When Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to BAM in June, the company will present the long-awaited return of Hymn, one of the late Artistic Director Emerita Judith Jamison’s most beloved works.

  
Hymn debuted in 1993 as a deeply personal tribute to Alvin Ailey following his passing in 1989. Denzel Washington introduced the work when it premiered as part of a gala performance. Being a tribute, one imagines a version of Hymn that might have been tender and elegiac, but Ms. Jamison offered a more daring vision. The choreography is propulsive, teeming, sharp-edged, and full-throated.  

“I wanted it to be a gift from myself to Alvin, and from the dancers to Alvin,” Ms. Jamison said. Hymn honors Mr. Ailey as a man and artist bursting with energy and hungry for movement—truly a celebration of life and dance at its most unabashed. 

The first work under Ms. Jamison’s directorship to feature the entire company (at the time, 33 dancers), Hymn also features a libretto by acclaimed playwright Anna Deavere Smith. Ms. Jamison had seen Ms. Smith perform in her 1991 play Fires in the Mirror, after which Ms. Jamison asked if she wanted to collaborate on a work together.  

The two lived in the same apartment building and Ms. Smith remembered Ms. Jamison burst in one day carrying all her newspapers, describing how she saw the work (including a large spiral staircase that the dancers ascended, which never materialized) and what she wanted Ms. Smith to do. Ms. Jamison was in and of out the door in fifteen minutes.  

“She proposed that I interview the company, all of them,” Ms. Smith said. “She wanted to choreograph a piece for the dancers to perform as I [acted out] their words.” Ms. Smith then interviewed the members of the company, including Ms. Jamison and then Associate Artistic Director Masazumi Chaya.  

The dancers shared their memories of Mr. Ailey. They talked about Katherine Dunham and how Mr. Ailey was part of a long lineage of Black artistic pioneers; they recounted personal relationships with the church and what it meant to perform Revelations; they remembered how during one performance of Mr. Ailey’s work Survivors, a tribute to Nelson Mandela, the theater received a bomb threat. They talked about AIDS, and what it meant to live in a moment when the disease was claiming so many lives. 
 

The scope of the interviewees was vast, “from Judith who actually lived with him at one point, to those who studied with him, those who auditioned for him, those who only saw him walking around, and those who never saw him,” Ms. Smith remembered. “To the question—What would you say today to Alvin if he were here?—most of them had a variation on the theme, I love you. It renders a very beautiful image of a man who was a combination of a creative force, and then someone who was also kind of a brother/father figure, brother/father/mother figure.” 

For all its spectacle—with all 33 dancers performing at the height of their technical and explosive power—the work is profoundly intimate because of these interviews, which were turned into a poetic monologue performed by Ms. Smith. 

“The question of vulnerability—I see that as a big theme in the Ailey legacy,” Ms. Smith said of the process. “A major part of Alvin Ailey’s dream was to make dance accessible on every level. It all comes back to the possibility of vulnerability both on a creative level and, I would say, on an institutional level.” 

As both his successor, his muse, and one of his dearest friends, Ms. Jamison gathered the entire organization into this milestone work of remembrance, and that gift remains just as powerful today as the company returns to the work for the first time since her passing in 2024. 

“When I was learning dance, I was taught not just to do steps, but to dance from some other place, some place very deep inside that’s connected to your heart, and your spirit,” Ms. Jamison once said. “I think Alvin knew choreographically exactly how to do that. And, I consider Alvin to have been my spiritual walker, someone that will always be there with me, even if they’re not there physically.”