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Hi, it's Phoebe.
We have something new this month on Phoebe Reads a Mystery.
I'm reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
I've always thought of myself as a Mr. Darcy.
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I remember the first time I did the piece in rehearsal in New York in the studio.
And the music starts doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom, doom.
And I'm doing the circle with the cloth.
And literally, I started moving.
I maybe did half a circle and Judy stopped the music and she said, let's start again.
She pressed it. music again, and I did it again.
And this went on like two or three times, three or four.
And I remember thinking, Dag, I haven't even moved.
I have not moved, and I can't complete a circle.
This is going to be hell.
This is Nasha Thomas.
For 12 years, she was a dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York.
When she was still a student, she saw the ballet piece Cry for the first time.
It was something that was just, you know, it took your breath away.
It's 16 minutes long, it's incredibly difficult, and it's performed by one dancer.
Newspapers have described it as almost sacred and grueling.
Sometimes the dancers bleed.
One writer, instead of describing the dance, said quote the only appropriate words in this instance are buy a ticket and see for yourself.
They call the dancers who can do it cry women.
Cry women were godlike.
You know, if you got to do cry, it was a whole other level.
The very first cry woman was Judith Jamieson.
It was one of those kinds of pieces that I would rush to the wings to watch whenever she was performing.
This is Donna Wood Sanders.
It was just beautiful.
Judith Jamieson debuted Cry in 1971 with Alvin Ailey's Dance Company.
She and Alvin Ailey had spent days together going through the steps.
It was three parts written to three songs.
I have been told Alvin's mother was coming to see his company in New York for the first time and he wanted to create a birthday gift for her.
And he and Judy went into the studio and came out with this incredible piece.
On opening day, Judith had a tech rehearsal, hours before the performance.
Judy had never done the whole piece all together, you know, straight through.
So in rehearsals they do a little bit here, a little bit there or work on different things, but she had never done the whole piece full out.
Judith tried on the costume Alvin had ordered, a dress, but it didn't look right.
So instead of running the whole piece through, they tried to find a new one.
Alvin sent someone to buy a white leotard.
Judith put on a white skirt she'd used for another piece.
In the beginning of the dance, Alvin had Judith carry a white cloth, about 15 feet long.
Here's Judith in a 2018 interview.
That white cloth represents everything in the beginning.
Slavery and a child and a cloth to be ironed and something to scrub the floor with and a crown on your head and being hung by your neck.
It just represents so much.
So that was the most difficult section he did, except all the explanation I just gave you, I didn't have
I didn't even know it was a birthday present for his mom.
About halfway through the performance that first night, Judith stopped being able to feel her leg.
When she finished, the audience cheered for almost 10 minutes.
Backstage, Alvin told her she was wonderful.
Later, she saw a copy of the program and the dedication Alvin had printed.
For all Black women everywhere, especially our mothers.
Here she is in an interview recorded in 2020.
This is dedicated to all Black women, especially our mothers.
Oh, thank goodness.
I didn't know that because that cloth is literally the weight of the world.
That first section was the statement that he was making about how much we are carrying as Black women.
At 4 a.m. the morning after the performance, Judith's phone rang.
It was Alvin.
He told her she was in the New York Times, that they'd written she was a triumph.
Judith remembered she replied, OK, thanks.
I'm a little tired.
At first, Judith was only supposed to perform Cry for a few nights.
But people kept asking the box office at the theater when they could see Judith Jamison in Cry.
So she ended up dancing at 26 shows in a row.
I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Love.
One of Alvin Ailey's closest friends said that Alvin didn't like to talk about his life growing up.
He was born at home in Texas, in a town called Rogers, in 1931.
His mother's name was Lula Cooper.
For work, she picked cotton and did other people's laundry or cooking.
She used to carry him on her back when she picked cotton and sing to him.
And, you know, he grew up and attended a Baptist church.
Nasha Thomas.
When Alvin got a little older, four or five, he picked cotton, too.
He and his mother moved around to different places, staying with family.
They would roast and sell peanuts outside of a movie theater.
Alvin would eat them when he got hungry.
Sometimes Alvin's mother drank, and Alvin said she could get angry.
He and his mother went on walks together in the woods and picked flowers.
One night he remembered he got sick and she carried him on her back for eight miles to the doctor.
On Saturday nights she liked to go dancing.
Alvin would watch from outside.
He remembered seeing women in red dresses and men in suits.
He didn't know his father, even though he was named after him.
He just heard that his father was wild and liked to chase members of the Ku Klux Klan on horseback.
Alvin only ever saw one picture of him.
