Judith Jamison, dancer and artistic director of Alvin Ailey company, has died at 81

“If truth be known, Judith Jamison is only 5 feet, 10 inches tall. Anyone who has ever seen her dance would surely guess her to be somewhere around the height of a mighty oak tree,” The Inquirer’s Nancy Goldner wrote in her 1994 review of dancer Judith Jamison’s autobiography, Dancing Spirit.

Ms. Jamison, who was born in Philadelphia, was the artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from 1989 until 2011, and then its artistic director emerita, died in New York on Saturday, at age 81 after a brief illness. She was surrounded by close friends, Ailey company spokesperson Christopher Zunner confirmed to the Associated Press.

Ms. Jamison brought the company not only continued global exposure and crossover cultural appeal but economic stability and growth, putting it in “a stratosphere that Ailey couldn’t even imagine,” said Wendy Perron, author and former longtime editor of Dance Magazine.

Perron attributes Ms. Jamison’s success, in a world when many dance companies struggle to survive, to her unique personality and ability to forge relationships. “There was a warmth and magnetism about her — everyone wanted to be with her,” said Perron. “There was a light shining around her.”

Ms. Jamison, however, described herself somewhat more modestly.

“I’m this little girl from Philadelphia, right? Long legs, long arms. God-given talent. Very simply, that’s it,” she told The Inquirer in 1985.

Ms. Jamison was born in 1943 and from age 5, “lived in the 200 block of Duval Street in Germantown. Her father played the piano; her mother drew. Her mother’s parents lived next door, and they also had a farm in Franklinville, Gloucester County, giving young Judy a touch of rural life,” Goldner wrote.

But her talents were prodigious, and they were shaped by the city in which she grew up. At 6, she began studying with Marion Cuyjet at the Judimar School of Dance in Center City.

Along with Cuyjet, who Ms. Jamison called a “third parent,” she studied with Marina Swoboda, Antony Tudor, and Agnes de Mille, who gave Ms. Jamison her first big break — a leading role in her ballet The Four Marys, created in 1964 for American Ballet Theatre.

The family rowhouse on Duval Street in Germantown was “built with bricks, heated with coal and filled with love,” she told the Daily News in a 1994 interview.

Ms. Jamison attended Germantown High School, where she sang in the glee club and played violin in the All-Philadelphia Junior High School Orchestra. On Saturdays, the family listened to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on radio. Each Sunday, they came downtown to attend services at Mother Bethel AME Church, a place Ms. Jamison calls the “umbrella” in her autobiography. Her parents never “squelched” her or her siblings, she wrote, but disciplined the children and taught them pride in being African Americans.

“There was always singing in the house, always. Opera or classical music … that’s what I grew up on,” she said to The Inquirer in 1985. “My father would come home from work and he’d take me to dancing school, wait for me, and then drop me home. And if he wasn’t doing it, my brother was by the time he could drive. And that would happen every day. And I loved every minute of it. I thought life existed there.”

Her mother, she said in a 2023 podcast interview, made Ms. Jamison’s costumes, and “would massage my legs when I got home from class.”

The family would visit “The Rodin, the Museum of Modern History, the Academy of Music, the Philadelphia Orchestra — whenever we would go there we would sit waaaaay at the top because that was all we could afford — the Uptown Theatre, the Pearl Theatre, where my mother first saw Ella Fitzgerald sing … just so many extraordinary things to take in,” Ms. Jamison said to The Inquirer in 1999.

“The people who surrounded me in my life were the type where if a door shut, they’d open another one, and they created their own agenda,” Ms. Jamison said. “They’re the people I admire most.”

When she was young, she wanted to be a brain surgeon, a pilot, or an engineer on a train.

“I love moving people,” she told The Inquirer in 1985. “And I thought the uniqueness of that was, of course, that I would be a woman pilot. The whole idea that a single human being could run something as massive as an engine, you know, was fascinating to me. Or a ship or anything like that. So the power, the idea of being able to move other people, to whatever level, to take them out of their stance into another circumstance, has always been fascinating to me. And I’ve always wanted to be the mover.”

At 14, Ms. Jamison danced in Giselle and Sleeping Beauty and played in the All-Philadelphia String Ensemble. After graduating high school, she briefly attended Fisk University in Nashville. She then transferred to the Philadelphia Dance Academy, which later became part of the University of the Arts, and studied the Horton technique with Joan Kerr.

Ms. Jamison left Philadelphia for New York in 1964 and joined the Ailey company the following year. Ailey chose Ms. Jamison for Cry in 1971, a work he dedicated to Black women everywhere, but especially mothers.

On opening night, Ms. Jamison said she didn’t know if she was going to make it through the demanding 16-minute solo in which she transformed herself from a scrubwoman to an African princess.

She left the troupe 15 years later to be one of the stars of Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies on Broadway.

In the late 1980s, she returned to UArts and founded the Jamison Project, a small repertory dance company jointly administered by the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts. Her work was featured at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she choreographed scenes in a 1988 Opera Company of Philadelphia production of Boito’s Mefistofele.

After taking the reins of Ailey’s company upon his death in 1989, Ms. Jamison, as artistic director, introduced new works and choreography, but also made sure to keep front and center her predecessor’s undisputed masterpiece: Revelations, a 1960 classic that has defined the company and powered its success like few others, if any, in the history of dance.

To this day, Revelations appears on most of the company’s programs, at home in New York and on tour, and is referred to as the most-seen work of modern dance. (It’s hard to conceive of anything comparable.)

Revelations was even performed at the White House, at a dance event hosted by Michelle Obama in 2010, in which the first lady paid tribute to Ms. Jamison, calling her “an amazing, phenomenal, ‘fly’ woman.”

Obama also told Ms. Jamison from the stage that a photo of her in Cry had been “the only piece of art” in the Obamas’ home before the White House, and that her daughters, Malia and Sasha, had asked her: “Is that the lady in the picture?”

A year later, retiring as artistic director, Ms. Jamison exclaimed to a cheering crowd at New York City Center gathered to honor her: “I have come a long way from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania!”

Among her many laurels, Ms. Jamison was awarded Kennedy Center Honors in 1999 and a National Medal of the Arts in 2001. She was the protagonist of the 1988 WHYY documentary, Dancemaker.

In 1985, she launched Jamison’s Choice Limited, a fledgling gourmet pie business with Toni Lynn Dickinson, the financial aid director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater School. Dickinson made chocolate cream pies while Ms. Jamison made her special lemon meringue and sweet potato pies, following her grandmother’s recipe which she insisted on keeping a secret.

“See these hands,” she said then. “Not only do they dance, but they bake. In fact, while I’m cooking, I’m thinking of dance steps.”

The same year, in a news conference held before an Ailey company performance at the Academy of Music, Ms. Jamison said she’d “like Philadelphia to be my home, if duty calls.” Among her dreams for the city was “a whole building devoted to the arts,” noting there were some “awfully nice buildings” around Broad Street and Susquehanna Avenue.

“Did you know that five Ailey dancers are from Philadelphia?” she noted with pride. “This town is hot to trot, but we need to keep those dancers here.”

This article contains information from the Associated Press.