Alvin Ailey (1931-1989) was the founder of one of the first major Black modern dance companies in Amerika. Two of the most interesting aspects of Ailey's life are his cultural achievements viewed in the context of racism and national oppression, and his own thoughts on racism and national oppression; and what has been described as his mental breakdown, also deeply intertwined with the realities of being a Black man in a racist society.

So we review Ailey's life here not as a model of oppressed national revolutionary cultural work, but as an example of how prominent Blacks cannot ignore national oppression. The contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations is the principal contradiction in the world today, so understanding the Black nation's subordinate position in this contradiction is necessary for dealing with it correctly. In a remembrance of Ailey, the journalist who helped him write his autobiography said "he was aware that this world, while accepting him, believes that European music and dance are vastly superior to all other music and dance."(1) In a way, Ailey's greatest strength and contribution was that as much as he fought to be accepted by the Euro-chauvinists of the art world, he fought to be accepted as a Black artist doing Black culture.

As someone who did cultural work with no explicit political affiliation, Ailey is not someone with whom MIM has a lot in common. But while Ailey himself probably would not have had a lot to say to MIM, his work has a lot to say about cultural efforts and leadership in the Black nation. Here we review two books on Ailey's life - Ailey's own autobiography, Revelations, and a new biography of him by New York Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning, Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance. Dunning's book is a detailed biography; it traces Ailey's life artistically, but does not deal with his motivations, political or otherwise. In Revelations, Ailey talks about what it meant to grow up and develop a public career as a Black man in Amerika. He does a better job of explaining his politics and their role in his work.

The path of Ailey's career

As the founder of an early major Black modern dance company in Amerika, Ailey grew up as an artist and an individual through a series of historic firsts. This position in some ways took a toll on his mental health; while working to be a leader in Black culture, he was being promoted as an example of Amerikan culture. In 1962, Ailey's company was the first Black troupe to tour Southeast Asia on U.$. State Department sponsorship and the first State Department sponsored company to tour extensively through the countries it visited.(2)

Sending a Black cultural mission to Southeast Asia on behalf of the government must have been a calculated move to instill friendliness between Blacks and the peoples who were then becoming U.S. neocolonial subjects. Because images of racism and national oppression had also severely tarnished the U.$. image overseas, this was also an by the State Department to promote integrationism internationally. Showing Blacks on an official tour would have given credence to the idea that the oppressed and oppressor nations within Amerika were relatively equal, and helped propaganda efforts to make colonized peoples more friendly to the colonizers.

Ailey's and his company's self-image

In her foreword to Revelations, Lena Horne said that Ailey and his dancers "inspired me to better prepare myself for the life I had to lead as a black artist in a society that too often refuses to recognize and reward fine talent and its contributions to our culture."(3) From these two narratives of Ailey's life, it is clear that he did not turn away from the pressure that is put on Black artists to be cultural ambassadors from their nation to the world. The expectations that Black people in the public eye be representatives, and transformers of the Black public image and the Black nation's self-image, create monstrous doubts in the minds of Blacks who must live up to them. When white Amerika promotes this expectation it lays all possible pressure on these individuals. MIM does not claim that white Amerika cares overly about individual famous Black psyches, but rather that by publicly placing responsibility for the fate of the Black nation in these individuals' hands, the oppressor nation pushes responsibility for the results of national oppression away from itself and onto the oppressed.

Ailey said he was struck, at one point fairly late in his career, by the realization that "the dances my family did at our home in Texas, those social dances, were beautiful marks of our own culture."(4) The same could be said of Ailey and dance as an editor said about Carlos Bulosan, the Filipino writer, and his writing: "Bulosan thus decided as a writer to identify with the Filipinos. He retold their experiences and gave voice to their aspirations."(5) Ailey retold Black experiences, particularly southern Black experiences, and made his career about that telling. Of his most famous series of dances, Ailey said "my plan was to make Revelations the second part of an all-black evening of dance. First would be the blues in Blues Suite, the spirituals in Revelations, then a section on Kansas City jazz, then a section on contemporary music. The aim was to show the coming and growth and reach of black music."(6) Ailey identified with the dances of his childhood and of the Black nation generally, and built much of his company's repertoire around showing the world the beauty of these dances.

