In 1958, Alvin Ailey and a group of young Black modern dancers performed as Alvin Ailey and Company at the
92nd Street Y in New York. In addition to Ailey, the original company worked with guest choreographers. For the company's first performance, Ailey's
Ariette Oubliée,
Blues Suite, and
Cinco Latinos were featured. Rehearsals for
Revelations were held in the basement of
Clark Center for the Performing Arts, Soon after, in 1962, Ailey recast his all-black dance company into a multi-racial group, and the modernized company completed its first international tour to Australia and southeast Asia. The tour of the Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Company, named for Ailey's partnership with
Carmen de Lavallade, started in Sydney, Australia, and ended in Seoul, South Korea. Dancer and choreographer
Judith Jamison joined the dance company in 1965, and would later serve as the company's first artistic director after
Alvin Ailey's death in 1989. Following, in 1970, the Ailey company and school relocated to 229 East 59th Street in Manhattan, a renovated church building. The crisis abated, however, and in 1971 AAADT made its first performance at the
New York City Center. AAADT had their debut performance at the
State Theater at Lincoln Center in 1974. The program featured Ailey's “Feast of Ashes,”
Talley Beatty's “The Road of the Phoebe Snow,” John Butler's “Portrait of Billie” revival, the premiere of John Jones's “Nocturne,” and
Joyce Trisler's “Journey.” The company then performed at
President Jimmy Carter’s inauguration gala in 1977. The company and school are located at 45th Street and Broadway, Judith Jamison replaced Ailey as the artistic director of AAADT. The company was struggling with mounting debts, and the number of company dancers was reduced. Two years later, AAADT broke ground on its new building site on West 55th Street. and the
Oprah Winfrey Foundation pledged one million dollars to endow a student scholarship at the Ailey School. A year later, the Ailey organization, including the main company, Ailey II, and the Ailey School, moved into its new West 55th Street home, the Joan Weill Center for Dance, the former
WNET-TV studios where AAADT first appeared on television in the early 1960s. In 2008,
Glorya Kaufman donated six million dollars to AAADT's educational programs, including support for AileyCamp programs, the Ailey School, and a BFA program with
Fordham University. The fifth floor lobby in the Weill Center for Dance is named in Kaufman's honor. The
United States Senate passed a resolution recognizing the artistic and cultural contributions of AAADT amidst the 50th Anniversary (2011) of the first performance of the Ailey classic
Revelations. In 2014, AAADT kicked off a fifty million dollar capital campaign, "Campaign for Ailey's Future," to support artistic, educational, and building expansion projects, and to honor outgoing board chair Joan Weill. The dancers performed Blues Suite to a positive reception to the New York crowd. Building off this reception, the company toured the world, in Europe, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Ailey’s choreographic strategy at the time was to provide a structure for the dancers while demanding improvisation and insisting on character over technique. Additionally, Ailey actively rejected the “black dance” label, contending that “good dance” transcends racial categorization. Despite enthusiastic audiences internationally, the company endured considerable institutional hardships. The cost of living stranded dancers in
Barcelona, and many lived in
Milan brothels without pay, so Ailey reinvested his personal earnings from Broadway directly into the company, demonstrating his devotion. Following Ailey’s death in 1988, the board appointed
Judith Jamison company director, and she honored his legacy by eventually creating a school on 61st street, preserving his global vision. In 1970, the U.S. State Department sent the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater on a tour of the
Soviet Union to represent the United States and perform choreography aligned with U.S. democratic values. The U.S. State Department and
President Eisenhower created an emergency fund for international affairs to finance performances abroad as part of a massive propaganda initiative against Soviet communism. In their performance, they presented
Revelations, which countered what the U.S. government sought to convey worldwide. The act was about African American self-determination and overcoming structural obstacles in American society. Expanding on this international presence, when the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater brought Black art to Soviet stages, it entered an existing
transnational terrain. African American artists such as
Langston Hughes,
Paul Robeson, and
W.E.B. Du Bois traveled to the Soviet Union and formed relationships there, in Hughes's own words, transforming Black selfhood "from the ground up" by rethinking racial identity outside the constraints of America’s racial hierarchy. African-American leaders’ presence in the USSR itself was a political act, as the Soviet Union offered Black Americans a context that shaped their sense of status and dimensions of public life that American society contested. The performances by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater mirrored this dynamic. ==Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation==