By Debra Cash

The late Jeremy Alliger’s Facebook profile picture.

The Boston dance community is reeling. Jeremy Alliger, the dance presenter who founded Dance Umbrella in Boston in 1979, helped create the National Performance Network with David White and went on to develop a series of international dance projects under the banner of Alliger Arts died in his sleep just a few weeks after his 74th birthday.

Arriving in Boston after a childhood spent on Long Island, Jeremy created his own major at Emerson College, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Design and Communication in 1975. It was at Emerson, he told me for a Dance Magazine profile in 1991, that he realized he was a visual person. After graduating, while trying to get a photography business off the ground, he took a gig as a substitute lighting designer for a small dance performance. It was, he often said, dance love at first sight.

Jeremy became the lighting and technical person at the Joy of Movement Center (later the Dance Complex) in Central Square, supporting small local dance companies. He convinced the Joy of Movement to give him a substantial discount if he could rent their studio theater for 40 weeks a year. Those companies became the foundation of Dance Umbrella.

Over the next 20 years, Dance Umbrella, with its tagline “Experience the Unexpected,” shifted the perception of what dance performance could encompass. While some local dancers complained of being sidelined, his intrepid support for work outside the mainstream paid big dividends in audience enthusiasm. Jeremy’s adventuresome taste spanned artists with distinct cultural backgrounds — indigenous Americans, flamenco dancers, Indonesian artists — and avant-garde experimenters. He championed and commissioned work from Mark Morris early in Morris’ career, and when, in 1986, the company ran into cash-flow problems in New York, Jeremy came up with the money to pay the dancers out of his own pocket. That moment of generosity was rewarded by Morris returning for a series of regular Dance Complex-sponsored residencies at Green Street Studios in Cambridge. Later, when Morris joined Mikhail Barishnikov and a small group of renowned modern and ballet dancers in the White Oak Dance Project, Dance Umbrella hosted their premiere performance. In a formal statement, MMDG Executive Director Nancy Umanoff wrote, “When the Dance Group eventually outgrew what Dance Umbrella could accommodate, he encouraged and supported our developing relationship with Celebrity Series of Boston, putting the success of the company ahead of his own interests. It was a characteristic act from someone who cared deeply about artists and their work.”

Jeremy Alliger celebrating the local dance community with Elaine Shannon at the 2016 Boston Dance Alliance Gala. Photo: Liza Voll.

Jeremy loved tap dancing, and when tap master Dianne Walker introduced him to the venerable tap masters of the Copacetic Club at a festival in Colorado, he made a long-term commitment to those artists. Dianne remembers that after one of the Boston tap festivals, he gave the elderly Jimmy Slyde a piece of the flooring so that he could continue to “stay on the wood” on a daily basis. Jeremy also commissioned the first choreography by then-young tap phenom Savion Glover. Jeremy delighted in the emerging languages of hip hop, and his Jazz/Tap/Hip-Hop showcases, through both Dance Umbrella and Alliger Arts, underscored the shared roots of Black vernacular artistry.

Perhaps the most important parts of Alliger’s legacy were the first-ever festival of Aerial Dance and the first international festival of Wheelchair Dance. Both challenged the assumption that the dancing body had to be defined by gravity and by standard definitions of ability. He worked with AXIS Dance Company from the San Francisco area; with Lisa Bufano, who began dancing after she lost her legs; and with former Bill T. Jones dancer Heidi Latsky, who, while able-bodied herself, has worked for years with dancers of varying disabilities in projects such as “On Display.” These collaborations brought dancers who used wheelchairs or had other nontraditional ways of moving to the stage as valid and potentially revelatory counterparts to more conventional dance genres.

Judith Smith, director emerita of AXIS, called Jeremy “an out of the box” presenter, adding, “he wholeheartedly got behind the idea of ‘physically integrated dance’ — combining dancers with and without disabilities — and quite literally helped build the field of integrated dance.” She noted that the international festival he created has yet to be replicated thirty years on.

Jeremy Alliger with Bill T Jones in 1998 at a Dance Umbrella fundraiser. Photo: courtesy of Dance Umbrella

Much of the 1980s and early 1990s was shadowed by HIV/AIDS. Alliger lost staff members, friends, arts administrator colleagues, artists. Dance Umbrella’s often provocative work — particularly salient in the nudity of artists like Eiko and Koma and of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane — was in the bull’s eye of censorship panic during the culture wars of the time, a period that has its MAGA and white Christian nationalism analog today. But Jeremy stepped up, appearing stark naked himself among the volunteers in the final tableau of Bill T. Jones’ 1990 “Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin / The Promised Land.”

In 2018, Jeremy was designated legally blind. For a person whose entire career was shaped by a visual art form, it was a cruel blow, but he continued to attend dance performances, sitting in the front row so that he could see to the limits of his ability. He had the forethought to donate his Dance Umbrella archive to Emerson and had a wonderful time hosting the associated celebrations. Then-Mayor Marty Walsh proclaimed Sept. 26, 2018, the day the Emerson archives opened, Jeremy Alliger Day.

Like more than a few visionaries, Jeremy could be self-aggrandizing, neglecting to give credit to others where it was due. More damaging, he was a lousy, even reckless, business manager. Even though he could pinch a penny — Dianne Walker remembers the bargain-basement travel arrangements he made for a European tour — Dance Umbrella ran up eye-watering debt. In 2000, Dance Umbrella folded in a sea of acrimony, with Jeremy alienating previously supportive board members and collaborators and resisting handing over the reins fully to a successor. Decades later, there are still people in Boston who have not forgiven him his lack of realism, even as they acknowledge the range of his accomplishments.

Jeremy with Judith Smith at Boston Dance Alliance’s regional convening on dance and disability,. Photo: Boston Dance Alliance 

But Jeremy is also remembered as someone who, unwaveringly, put dance first. “He never forgot you — whether you were a headliner or backstage help,” Dianne Walker says.

When news of Alliger’s unexpected death ricocheted across social media this week, Dance Complex Executive Artistic Director Peter Di Muro posted on Facebook, “Dance, through a Jeremy lens, owned genres both familiar and new to us as valid and valuable…this taught the public – audiences! yes! – and writers – reviewers and critics from 6 or so local papers for any given performance citing all our work! – to value diversity in aesthetics, to cherish the dances that entertained as well as the dances that provoked thought and questioning.”

Funeral, shiva, and memorial plans were not yet available at press time. Nonetheless, I feel confident saying that you can honor Jeremy Alliger’s memory by taking yourself and someone you love to experience a dance company you’ve never seen before, opening yourself to the joys of the unexpected.

Debra Cash is a Founding Contributing Writer to the Arts Fuse and a member of its Board.