Alvin Ailey Quotes

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

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.

To be who you are and become what you are capable of is the only goal worth living.

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.

I try to be as kind to poetry as I can... the expectation of the poem is much higher. People really expect to read seven lines, and walk away from that better. They want to be healed. People really think, "Oh, here's a poem, OK, let's see what you gonna do. Fix me." You don't go watch Alvin Ailey thinking "fix me." You don't go to the museum thinking "give me wisdom.

There’s a reason why Black women my age can recite lines from The Color Purple at will. The film is iconic because it dared, following Alice Walker’s lead, to suggest to America that Black women were the heroes and not the villains of the American national story. It dared to suggest to a watching world that the baggage we carry is not of our own stitching. And while we Black girls always recite these lines to each other in a humorous context, it is mostly humorous because just underneath the surface, the truth of what we say in jest leaps at us with the clarity of an Alvin Ailey performance.

Aside from being famous, what do Beethoven, Mark Rothko, Hemingway, Francis Ford Coppola, Van Gogh, Alvin Ailey, Robin Williams, Sylvia Plath, Balzac, Jackson Pollock, Edgar Allan Poe, Axl Rose, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf have in common? They all suffered from some form of mental illness. Even

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.

inchoate

And then you go to college and some teacher says to you, “Hey, why don’t you go to Alvin Ailey and go dance.” Madonna: No, he said, “You’re too good for this. You don’t need this. This is an environment for people who don’t know what they want to do with their lives. Go. Go to New York.