Alvin Ailey grew up in rural Texas during the Depression, the son of a sharecropper who left when Ailey was an infant. He picked cotton as a child. His mother took him to tent revival meetings where the music and physical expression of Black church worship left a permanent impression. They moved to Los Angeles when he was twelve. He discovered dance as a teenager after seeing the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo perform and being mesmerized by what bodies could do on a stage. He studied with Lester Horton, one of the few choreographers in America who ran a racially integrated company. When Horton died suddenly in 1953, Ailey, at 22, took over artistic direction of the company. He moved to New York in 1954, studied with Martha Graham and Charles Weidman, and danced in Broadway shows to pay the bills. He founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958 with a group of seven Black dancers and a shoestring budget. His 1960 work Revelations, built on Black American spirituals, gospel, and blues, traces a journey from sorrow through baptism to celebration. It became one of the most performed works in modern dance history. Audiences have been standing at the end of it for over sixty years. The piece works because it doesn't intellectualize; it transmits the emotional architecture of Black Southern church life directly through the body. Ailey expanded the company into a school, a junior company, and a cultural institution that trained thousands of dancers from every background. He struggled with depression and substance use for much of his adult life. He was hospitalized multiple times. He died on December 1, 1989, at 58 of a blood dyscrasia his doctor publicly attributed to a rare blood disorder. Ailey had asked him to avoid mentioning AIDS to spare his mother the stigma that still surrounded the disease. The company he built has performed for an estimated 25 million people in 71 countries.