Judith Jamison, Alvin Ailey’s Dowager Empress

This spring Jamison steps down from the Ailey company’s helm after 20 years of keeping her mentor’s mission alive. “Alvin would have hated that word, ‘mission.’ It gets used because we’ve turned into an organization, so therefore we have a mission. I think vision is the word, because he was a vi-sion-ary.”