Sylvia Waters is the Artistic Director for Ailey II, the junior company of the renown Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which she has led since its inception in 1974. Waters was hand-picked by Alvin Ailey to lead the new venture and under her direction Ailey II has grown into a powerful company in its own right. Prior to joining the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater as a principal dancer in 1968, Waters lived in Paris and worked with Michel Descombey, then director of the Paris Opera Ballet, as well as Milko Sparembleck. She performed at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City in 1968.
Waters received her Bachelor of Science degree in Dance from Juilliard. In 1997, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York at Oswego and in the spring of 2010, she was a guest lecturer in dance at Harvard University.
Waters has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts as well as for the New York State Council on the Arts. In 2008, she was awarded the Legacy Award as part of the 20th Annual IABD Festival, Syracuse University’s Women of Distinction Award, and the prestigious Dance Magazine Award.
Were you a child who danced all the time?
I was a child who moved. I was a child with a lot of energy. My mother started me off in piano lessons. So, my physical outlet in addition to piano was sports. Running track was my favorite. Playing basketball. And it was in junior high school that I began to get on the dance track.
How?
In our phys ed classes we had what I called “The General” for a phys ed teacher. We wore these gym suits and we had to get dressed in a minute and a half, then at the end you had to undress….all in a minute and a half! She was all about discipline. The fascinating thing about her was that she never wore a gym suit herself. She was always wearing the most wonderful suits and high heels.
We had these little things called tap bags sewn onto our gym suits. We would put these taps on the bottom of our sneakers and she [the General] would teach us time steps. You know, it took me years to realize how she did that in her high heels. She had obviously danced at one time. She also started an after school modern dance class. It wasn’t called modern dance, it was called interpretive dance.
Then I had a girlfriend, my best friend, who was studying dance at the New Dance Group. She had one of those no-bones bodies. She kept telling me, “You’ve got to come down to the New Dance Group, you really should come.” She’d show me the exercises, the floor work in her little room and I said, “Oh God, this hurts, I can’t do this…”
So all of these signals were coming to me. Even the kids that I baby-sat for, I would take them to dance class on Saturdays and I would watch them do their tap class and their jazz class and their ballet class. So it was all around me, but it wasn’t until my first year of high school, when I saw that there was a choice of gym or dance.
And you chose dance?
Yes. I went right into dance. And it was there that I really began to experience dance movement. I had a teacher who was, I guess, very interested in her students– as you would hope all teachers would be. She would bring in books and wonderful pictures of dancers, modern dancers, all kinds of dance. She finally said to me one day, “You really seem to like this a lot and you seem really good at this, have you ever thought of studying seriously?” The light bulb somehow came on and I went down to the New Dance Group, just as my friend had suggested, and that’s when it started.
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Peter Friedman is an American stage and screen actor who made his Broadway debut in The Great God Brown in 1972. Since then he’s worked on countless productions, including a Tony-nominated performance as Tateh in Ragtime and Drama Desk Award nominated performances in The Heidi Chronicles and The Common Pursuit. Other prominent New York stage credits include 12 Angry Men on Broadway, 
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