Remembering Judith Jamison
African American dancer and choreographer Judith Jamison (1943−2024) was a guest artist at SMU in the Meadows School in 2001, where she received the Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts. The award recognized the highest level of international achievement in the creative and performing arts.
Jamison spent a week on the SMU campus with students and faculty, during which she sat down for an interview. The warmth she is known for was in full display. She has this to say: “If we could teach young people to use their energy to create life, create a space for you and your brother to be in, and to learn that early in life… dance can do that… that’s the dream I have.”
Jamison, who passed away in November 2024, danced with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from 1965 to 1980, and served as artistic director from 1989-2011. Her early training in classical ballet and modern dance took place in Philadelphia. She later arrived in New York when Agnes de Mille invited her for a part in a production with American Ballet Theatre. But it is her association with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, her collaboration with Alvin Ailey, and her travel throughout the world with the company that propelled her career towards an African identity. She is known as a performer of “great intelligence, warmth and wit” (New York Times). She premiered a work choreographed by Alvin Ailey, Cry, for which she is known. That work, and others, were performed during the Meadows award ceremony in 2001 by Ailey dancers, Meadows School Division of Dance performers and students from Booker T. Washington High School. The G. William Jones Film & Video Collection in Hamon Arts Library is archiving the footage of the artists who came to campus to receive the Meadows Award, as shown in an excerpt below.
This post is the first in a four-part series called Celebrating Black History in the Arts. You may find resources on Judith Jamison and the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, shown below, in the Hamon Arts Library.
- Whitney Museum of American Art. Edges of Ailey. New York, September 25, 2024 – February 9, 2025. Exhibition catalogue coming soon to SMU Libraries.
- The HistoryMakers video oral history with Judith Jamison. Chicago: The HistoryMakers, 2016.
- Jamison, Judith. Extended Interview (1/4/10). By Jeffrey Brown. MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, January 4, 2010.
- Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Four by Ailey. [Germany]: ArtHaus Musik, [2009?]. DVD.
- Eccles, Andrew. Ailey Ascending: A Portrait in Motion. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2008.
- Kaiser, Michael M. The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Health Arts Organizations. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2008, pp.33-60.
- DeFrantz, Thomas. Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiement of African American Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Tracy, Robert. Ailey Spirit: The Journey of an American Dance Company. New York: Stewar, Tabori & Chang, 2004.
- Jamison, Judith. Dancing Spirit: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday, 1993. (Available through Interlibrary Loan)