Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater closes its annual month-long New York City Center season this Sunday, with five more performances on offer. The company’s rich and varied programming, a reason for celebration, feels weighted in the wake of the announcement that the name of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts may experience a change. Ailey’s work has always carried the imprint of American life, shaped by his experience as a Black man and by a gay identity that informed his artistic world. Insistently human, its endurance feels newly tested. In a moment when cultural institutions are being asked to declare what they stand for, Ailey’s legacy offers a measure not of excellence alone, but of moral clarity.
Says Alicia Graf Mack, the company’s new Artistic Director, on the Ailey website and in the printed dance program, Alvin Ailey “imagined the theater not as a place of alienation and elitism, but of welcome and togetherness. A place to celebrate Black artistry in all its diversity and beauty. A place to feel.” This season, major Black American choreographers, including Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Ronald K. Brown, and Alonzo King, all of whom have long linked artistic practice to social engagement, have set works on the 32-member company that affirm the value of Black life while situating it within a broader, shared cultural inheritance.
Activist, dancer, and choreographer, Ailey grew up in rural Texas, picking cotton at a young age with his single mother. His dances, what he called his “blood memories,” reflect hardship and prejudice. They also express the joy and sense of belonging found in the gospel church and in listening to the blues, as well as the formative experience of slipping out at night to watch adults dance.
Ailey’s relationship to political power was not incidental. During the Cold War in 1961, the U.S. State Department invited the Ailey company to perform as the U.S. representatives of the United States as participants of President Kennedy’s international cultural program. (Wikipedia) The invitation placed Black American dancers on global stages as part of a pluralistic national identity.
After President Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson carried that vision forward. Johnson named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as a living memorial to a president who believed the arts and multiculturalism belonged at the center of public life. Johnson’s commitment to social justice was not rhetorical. He signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history, an act that permanently altered the country’s democratic landscape. In that era, investment in culture, civil rights, and national identity were understood as intertwined rather than separate concerns.
That understanding feels far less stable today. The strain has become newly visible in the present moment. On December 31, choreographer Doug Varone announced that his company would cancel its upcoming performances at the Kennedy Center, citing opposition to the political rebranding of the institution. The decision carries real consequences. Like many mid-sized dance organizations, Varone’s company depends on such engagements for its continued viability. In response, supporters are stepping forward, donating to help offset the loss, a reminder that ethical positions in the arts are rarely abstract and are often shouldered by artists themselves.
The danger, then, is not merely one of renaming, but of borrowing cultural legitimacy without honoring its origins. Cultural authority is earned through action, history, and consequence. When institutions drift from those origins, artists are often the first to register the shift, because they experience its effects directly in their work and livelihoods. What is at stake is not a name alone, but the use of cultural inheritance without a corresponding commitment to the values that gave it meaning. Alvin Ailey’s legacy endures because it resists that severance, insisting that art remain grounded in lived experience, collective memory, and ethical responsibility. When that grounding erodes, the loss is not confined to the arts; it diminishes the civic life we share and puts at risk the cultural life of the nation itself.
Catherine Tharin is a choreographer, writer, curator, and educator. Her writing on dance has appeared in The Dance Enthusiast, Interlocutor, Side of Culture, and the Boston Globe. Tharin currently curates The Dance Series at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains, NY, and dance film at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY. Throughout her career, she has championed both innovative and legacy choreography, supported the work of artists across the field, and brought critical attention to the art form. Her latest dance, In the Wake of Yes, was noted as "powerfully animated, positively fizzy, full of droll wit" (Fjord), “The piece blended dance, art, and language into a layered meditation on love and emotional vulnerability." (Eye on Dance).
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