THE NEW YORK TIMES, WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 2020 N C5Troy Powell was dropped as the artistic
director of Ailey II, the junior troupe of the
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, after
an outside investigation concluded that he
had engaged in “inappropriate communica-
tions” with adult students in the company’s
training program, a spokesman for the com-
pany said on Monday.
Mr. Powell was put on a leave of absence
in June, when an investigator was retained
to look into “troubling comments” made
about the artistic director on social media,
said the spokesman, Christopher Zunner, in
a statement.
The investigator reported that Mr. Pow-
ell, 51, had communicated inappropriately
with adults in the Ailey School, the educa-
tional arm of the troupe, who were inter-
ested in moving up to the junior company.
The statement did not provide any details
as to the nature of the communications.
“Because his conduct was inconsistent
with the standards expected of Ailey’s staff,
executive leadership concluded that Mr.
Powell could not continue in his position
with the organization,” the statement said.
In an Instagram video posted last month,
Addison Ector, a former student at the Ailey
School, said that during his time there, Mr.
Powell messaged him and sent him an
“unwanted picture.” Mr. Ector, who said
that he later unsuccessfully auditioned for
Ailey II, said he “ended it right there” with
Mr. Powell.
Mr. Ector said in the video that he knew of
other students who had received messages
from Mr. Powell.
“He tries to get them to go out,” Mr. Ector
said. “He tries to get them to go to his
house.”
Mr. Powell did not immediately respondto requests for comment.
The Ailey School trains dancers, ages 2 to- Its students often progress to spots with
Ailey II, whose dancers tend to feed into the
main company. (In 2014, the company said
that nearly 70 percent of its members at
that time had been in Ailey II.)
Mr. Powell, who stepped into the role of
artistic director of Ailey II in 2012, is the sec-
ond person to lead the troupe since it
started in 1974. He started at the Ailey
School when he was 9 years old and moved
up to Ailey II, and then the main company;
next, he became a master teacher for the
Ailey School and resident choreographer
for Ailey II.
Mr. Powell was mentored by Sylvia
Waters, who led Ailey II for nearly four dec-
ades. In the years since he became artistic
director, the Ailey company has said, Mr.
Powell, a highly acclaimed dancer in his
own right, brought a “fresh dimension” to
the junior company.
Mr. Powell’s biography has been removed
from Alvin Ailey’s website.
Troy Powell sent ‘inappropriate’
messages to some adult
students, the company said.
Troy Powell had been the artistic director of the Ailey II dance troupe since 2012.MIREYA ACIERTO/WIREIMAGE, VIA GETTY IMAGESAiley II Dance Troupe Fires Its Artistic Director
Gia Kourlas contributed reporting.
By JULIA JACOBSAyodele Casel is a top-shelf tap dancer, as
generous of spirit as she is precise in tech-
nique. But years ago, she discovered that
even appreciative audiences didn’t always
grasp all that she was trying to communi-
cate with her feet.
“They would come up to me after shows
and say things like, ‘That was really good,’ ”
she recalled in a phone conversation from
her apartment in the Bronx. And while she
appreciated the praise, she found it “a bit
one-dimensional.”
In response, she began explaining herself
— with words, speaking as part of her tap
performances.
“Tap dancers always talk about how the
dance moves us, but I also feel that we move
the dance,” she explained. “Our upbringing
and life experience inform how we do what
we do and why we do it. I thought that if we
gave people more context, if we shared
more of our humanity, then they might see
themselves in us, and the dancing would be
a bonus.”
“Diary of a Tap Dancer” is what she
called the 2005 show that emerged from this
idea and the five versions that have fol-
lowed. What’s most distinctive about the
sixth, besides its being a video series, is a
widening of focus. This one has many danc-
ers, many diaries.
The past year has been a busy one for Ms.
Casel: a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard, a
triumphant show at the Joyce Theater, per-
formance and teaching gigs all over. “Two
weeks before the pandemic was declared, I
had been in like five different cities on seven
different planes,” she said. “I just wanted to
sit down for a little, so when they said you
have to shelter in place, I was so grateful.”
Stuck inside, she took stock. “Thinking
back over the last 25 years of my life as a tap
dancer, I felt so fulfilled,” she said. “I real-
ized that what I really want to do is amplify
other voices in my community.”
So a few weeks back, when New York City
Center asked her if she had a project she
wanted to work on, she had an answer. Each
Tuesday through Aug. 25, a new installment
of “Diary of a Tap Dancer, v. 6: Us” will de-
but on the City Center website. (The videos
will remain up indefinitely.) And while this
week’s entry featured Ms. Casel — in verbal
and tap conversation with the young Andre
Imanishi in Japan — the rest make room for
those other voices.
The videos, directed by Ms. Casel and her
wife, Torya Beard, are short, around five
minutes, a mix of tap and talk, photo-album
montages, old footage and new. It’s all been
edited, but “we’re not going to pretend
we’re in a dance studio or on a movie set,”
Ms. Casel said. “These are video diaries
about where we are now.” Some address
Covid-19; others express how tap has been
misunderstood or dip into long overdue
conversations about tap and race.
