{"id":868014,"date":"2025-12-02T20:15:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T17:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=868014"},"modified":"2025-12-02T20:15:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T17:15:00","slug":"the-curtain-rises-for-alicia-graf-mack-aileys-new-artistic-director","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=868014","title":{"rendered":"The Curtain Rises for Alicia Graf Mack, Ailey\u2019s New Artistic Director"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Arts<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The Curtain Rises for Alicia Graf Mack, Ailey\u2019s New Artistic Director<\/h1>\n
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By <\/span>Laura Regensdorf<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Photo: Andrew Eccles<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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On a recent Monday evening at the Manhattan headquarters of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, rehearsal for Revelations<\/em> had the camaraderie of a reunion. A drum set rumbled in the corner. Vocalists settled into their chairs, sheet music and iPads in hand. The late choreographer\u2019s canonical 1960 work, set to song-sermons and gospel, is typically performed with live music at the start of the company\u2019s annual residency at New York City Center, and the artists were finally back in one room to prepare for opening night on December 3. The musical director cued the spiritual \u201cWade in the Water\u201d\u2014an evocation of Ailey\u2019s boyhood baptism in a church pond in rural Texas\u2014and the dancers began a procession with undulating torsos. \u201cRocka My Soul\u201d brought out a flurry of yellow rattan fans, in homage to humid Sunday services, which sent a palpable breeze to the observers seated in front-row folding chairs.<\/p>\n

Alicia Graf Mack, Ailey\u2019s newly appointed artistic director and a twice-former company member, stepped in during a lull to demonstrate the easy fluidity of a head movement. However high the pressure may be for her debut season, Graf Mack, in serendipitous ways, has spent her life preparing for this moment\u2014from her first job at 17 with Dance Theatre of Harlem to her seven-year post directing Juilliard\u2019s dance division. The piano trilled, and a soloist began to sing, as if channeling the inner monologue of someone taking the helm of an internationally beloved institution: \u201cI wanna be ready, Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graf Mack, a statuesque 46-year-old mother of two, joined Ailey in July as only its fourth artistic director in history. The founder himself led the company from its debut in 1958 until his death of AIDS-related complications in 1989. His handpicked successor was Judith Jamison, a magisterial dancer with the troupe from 1965 to 1980, who went on to shape Ailey into an indisputable household name; she choreographed frequently for the company and spearheaded the campaign to build its six-story permanent home on 55th Street and Ninth Avenue. In 2011, Jamison took on an emerita role and handed the reins to Robert Battle, who expanded the roster of dancemakers during his 12-year tenure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Alvin Ailey in Hermit Songs.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Jack Mitchell. Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation Inc., and Smithsonian Institution<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Now, the corner office belongs to Graf Mack. She has brought along her framed Revelations<\/em> fan, a memento from her performing days. And she has made space for a colorful patchwork chaise longue that belonged to Ms. Jamison, who died last fall at age 81. \u201cI would never call her Judi\u2014it would sound odd coming out of my mouth,\u201d says Graf Mack, who had a poster of Jamison in her childhood bedroom. Theirs was a relationship of mutual respect, one artist to another: \u201c\u2018You\u2019re a divine spirit walker,\u2019 she would text me sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In many ways, Graf Mack\u2019s appointment in November 2024, just weeks after Jamison\u2019s death, felt ordained. Once again, the company would be guided by a five-foot-ten woman who captivated audiences on the Ailey stage. (A poster from the 2012-2013 season featuring Graf Mack\u2014one leg up in a side-split jump, with a beyond-180-degree extension\u2014no doubt earned a place in a younger generation\u2019s bedrooms.) Like Jamison, Graf Mack had carried the parasol in Revelations,<\/em> a role reserved for a matriarchal figure. And it\u2019s an apt metaphor, the umbrella, considering everything Ailey-related that falls under her purview. There\u2019s the bonafide company and Ailey II, for early-career dancers; the Ailey School for pre-professional training and a BFA program with Fordham; Ailey Extension classes for the broader community, plus AileyCamp\u2019s summer programs around the country for middle schoolers from underserved communities.<\/p>\n

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Judith Jamison in Alvin Ailey\u2019s Revelations<\/em> in Paris.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Aigles<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

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Alicia Graf Mack in Revelations<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Andrew Eccles<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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Graf Mack and Jamison at the 2023 Dance Magazine Awards.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Christopher Zunner.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

