{"id":30402,"date":"2021-07-22T14:05:16","date_gmt":"2021-07-22T14:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/?post_type=articles&#038;p=30402"},"modified":"2021-07-22T14:05:16","modified_gmt":"2021-07-22T14:05:16","slug":"ailey-documentary-jamila-wignot-director-interview","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/ailey-documentary-jamila-wignot-director-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Ailey\u2019 Director Jamila Wignot on the Story Behind the Choreographer\u2019s Iconic Work"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_30403\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-30403\" style=\"width: 1024px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-30403\" src=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2021\/07\/AILEY_still-4_Alvin-Ailey_courtesy-of-NEON-e1626959002890.jpg?w=1024\" alt=\"Alvin Ailey\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-30403\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alvin Ailey (Photo: courtesy of Neon)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Alvin Ailey\u2019s impact on American dance is incalculable. So says filmmaker Jamila Wignot &#8212; 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.alvinailey.org\/performances\/repertory\/revelations\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Revelations<\/em><\/a> set modern dance movement to gospel and blues music, dramatizing the grief and joy inherent in African-American spirituality.<\/p>\n<p><em>Ailey<\/em>, Jamila Wignot\u2019s 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, \u201cI think his journey of becoming is not something that people are familiar with.\u201d In a recent conversation, the director discussed her film, what she wanted to reveal about Alvin Ailey and her experience of his work.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"AILEY - Official Trailer - In Theatres July 23\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PHcM4HJEgs4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>For people who may be just discovering Ailey\u2019s work through your film, how would you describe his impact on American dance? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Whoa! His impact on American dance is incalculable. He is in the pantheon of modern dance choreographers. I think he\u2019s a part of a generation that\u2019s in the kind of most traditional form of modern dance. He\u2019s 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\u2019t really been done. It\u2019s 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 <em>highly<\/em> stylized and <em>highly<\/em> theatrical. I think he is as invested in kind of putting on a show &#8212; which comes from his Broadway roots &#8212; 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>And people who are already fans? What\u2019s in the film for them? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I think what\u2019s interesting about Mr. Ailey is that even for people who are fans of his work &#8212; and I\u2019m talking people who, like, they go to City Center every single year and they see multiple performances &#8212; his journey of becoming is not something that people are familiar with. Everybody knows that there\u2019s this man, Alvin Ailey, and his name is on the company and he\u2019s extraordinary. But I don\u2019t 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\u2019t it? It\u2019s <em>that<\/em> everlasting. And I think that required enormous sacrifice, as he says, to ensure that.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_30404\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-30404\" style=\"width: 1024px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-30404\" src=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2021\/07\/JAMILA_WIGNOT_HEADSHOT-e1626959757106.jpg?w=1024\" alt=\"Ailey director Jamila Wignot\" width=\"1024\" height=\"819\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-30404\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><i>Ailey<\/i> director Jamila Wignot (Photo: courtesy of Neon)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><strong>Going into this project, were there questions you had about Ailey? Things you wanted to find out or reveal about him? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Yeah, for me as a maker in a different form, I\u2019m just always interested in process and influences. How did you\u2026why dance? How did you get <em>there<\/em>? And then, why the kind of dance works that he did? What\u2019s informing this work? I feel like I knew the work, but I didn\u2019t 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\u2019s just Mr. Ailey, and he\u2019s a poster that hangs in the lobby of the studio, and he\u2019s exceptional and extraordinary. I felt that as we started listening to him talk and once we started to get a sense of his\u2026openness, 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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>You mentioned the sacrifices he made, and there\u2019s a clip early in the film of him talking about that. There\u2019s also less about his personal life in the film than I would have thought. I\u2019m assuming those two things are related. <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Yes, that was certainly something that I also hadn\u2019t anticipated. It became a challenge for the film in the sense that ultimately what we can do is <em>show<\/em> that. Just show it. There\u2019s not much to unpack there. I think the lack of a personal life is because he didn\u2019t invest time in cultivating one. In that piece of voiceover audio, he\u2019s asked, &#8220;Did you have to sacrifice anything?&#8221; And he says, &#8220;Everything.&#8221; And then he lists off what the \u201ceverything\u201d is, and the last line is, \u201cTraveling six months out of the year is disastrous on personal relations.\u201d 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 &#8212; \u201cAlvin invited me up to his apartment one time, and I said no.\u201d So, then, why? That way in which he built himself at a remove, that\u2019s the sort of comfort people had with him. There was some self-protection in that. There was some part of himself that he didn\u2019t want people to have access to. Some of that is in the film. It\u2019s not shame, he says it\u2019s a kind of brokenness. Coming from where I came from and the contrast of that against where I ended up &#8212; he couldn\u2019t reconcile his beginnings and his endings.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing was, I didn\u2019t really want to allow anyone to fully speculate on why that would be. It felt like that\u2019s 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, <em>Wow, this extraordinary figure who gave so much, and yet at the center of that is this deep loneliness. <\/em><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_30405\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-30405\" style=\"width: 1024px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-30405\" src=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2021\/07\/AILEY_still-3_courtesy-of-NEON.jpg?w=1024\" alt=\"Dancers performing &lt;i&gt;Revelations&lt;\/i&gt;\" width=\"1024\" height=\"561\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-30405\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dancers performing <i>Revelations<\/i> (Photo: courtesy of Neon)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><strong>You spoke to so many people who worked with him over the years. What was the overwhelming impression they gave you of him? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The initial, sort of surface meeting with people is: <em>Oh my god, he was amazing and we loved him!<\/em> There\u2019s all this joy and generosity. Judith Jamison talks about this grand embrace. But he wasn\u2019t letting people embrace him back. He could give love but he wasn\u2019t as able to open himself up to receive it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Do you remember the first time you saw his choreography and your impression of it? <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I do. I mean, of course, like everyone, <em>Revelations<\/em> stuck with me. I just remember the yellow section and feeling like, <em>How did we get here?<\/em> And feeling this emotional release and catharsis. And also being really amazed at, <em>Oh, this is the stuff that can be onstage? <\/em>I mean, I had had no exposure to modern dance, so I was na\u00efve 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\u2019s a thing that just stayed with me. And I was hopeful that the documentary could somehow achieve that same kind of grandeur.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29097,"featured_media":30403,"template":"","format":"standard","categories":[3324,16],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v18.5 (Yoast SEO v20.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>\u2018Ailey\u2019 Director Jamila Wignot on the Story Behind the Choreographer\u2019s Iconic Work<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Ailey, Jamila Wignot\u2019s new documentary, explores the life that shaped this titan of 20th Century dance, from his humble beginnings in rural Texas during the Great Depression to the loneliness that came with success.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/ailey-documentary-jamila-wignot-director-interview\/\" 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