FILE - Judith Jamison, choreographer and artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, observes young dancers during a workshop at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2010. “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 Philadelphia Inquirer’s Nancy Goldner wrote in her 1994 review of dancer Judith Jamison’s autobiographyMs.
But her talents were prodigious, and they were shaped by the city in which she grew up. At 6, when she began studying with Marion Cuyjet at the Judimar School of Dance in Center City. “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.
On opening night, Ms. Jamison had said, she didn’t know if she was going to make it though the demanding, 16-minute solo in which she transformed herself from a scrubwoman to an African princess.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.
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!”
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