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Graf Mack in front of Jamison’s mural.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Courtesy of Ailey<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cThis organization feels rooted in an individual\u2019s big dream for art and what it can do,\u201d Graf Mack says of Alvin Ailey\u2019s extraordinary vision, which honored personal identity and shared experience. As interpreters, Graf Mack shares Jamison\u2019s audacious streak, as the rehearsal director Ronni Favors, who arrived at Ailey as a student in 1974, puts it. \u201cThey\u2019re not afraid to dream big and shoot high, even if their affect is different.\u201d She remembers Jamison likening her dancers to B52 bombers\u2014her apartment overlooked the Intrepid, so she\u2019d watch the airplanes come and go with hurtling might\u2014while Graf Mack embodies a knowing reserve.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe thing that drives everything we do,\u201d Favors adds, \u201cis Mr. Ailey\u2019s beautiful quote. He said, \u2018I believe that dance came from the people and that it should always be delivered back to the people.\u2019\u201d Now, with Graf Mack leading the way, the collective goal deepens: \u201cHow many different ways can we make good on that promise?\u201d<\/p>\n

Graf Mack\u2019s own dance life began when she was tiny. Her mother, a Howard professor who also ran a community modeling school in Columbia, Maryland, would tote her along to evening courses; a young Graf Mack, with her coltish long limbs, was soon invited into the neighboring dance class. Ballet became her north star, with rigorous training consuming her free time. \u201cGrowing up biracial\u2014just trying to figure out, Who am I and how do I navigate this world?<\/em>\u2014I had all these images of dancers of color on my walls,\u201d she says. When Ailey toured through town, she\u2019d catch them at the Kennedy Center and Baltimore\u2019s Lyric Opera House.<\/p>\n

At 11, she took a master class with Dance Theatre of Harlem\u2014founded by Arthur Mitchell, the first Black principal at New York City Ballet and a noted prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of George Balanchine\u2014and the principal dancer Donald Williams signed her shoes with a prophetic note: \u201cHope to see you at DTH one day.\u201d Six years later, she joined the company. Rare as it is to see a woman standing six-foot-four in pointe shoes, Mr. Mitchell never saw Graf Mack\u2019s height as disqualifying. \u201cHe said, \u2018We have lots of tall partners for you here,\u2019\u201d she once told PBS. \u201cI never had to fight to feel a sense of belonging. I only had to do the thing that I was hired to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

A career that began with ease didn\u2019t continue that way; injuries related to an underlying rheumatoid condition sidelined Graf Mack after just three years. She studied at Columbia University as a history major, slipping into dance classes at the studio Steps. There, she began taking Horton technique\u2014a reprieve from ballet\u2014with Milton Myers, then a teacher with Ailey. He suggested she meet with Jamison and arranged for her to take class with the company when the tour overlapped with her spring break. \u201cFor me, it was like being a tourist,\u201d says Graf Mack, who relished the chance to meet an idol but already had a job at JP Morgan lined up for the fall. She spent that summer filling in with the contemporary ballet company Complexions, when the dance legend Carmen de Lavallade\u2014a high school friend of Ailey\u2019s, credited with introducing him to Lester Horton\u2019s studio in the 1940s\u2014took her aside. The bank job? \u201c\u2018You can do that at any time in your life,\u2019\u201d Graf Mack remembers her saying. \u201c\u2018But it\u2019s clear that you are born to do this and your body is telling you that you can, so you should.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Graf Mack and Jamar Roberts in Judith Jamison\u2019s Reminiscin\u2019<\/em> (A Case of You<\/em> excerpt).<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo; Paul Kolnik<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

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With Antonio Douthit-Boyd bow after Alvin Ailey\u2019s Revelations.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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Graf Mack in a poster for Ailey\u2019s 2012-13 season.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Andrew Eccles<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cThere have been all these\u2014I call them angels\u2014to point me forward, and they\u2019ve all been Ailey people,\u201d Graf Mack says. She took the advice and rejoined Dance Theatre of Harlem as a principal, though the company shuttered after a year due to financial instability. In 2005, she finally auditioned for Ailey, dancing for three years before injury again crept in. Academia beckoned: She got a master\u2019s degree in nonprofit management and began life as a professor. Then, as Jamison was preparing for retirement, she invited Graf Mack and Jamar Roberts to reprise A Case of You,<\/em> her 2004 duet that imagines a couple caught in the sometimes jagged, sometimes tender cycle of love. Robert Battle, the newly named artistic director, convinced Graf Mack to come back for what would be another three-year run\u2014\u201cthis time married,\u201d she recalls. \u201cLife happens in between.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It isn\u2019t always apparent how the sum of one\u2019s pursuits will eventually coalesce. In this case, the final piece of this preparatory puzzle was Graf Mack\u2019s 2018 appointment as dean and director of Juilliard\u2019s dance division. This was a role that demanded institutional savvy and in-the-classroom nuance; she helped with fundraising, tapped visiting choreographers, reframed history courses. As a Black woman with a long performing career, she understood the evolving landscape for working artists. With shrinking numbers of tentpole companies, graduates would need stylistic versatility, with training across a breadth of disciplines; new composition requirements helped prepare dancers to work with choreographers who increasingly build off in-studio improvisations. Old gender norms with ballet went away, allowing students to choose between pointe or allegro tracks. New media courses presaged the shift that would soon come during COVID. Graf Mack\u2019s conception of diversity as a thriving ecosystem was all-encompassing\u2014both a reflection of the world as it is and an aspiration for how it could be.<\/p>\n

