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Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance Book
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Foyles
Alvin Ailey (1931--1989) was a choreographic giant in the modern dance world and a champion of African-American talent and culture. His interracial Alvin Ailey ...
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Amazon Review
The great African-American choreographer Alvin Ailey created breathtaking modern dances,which changed the boundaries of the art form, and founded a school and a dance company to maintain the tradition. In this sensitive but searing biography, Jennifer Dunning, a dance critic with the New York Times, reveals the terrible personal pain that Ailey hid from his public. The life of a dancer and choreographer makes enormous physical demands, and the kind of adulation Ailey received as a young man takes a toll on the spirit. Ailey, a manic depressive full of self-doubt, retreated to alcohol, drugs, and promiscuity for self-affirmation off the stage. He lived a life of awful self-destruction, and then died of AIDS-related causes at age 58. Dunning captures the greatness and the agony of Ailey's creative spirit.
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Product Description
Alvin Ailey (1931â??1989) was a choreographic giant in the modern dance world and a champion of African-American talent and culture. His interracial Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater provided opportunities to black dancers and choreographers when no one else would. His acclaimed â??Revelationsâ? remains one of the most performed modern dance pieces in the twentieth century. But he led a tortured life, filled with insecurity and self-loathing. Raised in poverty in rural Texas by his single mother, he managed to find success early in his career, but by the 1970s his creativity had waned. He turned to drugs, alcohol, and gay bars and suffered a nervous breakdown in 1980. He was secretive about his private life, including his homosexuality, and, unbeknownst to most at the time, died from AIDS-related complications at age 58.Now, for the first time, the complete story of Aileyâ??s life and work is revealed in this biography. Based on his personal journals and hundreds of interviews with those who knew him, including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Judith Jamison, Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham, Sidney Poitier, and Dustin Hoffman, Alvin Ailey is a moving story of a man who wove his life and culture into his dance.
- 0306808250
- 9780306808258
- Jennifer Dunning
- 1 March 1998
- Da Capo Press Inc
- Paperback (Book)
- 496
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