Alvin Ailey Dance Quotes & Sayings

My dancers must be able to do anything, and I don't care if they are black or white or purple or green. I want to help show my people how beautiful they are. I want to hold up the mirror to my audience that says this is the way people can be, this is how open people can be. — Alvin Ailey

But the dance speaks to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn't work. — Alvin Ailey

Boy - before intense anxiety had crushed his chances for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and sent him into the awful mental decline in which he'd been made a vampire. — Anne Rice

All my life I've been fascinated by the precipice in all of us. When you come to it, you either choose to fall or you don't
Alvin Ailey — Kathy Petrakis

There was still no likelihood that we could make a living from dance. We were doing it because we loved it ... We realized how full we felt; we were surrounded by music and dancing and joy. — Alvin Ailey

DeFrantz's study ... is not the first book about the protean Ailey, who was born in hardscrabble Texas in 1931 and died in 1989 after creating close to 80 works. But it is perhaps the most comprehensive, combining biography, criticism, the analysis of dance criticism, and a sort of corporate history, siting the now firmly established Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in the international cultural landscape. — Alvin Ailey

I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn't care, I was free. — Madonna Ciccone

As long as there are dancers around who love to dance, there will be an Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. We miss him so much, but he's alive as soon as you see a dancer hit the stage. — Judith Jamison

The way Alvin Ailey has transformed modern dance and dance in general is the fact of variety. It's a cornucopia of ways to move. There are choreographers in the company as - as diverse, as different from each other as Donald McKayle and Bill T. Jones, or Jawole Zollar and John Butler, Lar Lubovitch, you know, and Judith Jamison. — Judith Jamison

Dance is for everybody. I believe that the dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people. — Alvin Ailey

If you live in the elite world of dance, you find yourself in a world rife with racism. Let's face it. — Alvin Ailey