Many years later, when he was in his 50s, Alvin decided to start talking about what it was like growing up.
He asked a journalist named A. Peter Bailey to help him write about his life.
Alvin told Peter that he had always wondered about a memory of one night when he was about five years old.
His mother had come home late from work.
She was crying and had bruises.
Alvin pretended to be asleep.
He never asked her about it. but he heard that she had been raped by four white men.
Alvin asked if Peter would ask his mother if that was true.
She told Peter that it was.
When Alvin was around 11, he and his mother moved to Los Angeles.
She started cleaning people's houses.
Alvin wrote.
I remember very well seeing my mother on her knees scrubbing these white folks' rooms and halls.
That image is in my ballet cry.
Then she got a job working overnight in a factory, making airplanes.
It was the middle of World War II.
One of their neighbors, a woman named Ophelia, would take care of Alvin.
One day, Alvin said, Ophelia shot her boyfriend in the leg because she thought he had another girlfriend.
Alvin came home from school and saw her on the top of the stairs, telling the police she'd done it.
He put Ophelia in cry, too.
In middle school, Alvin collected records.
He loved Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire and would dance in his backyard.
In high school, he did gymnastics.
And a friend took him to a modern dance class, taught by a man named Lester Horton.
Alvin kept going back to Lester Horton's classes, and eventually he joined his dance company.
And in 1958, Alvin started his own dance company in New York.
He wanted the company to be all black dancers and slowly recruited people like Judith Jamison.
He always used to say, I love people who dance.
Donna Wood Sanders.
And that's very different.
You're not looking for a particular body type.
He wanted people that dance.
Judith Jamison was 5'10".
One dance critic wrote... that anyone who's seen her on stage is convinced she's six feet five.
Alvin said she looked like his neighbor, Ophelia.
Extremely long, you know, the length of her arms, her legs, everything about her, statuesque.
Judith had grown up in Philadelphia.
Her parents loved opera and classical music, and they put her in ballet classes when she was six.
In 1964, when she was 22, she got her first part as a professional dancer.
It was a piece for the American Ballet Theatre in New York.
Judith's character was a black maid in the South before the Civil War.
After that she couldn't find more work.
So she got a job riding a logboat ride at the New York World's Fair, but she kept auditioning.
Then, a few days after Judith auditioned for a TV part she didn't get, she got a call from Alvin.
He said that he'd seen her audition, that he had a small dance company about 10 people and he asked if she would like to join.
She said yes.
Judith was known for hearing things in music that other dancers didn't.
Once she said, the dancer is music, where the notes come to life.
She just had a magnetism that went on forever.
There was always a a driving force in her performances.
He would choreograph on her, and she added things, he added things.
Judith and the other dancers would rehearse at night, sometimes after midnight, and work other jobs during the day.
Alvin later said that he and Judith couldn't stand each other.
Judith, quote, didn't get my message and was argumentative in rehearsals.
They would disagree about music and what they heard in it.
Judith wrote that Alvin quote could be as loving as he could be insulting and that there were no gray areas in my reactions to Alvin.
I was either absolutely ecstatic or wanted to tell him to leave me alone and get out of my life.
In 1971, Alvin made cry.
Suddenly, Judith started getting requests for interviews and guest performances.
She danced cry around the world.
People say it made her a star.
Later, Alvin said, that was the work that broke the ice between us.
We began to move toward each other.
We'll be right back.
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Do it the right way with Indeed. is it to have a 16-minute solo?
To be honest, I don't think there's any other repertory in the Ailey's rep that's 16 minutes long.
I mean, yeah, it's really tough and it should be hard.
Constance Damatiu is one of the dancers in the Ailey company who performs Cry today.
How many Cry ladies are there in the company?
Right now there is, I would say, five cry ladies, but three of those ladies have only done the third section.
So as of right now, there's only two of us that know the entire ballet.
Judith wrote that at first Alvin didn't want anyone but her to perform cry, but eventually they had to start teaching other dancers to do it.
In an interview in 2000, Judith said, I choose women for the ballet who can carry its weight.
They must be able to fill the stage from the very beginning.
And she said, they also must breathe.
Judith taught Donna Wood Sanders the ballet.
We always get notes, always get notes.
Donna, be sure that you make it from upstage right all the way to downstage right.
You only have, you know, make sure you get all the way from the corner to the other corner, you know.
Remember that you are a goddess.
Remember how big, you know, the image is.
Remember, or make sure that your leg gets a little higher.
Make sure that your body is over to the side.
Make sure we got corrections all the time.