Graf Mack\u2019s appointment at Ailey comes at a moment of cross-currents. The recent \u201cEdges of Ailey\u201d exhibition at the Whitney Museum\u2014a monumental, moving project that centered on the impact and influences of the man himself\u2014has recontextualized that household name for new audiences. The show\u2019s accompanying performance series, which tapped dancemakers across eras and backgrounds, also underscored Ailey\u2019s original big-tent vision. \u201cHe didn\u2019t want just a company for his own work, but a repertory company to give a platform for other artists to share their stories,\u201d says Graf Mack.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Ailey\u2019s core principles\u2014honoring identity alongside aesthetic achievement\u2014face a shift in political winds. For its Washington, D.C. season early next year, the company will have its two-week run at the historic Warner Theatre, quietly closing a long chapter at the Kennedy Center. Graf Mack has seen the upheaval play out across higher education and arts organizations; she and the Ailey leadership are proceeding with care and integrity. \u201cWe follow the founding tenets and then we allow [Mr. Ailey\u2019s] bravery to keep us going into the future,\u201d she says. Here was a queer Black man barrelling bare-chested into the cultural firmament. \u201cHe very much put our stories at the forefront, even when that might not have been widely accepted, but his genius is that he did it in a way that made audience members see themselves onstage, whoever they were, from any background, identity, place around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Alice Castro<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Highlights on the City Center program reflect this effort to simultaneously root into tradition and break new ground. Maija Garc\u00eda\u2019s Jazz Island,<\/em> with an original score by the trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles, is a narrative exploration of Afro-Caribbean folklore created for the full company. Garc\u00eda took inspiration from the book Black Gods, Green Islands,<\/em> by the late Trinidadian artist and dancer Geoffrey Holder; his longtime partner, Carmen de Lavallade\u2014one of those \u201cangels\u201d that helped steer the artistic director back toward dance\u2014called it \u201ca very good meal\u201d after a recent preview.<\/p>\n

Graf Mack sees Jazz Island<\/em> in the tradition of Ailey\u2019s first work, Blues Suite<\/em> (1958)\u2014each dancer embodying a distinct character\u2014while the company premiere of Blink of an Eye<\/em> is a coolly contemporary addition. Choreographed by Medhi Walerski for eight dancers, it was originally created for Nederlands Dans Theater. \u201cIt\u2019s not built in the Black aesthetic or cultural narrative language,\u201d she says. What makes it Ailey is the \u201camazing dancing with so much heart and daring.\u201d During a rehearsal, Graf Mack let out a yelp when a petite dancer leapt a rather far distance into a pair of waiting arms\u2014an illustration of risk and reward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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For the opening night performance, the Grammy-decorated violinist Melissa White will play for Blink of an Eye<\/em> and the powerhouse vocalist Samara Joy\u2014with five Grammys at just 26, Graf Mack points out\u2014will accompany the newly revived A Case of You,<\/em> in place of Diana Krall\u2019s rendition of the Joni Mitchell track. But the first glimpse of the new season arrived ahead of schedule, for the audience Ailey always imagined. On the Friday evening before Thanksgiving, the company\u2019s rehearsal for Revelations<\/em> took place in the street-level studio. They opened the shades and piped the music out onto the sidewalk, like a Ninth Avenue take on the holiday windows. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing to practice these gifts,\u201d Graf Mack says, but \u201cthe mission is to give dance back to the people.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

Source URL: http:\/\/vogue.com\/article\/alicia-graf-mack-artistic-director-ailey<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arts The Curtain Rises for Alicia Graf Mack, Ailey\u2019s New Artistic Director By Laura Regensdorf December 2, 2025 Photo: Andrew Eccles On a recent Monday evening at the Manhattan headquarters of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, rehearsal for Revelations had the camaraderie of a reunion. A drum set rumbled in the corner. Vocalists settled into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":868015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-868014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-vogue-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=868014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/868015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=868014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=868014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=868014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}