June 3, 2015
Dudley Williams, Eloquent Dancer Who Defied Age, Dies at 76
Dudley
Williams, an East Harlem prodigy who dazzled Alvin Ailey company
audiences as a leading dancer for more than four decades, performing
into his 60s, died over the weekend at his home in Manhattan. He was 76.
A
spokesman for the company said Mr. Williams was found dead in his
apartment on Sunday. No cause was given, but the medical examiner’s
office said the death was not considered suspicious.
Mr.
Williams was dancing with the Martha Graham Dance Company when he was
recruited by the choreographer Alvin Ailey as a last-minute replacement
for an Ailey troupe member in 1963. He performed with the Alvin Ailey
American Dance Theater until 2005, continued to dance with Paradigm, a
trio of older dancers he formed with Carmen de Lavallade and Gus
Solomons Jr., and taught at the Ailey School, on West 55th Street in Manhattan, until he died.
At
75, in 2013, Mr. Williams returned to the stage, at City Center, for an
Ailey company New Year’s Eve performance of “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom
of Abraham,” the rousing finale of the troupe’s classic “Revelations,”
which was choreographed by Ailey.
Mr.
Williams’s signature solo, “I Wanna Be Ready,” was also from
“Revelations,” in a repertoire that included Ailey’s “Reflections in D,”
“Love Songs” and “Blues Suite”; Donald McKayle’s “Rainbow Round My
Shoulder,” Lucas Hoving’s “Icarus,” Louis Falco’s “Caravan” and his role
as Nelson Mandela in “Survivors.”
Judith
Jamison, who succeeded Ailey as artistic director, described Mr.
Williams as the epitome of “the male lyric modern dancer.”
Critics
lionized him. In The New York Times, Anna Kisselgoff, the chief dance
critic, wrote in 1984: “Mr. Williams manages to inject the smallest
gestures with an understated but powerful poignancy. One of the finest
American dancers of his era, he has carved a niche for himself as that
rare performer who can dazzle technically without for a moment losing
sight of the dance’s dramatic resonance.”
And
reviewing a City Center performance of “Reflections in D” for The Times
in 1991, Jennifer Dunning wrote: “Mr. Williams’s long arms reached out
from time to time, curved like a powerful bird’s wings yet stretching
with subtle inflection. But the solo, set to music by Duke Ellington, is
essentially a long gentle spiral of continuous movement, rooted mostly
in place. The dance needs the focus Mr. Williams brings to it, but the
murmured eloquence is all his.”
Dudley
Eugene Williams was born in East Harlem on Aug. 18, 1938, to Ivan Leroy
Williams, a carpenter, and the former Austa Beckles. His brother, Ivan
Jr., is his only immediate survivor.
Dudley
was dancing from a young age. Indeed, as he recalled, his mother
enlisted an aunt to find someplace for him to take dance lessons
“before,” as she put it, “he breaks my lamps.” She skimped to buy a
piano, too.
He
flopped at tap dancing and was taunted in the East Harlem housing
projects for his devotion to dance, but he persisted, spending days at
the movies with a friend watching dance films. When, as a 12-year-old,
Dudley stopped to hear his uncle sing at Sheldon B. Hoskins’s theater
school, he peeked into a dance studio and decided to stay, paying for
his lessons by hawking copies of The Amsterdam News.
He
also became a proficient pianist and applied for admission to the music
division of the High School of Performing Arts. When he was told his
application came too late, he was asked if he had any talent besides
piano playing.
“I said, ‘I can dance,’ ” he recalled in 1978. “I thought I’d take dance and switch over after a half term, but I never did.”
After
graduating in 1958, he formed a dance company called The Corybantes,
which toured union halls and Army bases; danced with the May O’Donnell,
Donald McKayle and Talley Beatty troupes; and studied briefly at the
Juilliard School before transferring to Martha Graham’s school on a
scholarship. He was invited to join her company in 1962.
Mr.
Williams said he had been planning to leave the Graham troupe
eventually when Ailey asked him to replace a dancer who had quit his
company just before a season in London. Mr. Williams danced with both
companies for a few years, though he grew unhappy with the Graham
troupe. “I bought a steamship ticket to anywhere, just to get out,” he
said.
“Finally I had to choose,” he said, “and when I told Ms. Graham, she slapped me across the face. I deserved it.”
Working for Ailey was no cakewalk.
“Alvin
used to rehearse us until curtain; he was brutal in that way,” Mr.
Williams said. But he preferred him over Graham, he said, “because he
was doing dances that weren’t about legends.”
“They were more about today people,” he went on. “His work was more humanly possible for me.”
Even
so, Mr. Williams redefined human possibilities. He suffered a knee
injury in the 1960s and was told he would never walk again, but he was
back onstage in two weeks after a regimen of Pilates exercises. Most
dancers stop performing professionally around 30. For Mr. Williams, that
was not even the halfway mark. He pushed his slight 5-foot-8, 130-pound
frame to its fullest.
“I feel that God has given me a gift,” he said, “and if you don’t use it, shame on you.”
In
2003, when Mr. Williams was 65, Ms. Jamison said: “Dudley is surrounded
by dancers two or three generations younger than he is, and there he
is, very spry and very much like a grasshopper. Dudley has a lot to
teach, by just the movement of a hand.”
He taught by example, explaining that a dancer needed a reason for every movement.
“You
can’t just put your hand out,” he said. “You have to know what happens
when you put your hand out and your body goes with it. And I dance to
the music, no matter what it is. I stretch my whole body — you have
fingers, so use them — to every plink of the piano. You must listen to
the music and love it, and then you can do the dance differently every
time.”
Ailey, who died in 1989, tried to recruit Mr. Williams to be his assistant, but Mr. Williams demurred.
“I said, ‘You know, I still want to dance,’ ” he recalled in 2003. “I had a need to dance and I still do.”
“It’s
a hunger — doing it until you do it right,” he added. “It’s a
nervousness that puts me on the stage, it’s palms sweating, feet
sweating, wondering, ‘Am I going to hit this position?’ ”
He
added: “You’re always striving for a perfect performance. And that will
never happen. When it does happen, that’s when I think you should give
it up. The challenge is gone.”
Correction: June 5, 2015
An obituary on Thursday about the longtime Alvin Ailey dancer Dudley Williams, using information from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, misstated the given name of his father and his brother. They are both Ivan, not Iban.
An obituary on Thursday about the longtime Alvin Ailey dancer Dudley Williams, using information from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, misstated the given name of his father and his brother. They are both Ivan, not Iban.
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