Judith also helped Nasha Thomas get the dance right.
Now Nasha teaches it herself.
Earlier this year, on Mother's Day weekend, Nasha taught a special workshop on cry.
It was also Judith Jamison's birthday.
She would have been 82.
She died in 2024.
I'm going to learn a little bit from each section.
I'm going to give some of you the opportunities to put on a skirt, hold a cloth.
You start walking towards the audience with this cloth, looking side to side, you know, almost like a cry for help or like how dare you stand there and do nothing?
It's saying nothing.
And that walk has to be so grounded for you to get the audience's attention right away.
The cloth represents many different things.
It represents a body that you're carrying, looking for a place to put down.
It represents a rag that you're scrubbing the floor with.
It represents a crown on your head.
It represents a shawl that you wrap around your shoulders.
Eventually the dancer lays it down.
Constance says it looks like a mother placing her child's body on the ground.
She just kind of, you know, uses her arm and hand to graze over the cloth like she's saying her last goodbyes.
The dancer leaves the cloth, but later she comes back to it.
She uses it to scrub the floor, then wraps herself in it and wraps it around her head.
Then she puts it back down.
As the first song ends, the dancer slowly lays on the floor.
When she's laying down, her body is like in the shape of a cross.
And she gets up because she feels like, you know, she hears her name being called.
And then there's a quick head turn, like her name's being called again.
I feel like that moment is, like I don't know, this divine energy or maybe it's God, or maybe it's your child that's calling your name to tell you to get up.
Then the next song begins.
The second section is dealing with loss.
And it starts in the beginning with this little movement of the rib cage and it's very, very slight.
You know, you get that sense of, oh, she's had enough or, you know, she has nothing left.
That's when you actually kind of see her sob and cry.
Blow, boom, hear it on the other side.
Then on a train north, bop, bop.
Baby, did you hear the whistle?
Bop, bop, bop, blow.
And the third section is triumph and overcoming and being free and celebrating the existence that you're still here.
And through all of that, you have made it.
Third section, straight gang gang.
Gang gang section is what we call an African dance.
And it really is just about higher energy pumping.
You know, we did kibbas and head rolls.
I would try to out head roll myself every time I did the ballet.
Can I do six head rolls this time?
Can I do seven?
The third section, that is the being shot out of a cannonball section, you know.
She's moving the skirt and lifting her head up high and twirling in circles, looking up into the sky and dancing.
The skirt is almost like an extension of her arms.
It almost looks like wings.
While the dancer swings her arms, holding the skirt, spinning in circles, she bends backwards.
In the workshop, Nasha told the dancers they should bend back far enough to see the wall behind them.
Constance says at this point in each performance.
The rest of the dancers stand on the sides of the stage, hidden just behind the curtains, for support.
And what people don't get to see is, you know, at the end of the ballet you're so exhausted you really just want to fall to the floor.
But we have to stand up and we have to twirl to each side to give our bow to the audience.
And, you know, Mr. Ailey always wanted the women to receive flowers.
So we get our flowers and we bow.
And then, once that curtain comes down, every lady falls to the floor and And then you see your peers rush from the side to hand you napkins, to pat you down water, you know, to rehydrate.
And, you know, someone grabs your flowers to carry for you and they help you up.
What is the physical toll of the?
I mean, in that first section there's a part where the dancer is on their knees, kind of walking forward in a way.
And I just thought, I kept thinking about... your knees.
Oh, yes.
We call that the cry knees.
The skin on your knees becomes very raw, I tell you.
And, you know, we can't wear knee pads.
And so there are moments, especially when you're rehearsing that piece quite often and performing, you know, sometimes you tape them up and sometimes it's like oh, I think I have enough skin.
And By the time the curtain comes down, you realize you have blood on your skirt.
And of course, that's not good for our wardrobe.
So we try to let them know, hey, I'm sorry, there's a blood stain on my skirt.
So they can remove it and make the skirt white again.
What do you do when you go home?
Oh, when I go home, I fill up that bathtub with Epsom salt.
And get in it immediately.
Oh, yes.
We'll be right back.
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When I first joined the company, and maybe a year and a year and a half later, I asked Alvin if I could do Cry.
And he said no.
Donna Wood Sanders.
And I thought, oh my goodness, I was like, Oh, but I know I can do it.
I know I can do it because I knew I had the energy to do it.
But he said no.
Actually, he made me wait about another four years before he asked me to learn cry.
Donna finally learned cry in Judith Jamison's apartment.
We got together in her apartment, pushed the furniture aside, and in three days she taught me cry.