Ailey's ballet Cry, a solo which he would not allow white dancers to do, is "dedicated to Black women everywhere" and takes the performer "from oppressive drudgery to emotional anguish and finally to wrenching joy" in a mourning and celebration of Black wimmin's lives in Amerika.(7) Revelations, his most famous work and likely the most famous single ballet of the twentieth century, is all about the southern Black church - its place in the community, in nurturing young Black people, and so on. Blues Suite is about the Dew Drop Inns and honky-tonks where Black adults spent their Saturday nights before going on to church on Sunday mornings. For Bird with Love was his big jazz piece, premiering very late in Ailey's life and dedicated to Charlie "Bird" Parker.

In To Die for the People, Huey Newton describes Melvin Van Peebles's approach to symbolism in the Black community: " Sweet Sweetback [shows the reaction of the oppressed to their oppression] by using many aspects of the community, but in symbolic terms. That is, Van Peebles is showing one thing on the screen but saying something more to the audience. In other words he is signifying, and he is signifying some very heavy things."(8) Aliey's work - in the combinations of music and dance, the selections of pieces and periods of Black culture - does the same thing. He made constant efforts to universalize his work and to speak to all people with his choreography. But at the same time, Ailey was signifying to Black people first.

In his choreography, Ailey devoted his time to depicting Black life and the spirit of Black people over making dances of political protest. He planned for many years to do a piece on Malcolm X but never got to it. Around the time of Nelson Mandela's 67th birthday in 1986, Ailey choreographed the ballet Survivors, based on the life-stories of Nelson and Winnie Mandela,(9) and he did a benefit for Martin Luther King's civil rights work. While on tour with his company in the Southern U.$. in 1963, Ailey referred to the South as "Courage Country" in reference to Black southerners' political work for civil rights.(10) But his ability to identify with the Civil Rights Movement politically was limited, and his activism was limited to celebrating Black culture with Black audiences and popularizing it among broader audiences.

Ailey's career was representative of a section of national bourgeois culture. Even while this section can be progressive, it shows us the importance of proletarian art in the revolutionary movement. The separation of life from politics in Ailey's work is a political expression of the national bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. The pursuit of culture over politics is an attempt to misguide the proletariat into supporting the national bourgeoisie to the exclusion of making socialist revolution.

AAADT and its associated institutions

As much as he chose not to pursue politics, Ailey did structure his artistic life to fulfill his political goals. In response to the barriers he faced as a Black man trying to have a career in dance and to his analysis of the dance world, Ailey saw it as his responsibility to bring Black culture to the stage. He wanted to bring Black culture to Black people and provide work opportunities for Black artists.

Black dancers had a very hard time finding work. For this reason, Ailey made it his business to create jobs for them: "I feel an obligation to use black dancers because there must be opportunities for them but not because I'm a black choreographer talking to black people."(11) MIM supports this type of thinking; we do encourage the idea that Black dancers (actors, teachers, politicians) should only be hired to represent or talk to Black people. This is a dangerous idea because it means that people who do not do work with explicitly Black content are released from the obligation of hiring Black people. Naturally, we also think that production of culture with specific Black content is also very important because it is the culture of an oppressed nation and an important part of the consciousness of the Black nation.

Ailey did not restrict his choreography or his presentation of other choreographers' work to Black material and with the exception of his ballet Cry; he also did not restrict non-Black dancers from prominent roles in the company. But being Black in Amerika, he saw much of his work as a series of work on the Black experience.

In his weaker political moments, Ailey said things like "I am trying to show the world that color is not important ... that's what it's all about to me."(12) As weak-kneed as this statement is, we have to look at it in context. What Ailey says to a New York Times reporter is not necessarily the measure of his politics. It is only the measure of how he wants to be seen in the dance world where he jockeys for money and for performance and rehearsal space. In his stronger moments, Ailey said that just because the culture is Black doesn't mean that all people can't relate to it, and he went on to say that racism kept white choreographers from recognizing the potential of relating to culturally disparate people through dance. "Here, in short, is the big problem with white ballet companies: Does one really want to see a black swan among thirty-two swans in Swan Lake ... I give no credence to that position whatsoever. ... We're in the theater, not in a history seminar. It's the same as saying that Japanese dancers can't dance the blues- well, they do in my company. ... their presence universalizes the material."(13)

