had no exposure to modern dance, so I was naïve in every sense, not realizing this was a form that was about looking at the ordinary in every man. But there was a sense of just a full humanity of experiences that were about what the universal human struggles were that these people were dancing on the stage, and a kind of real emotion just hitting me full on in my gut. And it stayed with me. It’s a thing that just stayed with me. And I was hopeful that the documentary could somehow achieve that same kind of grandeur.
