AT AUDITION TIME, it takes more than superb arabesques, turns and extensions to win over Judith Jamison, the artistic director of what is today, arguably, the world's most successful modern dance company.
'What I'm looking for is a person who understands their individuality,' says Jamison, in the Kempinski Hotel in Dresden, Germany, just across from the Semper Opera House, where her company - the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (AAADT) - performed for two weeks this summer.
'I don't care if they fall by accident,' she says. 'I'm looking for that do-or-die energy that comes when you're well trained. I have to see more than you being able to do 10 turns. I'm looking for how you did that and what's inside your head, heart and spirit.'
The last time Jamison held auditions - for two positions - some 200 women showed up. She picked only one. She says she'll keep auditioning until she finds a quality that lifts a certain performer beyond being merely technically skilful. 'It's hard,' she says. 'Because of what I ask you to do: really envelop yourself in characters or abstractness, and imbue it with your own versatility or originality. But I have an eye for it, like some people when they go shopping. It hops out at you.'
That the AAADT can be so exigent in choosing its 30 dancers is testimony to how far the company has come since its namesake, Alvin Ailey, and a group of young, black, modern dancers gave their first performance in 1958 in the modest surroundings of New York City's Young Men's Hebrew Association.
For much of the group's history, survival was the driving issue. In 1970, Ailey announced the company might be dissolved because of insufficient funds. It wasn't the first or last time the company faced financial crisis. When Ailey died in 1989, the company was near bankruptcy.