At a Black Entertainment Television Black Girls Rock! event two summers ago in Newark, N.J., Misty
Copeland
presented Judith
Jamison
with the Living Legend Award, noting her “virtuosity in dance” and describing the modern-dance giant as a “dancer, choreographer, author, spirit.” Before handing the lifetime achievement trophy to Jamison, Copeland bowed, in a move reminiscent of the ballet bow known as “révérence.”
While the two women broke through in the dance world decades apart—Jamison, 77, as a modern dancer and later the creative director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Copeland, 37, as the first African-American female principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre—they’ve both managed to break the proverbial glass ceilings in their disciplines, inspiring those who look like them and those who don’t.
Neither dreamed of being professional dancers, they told Penta, partly because they didn’t see any role models who looked like them. Describing how she came to dance, Jamison says, “I can say it in one sentence: I was having fun. I was an overactive child, and I was put into a ballet school at 6 years old.”
For Copeland, too, her discovery of dance—and ballet in particular, though later in life—was surprising. “I had never heard of classical music, and I didn’t know what a ballerina was. The dream that I can most vividly remember was at 12, when I decided I wanted to be a cheerleader in the drill team at my middle school. There was nothing before that at all. It fell into my lap at 13, and I happened to be really good at it.” And, she adds emphatically, “I had mentors who led me to this profession.”
Among the mentors and inspirations Copeland names are “
Lauren Anderson
,
Alicia Graf Mack
,
Virginia Johnson
, Aesha Ash, so many black women….There’s no true record of the history of black dancers who came through. When I became a soloist, I only knew from word of mouth. The press releases said I was the first black soloist, but I wasn’t. Everyone had a part in some way.” Copeland says she has “followed the lead of so many leaders, whom the world isn’t aware of,” citing that as one of the reasons she’s working on a book about black ballerinas.
“
I’ve lived through these experiences, so I can lead the next generation in the right way.
”
Jamison, too, says she got where she is by being “lifted” by trailblazers and mentors such as
Alvin Ailey
, Pearl Primus,
Carmen de Lavallade
,
Katherine Dunham
,
Mary Hinkson
, and many more. But none of these disrupters, she says, were household names or faces when she first happened upon the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater in 1965, about seven years after it was founded. “Very rarely did you see black people on television at the time,” Jamison says.
As soon as she first saw the company perform, she tried to imitate them. Then her big break came when she met and auditioned for Ailey—the dancer, choreographer, and activist who founded the company in order to tell the African-American experience through modern dance.
Jamison catapulted to stardom after performing in Ailey’s Cry, a dance he had dedicated to his mother and to “all black women everywhere—especially our mothers.” (The dance was performed by the troupe during this year’s traveling show, which was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic.)
Ailey, Jamison says, was a true disrupter who aimed to use modern dance to convey and celebrate African-American culture and experience.
“He wanted to tell the truth through his art form. He told the truth, and thought it was important to tell our truth.” That’s what makes a disrupter, she says. “They’re all there putting truth, and beauty, forward.”
Jamison—too humble to call herself a disrupter, despite being honored by
Michelle Obama
at the first White House Dance Series; being inducted into the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance; and writing an autobiography, Dancing Spirit, that was edited by
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
—says her job was to bring in the disrupters, including
Robert Battle
, who took over as artistic director at Ailey after her.
To truly disrupt in the art world, Jamison says, one must be a “conveyor of your truth.”
And telling those truths is something of utmost importance to Copeland, too. “What’s been most impactful and deliberate is my decision to use my voice and visibility to make change, and make people feel uncomfortable, and to push conversations,” she says. “That, for me, has been the biggest responsibility, which I’ve taken on with pride.”
While her ascent has caused conversations about diversity, “it’s about continuing the conversations, and not thinking, ‘OK, we’ve done our part,’ ” Copeland says.
Copeland uses, as an example, her decision to turn to Instagram—where she has 1.8 million followers—to show a photo of two dancers from the Bolshoi ballet in Moscow dressed in blackface for a production of the 19th-century ballet La Bayadère, which is set in India. The post caused a stir, with some defending the move, saying that it’s just a part of a long culture. “Some of the conversations you think you’ll have support on, you don’t,” Copeland says. “The blackface is wrong. And why do I have to feel like it’s a touchy subject?”
She also sees social media as a powerful tool for reaching people all over the world and opening their eyes to issues facing the ballet world.
“I’ve lived through these experiences, so I can lead the next generation in the right way,” she says. “It’s so important to me to tell them that they’re not alone.”
Jamison, now artistic director emerita at Alvin Ailey, says her goal is to keep breaking new ground. “I see a spiraling upward, and a wider and wider spiral. That was Alvin’s original idea of what this company is about—the spreading of the joy, love, and the truth of dance.”
“Each generation informs the next,” she says. “We pass that on from generation to generation, dancer to dancer—that’s what it’s all about.”
Credit: Source link