In the series opener, the voluble and al-
ways swinging 60-year-old veteran Ted
Levy compares the way that the pandemic
has caused people to reassess their lives
with the kind of self-searching that tap
dancers do while practicing, or woodshed-
ding. “The whole corona thing was nature’s
way of stopping everybody,” he says. “The
whole world gets to do what we do on a reg-
ular basis: We got to go in the shed” and fig-
ure things out.angle more directly. “My entry is about
identity, about history, about racism,” Ryan
Johnson said. “It’s not an attack on white-
ness. It’s about me finally being in a space
where I can say what I’ve been feeling.”
Actually, Mr. Johnson has been speaking
his mind for years. His Washington com-
pany Sole Defined presents “percussicals,”
shows that use African-American percus-
sive dance to address social injustice in
Black communities, and its extensive arts
education program is centered in using art
for change.
Still, “Diary of a Tap Dancer” seems dif-
ferent to him in its potential reach. “You
mean I can actually talk about something
real on the City Center platform, and it can’t
be censored?” he recalled asking Ms. Casel.
A lot of the something real has to do with
race. “It’s important to say that tap dance
was created by Black people,” he said, “but
we don’t like to have that conversation be-
cause it’s connected to slavery.”
And the issues, of course, aren’t only his-
torical. Touring with “Stomp” and Cirque du
Soleil, Mr. Johnson said, he’s appeared on
major stages across the world. “But when I
get offstage, I go right back to being a Black
man,” he said. “And that means people look-
ing at me like I don’t belong in the hotels
that we’re staying in. The people who want
a picture or autograph are the same people
that if they saw me walking down the street,
would pull their children closer or grab their
bag.”
“There’s so much pain, and that’s why wedance,” he continued. “For me, it’s a spiritu-
al thing. Half the time my eyes aren’t even
open. Some of my best shows come when
I’m upset. Like when I think about six or
seven years ago, when I got beat up by two
cops in my mom’s driveway and I called her
name and nothing could happen. That was
what initiated me to use my art for reform.”
The video diary of Lisa La Touche tells a
more recent story. In 2006, she moved with
two suitcases to Chicago from Calgary, and
for the past 12 years, she has lived the
dream in New York, including a stint on
Broadway in “Shuffle Along.” In March, she
found herself with three suitcases and her
toddler son on a plane back to Calgary, flee-
ing the virus.
The move was supposed to be temporary.
But as she recovered from Covid-like symp-
toms in her mother’s basement and found a
place in Calgary for herself and her son, she
gradually surrendered to a gut feeling: She
wasn’t going to return to New York.
And who helped pack up her New York
apartment and put her belongings on a
truck to Canada? Who helped unload the
truck on the other end and build her a wood-
en board to dance on? Tap dancers did.
“I’m mixed race,” Ms. La Touche said.
“It’s complicated in my family right now
and I’m careful about what I sign up for be-
cause I’m so fragile. But making this diary
has helped me keep my sanity, processing
what I’m experiencing while having a pair
of tap shoes. Those who haven’t been heard
from, need to be heard.”Talking About the Feelings That Move the Feet
In Ayodele Casel’s
video series, tap
dancers share their
work, pain and
deepest thoughts.
By BRIAN SEIBERT‘Tap dancers always talk about how the dance moves us, but I also
feel that we move the dance.’
AYODELE CASEL
CREATOR, ‘DIARY OF A TAP DANCER’‘Tap dancers are more than just rhythms. We’re more
than a smile and a song, but you have to set up a
context in which the dance can be understood.’
TED LEVY
VETERAN DANCER
MARIDELIS MORALES ROSADO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAyodele Casel, near right,
with her wife, Torya
Beard. The two directed
the video series “Diary of
a Tap Dancer, v. 6: Us,”
which includes an
interview with the tap
dancer Ted Levy, below.
“Tap dancers are more than just
rhythms,” he said in an interview last week.
“We’re more than a smile and a song, but
you have to set up a context in which the
dance can be understood.”
Ms. Casel calls Mr. Levy “an encyclope-
dia of the art,” and he calls her “the Oprah
Winfrey of tap.” Recounting Zoom calls
among the project participants, he mar-
veled at how easily she could get everyone
to open up emotionally.
“I’ve found that dancers don’t take stock
of their feelings with any kind of frequency,”
Ms. Casel said. Tap is a form of emotional
expression and an outlet, but “you also re-
ally need to say it out loud.”
For many of the contributors, doing so in
public is new, and scary. The video diary of
Starinah Dixon addresses this newness di-
rectly. “All of my choreographic work has
been related to happiness or paying
homage to the forefathers of this art form or
about social justice,” she said from her
home in Chicago. “This seems a time to let
people know about myself as a person.”
Growing up amid “turmoil and chaos in
one of the worst neighborhoods of Chicago,”
she said, she took after her mother, a “re-
main calm through the storm type of per-
son.” Now she wants to be more honest
about her doubts and pain. “During quaran-
tine, I’ve had a lot of time to think,” she said.
“For so much of my life, I’ve done what ev-
erybody else wanted me to do. But I’m
about to be 33, and it’s time for me to speak
my truth.”
That truth doesn’t exclude the political.
“For so much of the world, the face of tap is
still white,” she said. “For a long time, when
I told people I was a tap dancer, they would
say, ‘I didn’t know that Black people did
that.’ Well, tap is for everybody, but it is also
Black.”
Other diarist-dancers take the political