It was a failed audition that set in motion the superlative career of the American dancer and artistic director Judith Jamison, who has died aged 81. In 1965, the then 22-year-old had spent the summer “pushing buttons at the log flume ride” at New York’s World’s Fair, when she auditioned for a television special. She did not get the job; “I was really bad,” she said in a TV interview. But unbeknown to her, the choreographer Alvin Ailey had been watching, and a few days later he called and asked her to join his company, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT).
For 15 years she was one of the company’s most popular and vivacious dancers, and a muse to Ailey. When he died in 1989, she took over as artistic director and the predominantly African American company thrived under her stewardship for 22 years, nurturing new generations of dancers and passing on Ailey’s, and her own, sense of a higher purpose.
“We celebrate the human spirit through movement,” she said in 2009 of the company dancers. “Through dance, the beauty and humanity of their heritage will unite people of all races, ages and backgrounds. They become the embodiment of the best that is possible in each of us.”
It is not hard to imagine what Ailey saw in the young Jamison. She was tall, at 5ft 10in, and did not fit the petite ballerina mould. Instead she was an expansive and expressive dancer, who moved with authority and vigour, and she was innately musical. “The dancer is music. We’re the notes come to life,” she said.
The dance impresario Paul Szilard, who organised Ailey company tours around the world, said of Jamison in a filmed interview: “She had such an enormous personality that when she stepped on stage, in five minutes the entire public was in her hands ... She had arms which were talking by themselves. That hair-raising feeling you would get ... She was a wonderful performer.”
In 1971 Ailey created the solo Cry for Jamison, dedicated “to all Black women everywhere – especially our mothers ”. To the music of Alice Coltrane, Laura Nyro and Chuck Griffin, Jamison embodied women’s struggles and triumphs in 15 minutes of non-stop dance.
On opening night, she recalled, “I felt like collapsing halfway in the middle”. But the ovation at the end was rapturous. Jamison was supposed to be alternating each night with another performer, but when people started calling the box office to insist on seeing her, she ended up dancing 26 nights in a row.
She performed many notable roles, including in Ailey’s signature work Revelations (1960) and the 1976 duet Pas de Duke with the exiled Mikhail Baryshnikov, but Cry was iconic – Barack Obama used to have a photograph of Jamison in Cry on his wall.
Born in Philadelphia, Jamison was the daughter of John, a sheet metal engineer, and Tessie (nee Brown), a teacher, who met singing in a church choir. She had an older brother, John Jr. Describing herself as a “serious little girl”, she learnt piano and violin, and started ballet at the age of six with Marion Cuyjet at the Judimar School of Dance. By 10 she was studying in a class of adults with the celebrated British choreographer Antony Tudor in Philadelphia, and had posters of the ballet icons Alexandra Danilova and Frederic Franklin on her walls. “It wasn’t a matter of wanting to be a dancer. I needed to be a dancer,” she recalled in 2015.
After a short spell at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, she transferred to Philadelphia Dance Academy (which became part of the University of the Arts, Philadelphia). It was on a class trip that she first saw Ailey’s dance company: “I was flabbergasted,” she told the Guardian last year.
Before Ailey himself spotted her, however, Jamison was noticed by the choreographer Agnes de Mille, and invited to dance in De Mille’s The Four Marys with American Ballet Theatre, although that did not lead immediately to other jobs – there were limited opportunities for a tall, black dancer in the mid-1960s. Then Ailey called.
After her years dancing with Ailey (plus a brief sojourn with Harkness Ballet in 1966-67), Jamison left the company in 1980 to dance on Broadway. In 1984 she made her first choreography, Divining, for AAADT, and formed her own company, the Jamison Project, in 1988.
But when Ailey died the following year, she returned to AAADT, bringing the same drive, energy and passion she showed on stage to her career as a director, striking a balance between preserving Ailey’s legacy and commissioning new choreographers. She secured the company’s (previously precarious) finances, took them on extensive international tours and oversaw the building of the company’s own studios in midtown Manhattan.
She was a force. When quizzed for the Guardian’s Portrait of the artist series in 2007, she was asked if she had suffered for her art. “The word suffering is not in my vocabulary,” she said. “It’s been a long, hard road to get this far, but I’m now sitting in the largest dedicated dance building in the United States. I wouldn’t call that suffering.” As for the low point of her career, “If there has been one,” she said, “nobody’s going to know about it.”
Jamison was married briefly to Miguel Godreau, a fellow dancer with AAADT, from 1972 to 1974. “I haven’t had a family,” she said in 2007. “But I don’t think of that as a sacrifice: my dancers are my family. And I’m fortunate enough to have spent my entire career doing what I love. Not many people can say that.”
She sometimes talked of being “guided” in her career, as if by a higher power, and that spirituality seeped into her generous dancing as well as her way of living. “The point is to have a connection with your soul,” she said in a 2015 interview on the art of dance, “and hopefully, connect with someone else’s. Will they remember you for how high your leg went, or how many pirouettes you did? Or will they be touched in the innermost part of their being? That’s what dance is supposed to do.”
• Judith Ann Jamison, dancer and artistic director, born 10 May 1943; died 9 November 2024