Ailey talked consistently about bringing more Black people out to the theaters to see his company perform. While the company was in residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Ailey was upset that the theater would send buses to Manhattan to pick up audiences, rather than go into the Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn to bring back Black audiences to a theater that was as far from them as is was from the white people in Manhattan.(14) Certainly the Ailey company performed for audiences with greater percentages of Blacks than the typical dance concert audiences. Ailey pointed out that "black folks make up roughly twenty percent of our audience, and the percentage should be greater." Ailey wanted the company to always be more for Black people: "dance should be a popular form," he said, "wrenched from the hands of the elite."(15)

But even Ailey's company, with all its efforts to bring dance to the people and to Black people in particular, is for the elite. From Ailey's comments on who in the Black nation supported his work, the individuals with whom he made connections in expanding his company's work into a dance school and summer dance camps, it seems that the overwhelming majority of Blacks in his audiences were at least petty bourgeois. This class composition makes sense given the restrictive ticket prices of concert halls where the company performs. In retrospect, we can see that Ailey used the class composition of his Black audiences the way MIM would have the Black national bourgeoisie organize itself. Although he made no conscious effort to string the two aspects of his work together, he generated a consistent stream of Black culture and popularized it among the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie, emphasizing the importance of Black culture to the elite of the Black nation. He then went on and took the support he had gained from the wealthier Blacks and used that to reach out to sections of the Black proletariat through his dance school and summer dance camps.

Leadership in the Black community

Dance companies in the 1950s and 60s, with the exceptions of a few in New York and Lester Horton's company in Los Angeles, where Ailey received his early dance training and performing and choreography experience, did not accept Black dancers. As a young dancer, Jimmy Truitte, who would later dance with both Horton and Ailey, was told by white dance instructors that they would happily give lessons in the Black neighborhoods if Truitte could find enough interested students on his "side of town." They also offered lessons in their own studios at a separate time from their regular dance classes "because I know you people work so hard."(16)

When Ailey had the money and the organizational support, he established dance camps - one in New York and one in Kansas City - as places where he could foster the kind of leadership and encouragement which he and his friends couldn't find as young dancers. The camps drew kids who would have been good candidates for dropping out of school and taught them about dancing and making dances. Allan Gray, a friend of Ailey's who had fostered the company's presence in Kansas City and established the Kansas City camp, described what the AileyCamp dance program did for kids. They "start seeing how their bodies react differently to different situations. They later tie that into control and learning what discipline it takes to think through a program, make strategies, and then be prepared physically to carry them out. And they tie that into how you have to be mentally prepared but also educationally prepared if your strategy is to complete school." Gray continued, "Many of these kids realize for the first time they have control of their lives. They don't have to react to the outside world or their families."(17)

Huey Newton's words on political action and understanding are a good framework for understanding the work of the AileyCamps. Newton wrote, "the essence of the ideology of the Black Panther Party is that we recognize that matter is constantly in transformation in a dialectical manner. But when we understand this and understand the forces in operation, we can control them in a manner which is beneficial for the community. Therefore what we want to do is understand the contradictions within every aspect of the Black community and move on them by trying to increase the positive side of each contradiction until it comes to dominate the negative side. This is how we define power: the ability to define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner."(18)

In establishing the camps, Ailey and his associates recognized the contradiction between Black children trying to grow up and become something worthwhile, and the society they lived in and the schools that educated them telling them that they were worthless. In the introduction to his autobiography he said "that's one of the worst things about racism, what it does to young people. It tears down your insides so that no matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it's not quite enough."(19)

Ailey's mental breakdown

In 1980, Ailey lost track of reality and was put in a psychiatric hospital. In Revelations, Ailey describes a process that began when his good friend Joyce Trisler died in 1979 at age 48 (she and Ailey were the same age). His mentor Lester Horton had also died young and suddenly, and Ailey decided that he was doomed to die quickly and set out both to make sure that happened and to live life to the fullest before his death. He drank and took a lot of drugs (principally cocaine), spent money on all sorts of luxuries while stealing from his corner grocery store when he felt like it, and several times ran through the halls of his apartment building screaming "Fire! Fire!"(20) After one of the fire episodes, Ailey was arrested and when given two options, chose to check into a mental hospital or go to jail.(21)