How hard was it to learn?
Because I had been watching it since I joined the company, I actually pretty much knew it.
But the molding took a few years before I actually felt that I was in command, if I may say, of the piece.
Judith told Donna about some of the images Alvin had shown her when he first choreographed the dance.
One was a photo from Life magazine of a woman in Nigeria during a famine with a baby in her lap crying out.
In rehearsal, Donna started running through the whole piece three times in a row.
Because I felt if I can do three times, maybe I could do one really well.
To have enough energy, she made herself a special drink.
It was really just blackstrap molasses and hot water right before performance.
She remembers the first time she performed Cry for one of her own.
My aunt, you know, the family is from the South.
We had moved to Ohio, et cetera.
And my grandmother, you know, she did clean houses.
And I remember my aunt came in and she said, that is not how you scrub a floor.
I was like, huh, what?
I'm thinking, yeah, I've cleaned floors.
She said, no, that is not how you scrub a floor.
Judith Jamison said that before her performances She liked to sit on the floor of the stage with the cloth.
She wrote, Before it begins, I could be thinking of anything.
My brain might be processing whatever happened to me during the day or two years ago, or a hundred years ago in another life.
Here's Nasha Thomas.
The first time I did it, my daughter was two months old. and I was still breastfeeding.
And I remember it was at the Victory Theater and I was in the bathroom pumping so that I would not leak on stage.
And all I could think of was hearing Judy say when she did the first performance the ballet from beginning to end she felt like her head was on one side of the stage and her lungs were on another.
Six years performing the ballet, the full ballet, I was never not nervous.
I never felt comfortable.
I had the music on my Walkman and I would listen to the music all day.
I would take two or three baths a day.
I would sit in the tub listening to the music, doing the movement.
It was never until I got on stage and that curtain went up that I exhaled.
In six years, I did the same routine all the time.
When I was at the theater in costume, I could not watch the ballet that was before Cry.
I could not talk to anybody.
I could not look at anything.
I could hardly breathe.
And I never lost that feeling of, I'm not going to be able to do it.
It's not going to be good enough.
A dancer named Renee Robinson said Usually, before we cry, ladies are scheduled for the ballet.
We go into a thing a day or two before.
When you get older, you handle it better.
When Constance D'Amatiou First learned to cry, she was 22.
Now she's 41, and she has two kids.
When I was in my 20s, I thought of it as a character.
Now I feel that it is me.
There are moments when I'm on that stage and I might actually really be crying on the stage but also trying not to lose control.
And ugly cry said that he put in his choreography what he called his blood memories.
He talked about, quote the agony of coming from where I came from and then dancing on the Champs-Élysées the contrast of all that.
On one hand, the darkness, where you feel like you are just nobody, nothing.
And the other hand, you're the king, you're on top of the world.
Nine years after Cry debuted in 1980, Alvin was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
He'd been having extreme mood swings for about a year and spent much of his money on drugs.
He'd gotten the news that a friend he'd learned to dance with in LA had died.
She was 48.
Alvin later said It started with the belief that I had to do something with myself because I might die at any moment.
That if I didn't live quickly it would be too late, committed to a mental hospital for almost two months and his mother came to pick him up.
She stayed with him for weeks.
He moved into a new apartment and started choreographing again.
Nine years later he died of complications from aids.
He was 58.
He asked his doctor to tell people that he was sick with a blood disorder.
More than 4 000 people came to his funeral.
Donna performed a part of Cry.
What was that like?
Oh, that's a hard one.
It was difficult.
It's even difficult to think about it, but they were so important.
I think statements from his heart to the audience and to be able to sort of serve that back to him was important.
I just wanted to send him home.
What section did you perform?
The third section.
So it starts from the rising.
Think of it as the rising, not from the ashes, but the rising from you.
Know all that tribulation and everything, and just to be jubilant.
After Alvin died, Judith Jamieson took over as artistic director of the company.
By then, people had started calling her Alvin's Muse.
She opened a new building and hired more dancers.
Nasha says that every time she performed Cry, Judith still had something to say about how she could do it better.
Finally, it was one performance where I was in DC and she came and Backstage.
It was always like okay, what didn't I do this time?
But she came backstage and she looked at me and she said that was perfect.
And I tell you, when I exhaled, I exhaled.
And I knew before she even told me that that was the performance.
It was like she was performing inside of me.
She was in my ear.
Nasha, get to quarter from center to quarter.
You've got to hit this shape.
This this this arm comes around.
This hand goes up on this musical note.
And for the entire length of the ballet, it was just me and Judy.
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