Cheers filled a packed Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall in August as 63 young dancers in the 2024 AileyCamp Baltimore brought to life the choreography of Alvin Ailey’s jubilant 1960 work, Revelations. The six-week summer intensive program AileyCamp is hosted by the Peabody Preparatory and led by Conservatory Dance faculty artist Diedre Dawkins. Its final concert opened with an arrangement of Ailey’s beloved and best-known work, which explores the African American experience through the Black church using spirituals, gospel, and the blues.
In the audience, Catrish Griffin saw the joy on her daughter Aeris Jackson’s face as she danced on stage with her new friends. “You wouldn’t have known it by the way she tried to talk her way out of it for months,” Griffin says, adding that Aeris, who’s participated in competitive cheerleading since she was four years old, was asking to go to different camps up until AileyCamp started.
“She absolutely fell in love on the first day,” Griffin says, noting that she saw Aeris practicing dance at home, improving her overall flexibility and strength. “I am so glad that I didn’t let her talk me out of sending her. She would not have discovered what she learned about herself, that she is strong and resilient.”
The late dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey believed that “dance is our souls moving.” His creative legacy included launching a summer camp for children aged 11 to 14 in Kansas City, Mo., in 1989 that has grown into 10 AileyCamps nationwide. Dawkins joined AileyCamp Baltimore—which is free for Baltimore City Public Schools students to attend—as a modern dance instructor when it started in 2014 in north Baltimore and became director in 2020. The Peabody Preparatory started hosting the program in 2022.
Dawkins’ staff of 15 led the 2024 campers through classes in percussion with Di Andree Dukes; creative communication with artist Espi Frazier; and ballet, modern, Jazz, and West African dance. Interwoven throughout the entire program are aspects of personal development. “Those transitional middle school years are so difficult,” says Leslie Jones, AileyCamp Baltimore’s personal development instructor and a veteran from AileyCamp New York’s staff. She says she’s found that creative practices can be used as springboards to talk about conflict, self-image, and looking at life through different lenses.
“We use all of those things that we know as artists to address what young people need as they move into adulthood,” Jones says. “We’re helping them to develop critical thinking skills, self-esteem, and self-confidence to navigate the growing pains of figuring out who they are in the world, especially in the context of what the world looks like today.”
“We use storytelling and cultural components inside what we do,” Dawkins says, and mentions one of the West African dances campers learn, kuku. It evolved from a coastal dance done by women who fish the Ivory Coast into an acrobatic form in Guinea.
“And it has lasted throughout the African diaspora,” Dawkins continues. “When I went to Barbados, I experienced a fish festival and realized, This is directly connected to Guinea and to the Ivory Coast. Those [examples] are opportunities to really talk about culture—what is it? What does your family do? What lasts through your family? What is the one thing that your mother says that you must do before you go to sleep? Those sorts of things all connect to what they’re doing and learning.”
Shoshana Jackson, dance advisor at Fort Worthington Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore, has long been familiar with Dawkins and AileyCamp, and her daughter Priscilla Eden-Faye Jackson attended AileyCamp Baltimore for the first time this summer. “I’ve seen a tremendous difference in the young lady my daughter is,” she says. “She has become more aware of her capabilities, creativity, and character.”
As an educator, Jackson knows that dance can be a pathway to open young people up to self-expression and growth. “I got to see my daughter work on the social, emotional aspect of life through this art of dance,” she says, noting that her youngest daughter watched Priscilla perform and now aspires to participate when she’s old enough in two years. “I believe that a lot of young girls and boys will not just benefit from AileyCamp, but it will also be an enhancement for them. It gives them a different perspective of life.”