General
Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey Dancer of ‘Power and Radiance,’ Dies at 81
She became an international star as a member of the company and later directed it, guiding it out of debt and boosting its popularity.
Judith Jamison, a majestic dancer who became an international star as a member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and who directed the troupe for more than two decades, building it into the most successful modern dance company in the country, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 81.
Her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center, was announced by Christopher Zunner, a spokesman for the Ailey company, who said she died “after a brief illness.”
At 5-foot-10, Ms. Jamison was unusually tall for a woman in her profession. “But anyone who’s seen her onstage is convinced she’s six feet five,” the critic Deborah Jowitt wrote in The New York Times in 1976.
“I was the antithesis of the small-boned, demure dancer with a classically feminine shape.” Ms. Jamison (pronounced JAM-ih-son) wrote in her 1993 autobiography, “Dancing Spirit.”
It wasn’t just her size and shape that were distinctive, however. She was a performer of great intelligence, warmth and wit.
