His smile was proportional to his tall height, 1.78 meters. It immediately enveloped you in a circle of positive energy. Radiant, naturally magnetic, dancer Judith Jamison left sparkling traces wherever she went. Star of international stature, muse of Alvin Ailey (1931-1989) in the 1970s, director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, from 1989, she died on November 9, in New York, at the age of 81 years.
Testimonies immediately multiplied on Instagram to celebrate it. Mikhail Baryshnikov remembers “his emotional eloquence and his restraint” when he discovered her on stage. Choreographer Wayne McGregor salutes the“inspiring, elegant and iconic Judith Jamison”. The dancer Yannick Lebrun, who, as a teenager, played the ballet DVD on repeat Hymnin his grandmother's house in Guyana, commented on the disappearance of the woman who hired him in 2008: “Words cannot express the immense amount of love and gratitude I have for you, Judi… Thank you for your grace, your courage, your strength, your tenacity in carrying on Ailey’s legacy. Thank you for making my dreams come true…”
Judith Jamison was born on May 10, 1943, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She learned to play the piano and violin from her father. She was 6 years old when she was introduced to classical and modern dance, then tap dancing, acrobatics, as well as the technique of Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), a pioneering African-American activist. About ten years later, here she is a student at the Philadelphia Dance Academy, where this curious and reckless learns everything she can, honing a flexible and responsive body.
Lyrical power
The choreographer Agnès de Mille (1905-1993) hired him in 1964 in the American Ballet Theater in New York. A year later, she joined the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: she was 22 years old. She quickly revealed herself as one of Ailey's leading performers, electrifying with her lyrical power many of the choreographer's shows, including his best-seller, Revelations (1960). In the now historic solo Cry (1971), designed for her on music by John Coltrane and gospels, she carries high, between pain and bite, the torch of a piece dedicated to Ailey's mother and to “all black women ».
His talent captivates and has earned him numerous collaborations such as with the Ballet Cullberg, in Sweden, or the Ballet du XXe century, where Maurice Béjart asked him to endorse his version of Ghost of the rosein 1978. Two years later, she appeared on Broadway in Sophisticated Ladiesthen founded, in 1988, the Jamison Project, before taking, at Ailey's request, the reins of his troupe.
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