MIM has basic disagreements with the designation of mental illness under imperialism. We do recognize that some people have genuine and serious mental or emotional problems, and this will be true under socialism as well. But as socialists, we resist unquestioning acceptance of the bourgeoisie's definitions of mental illness as many people have been labeled mentally ill whose only illness was social - they opposed imperialism in one manifestation or another. Further, imperialist psychiatry uses the mental illness diagnosis to isolate undesirables from the rest of society. Mentally ill individuals are defined as being less than other people and there is little effort to bring them into society as productive people. Under socialism, we would deal with mental illness as the Chinese did under Mao, "in a comradely manner, as [we would deal with] all contradictions among the people, which are by definition non- antagonistic."(22)

For MIM, Ailey's breakdown is a very public example of how difficult it is to separate mental and emotional stability from political position and consciousness under imperialism. While Trisler's death was the event which set him off, Ailey describes how living in such an oppressive society had already set him on the edge. From Ailey's case we can see how the imperialist psychological and psychiatric professions are responsible for teaching people that they must fit in to an oppressive society to have happy lives. So as a Black person angered by racism treatment, Ailey was told to control his temper and learn how to function within the system.

This notion that we live in an unchangeable system and that individuals must change themselves to fit into it is an important element of capitalist superstructure. If the capitalist propagandists were to admit that capitalism is not good for everyone, they would be encouraging rebellion against capitalism. For this reason, capitalist psychological ideology is antithetical to revolutionary theory. Even in Ailey's non-revolutionary case, this bullshit ideology was impossible to reconcile with any degree of nationalism.

Almost from the beginning of Ailey's career, Amerika was aggressively pressuring him to adopt integrationism and leave the Black nation behind. The U.$.-sponsored tours were only the best documented form of this pressure. As far as MIM is concerned, feeling allegiance to the Black nation and struggling to make its collective consciousness and culture the bases for a cohesive body of work celebrating that consciousness and culture, all in the face of a country which rejects the idea that the Black nation might have anything of value to offer, is enough to make anyone go crazy.

The only extraordinary thing about Ailey's case is that when the contradictions between his national will and the pressures put on him from outside came to a head, he was hospitalized and not put in prison. Blacks who have problems with imperialist society are much more likely to be put in prison, while whites are the majority in mental institutions.(23) Ailey's institutionalization was another form of pressure put on him to soften his solidarity with the Black nation and adjust to Amerikan imperialism. When Amerika imprisons so many of the poor Black men who react violently to national oppression, putting a prominent Black cultural figure in a mental institution instead could only have been an effort to placate him into compliance with imperialism.

Ailey himself recognized the reasons for his so-called insanity, even though he did buy the mentally ill label in the end. Ailey quotes a Village Voice article about his hospitalization: "Alvin Ailey may be paying dues for fifty years of agony." Ailey comments on that article saying "my illness, I now understand, was the way that agony manifested itself. I never understood or faced the truth, not for many years. My way has always been to take things at face value, for what they are. The agony of being black, the agony of coming from a small-town Texas and ending up dancing on the Champs Elysees in Paris, was a heavy load to carry. The contrast, the cultural distance between those two points, certainly had something to do with my illness."(24)

Notes:
1. Alvin Ailey with A. Peter Bailey, Revelations. (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1995), p. 150.
2. Ibid., p. 106.
3. Ibid., p. 2.
4. Jennifer Dunning, Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance. (New York: Addison Wesley, 1996), p. 380.
5. E. San Juan, Jr., ed., If You Want to Know What We Are: A Carlos Bulosan Reader. (Minneapolis: West End Press, 1983), p. 7.
6. Ailey, p. 97-8.
7. Dunning, p. 271.
8. Huey Newton, To Die for the People.
9. Dunning, p. 374.
10. Ibid., p. 177.
11. Ibid., p. 243.
12. Ibid., p. 388.
13. Ailey, p. 128.
14. Dunning, p. 243.
15. Ailey, p. 101.
16. Dunning, p. 47.
17. Ibid., p. 396.
18. Newton, p. 138.
19. Ailey, p. 5.
20. Ibid., p. 134-42.
21. Ibid., p. 143.
22. MIM Theory 9, "Psychology and Imperialism," p. 34.
23. Ibid., p. 31.
24. Ailey, p. 146.

Buy Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance

Buy Revelations : The Autobiography of Alvin Ailey