Dancer and choreographer who rose to fame with Alvin Ailey’s company in New York and became its artistic director

It was a failed audition that set in motion the superlative career of the American dancer and artistic director Judith Jamison, who has died aged 81. In 1965, the then 22-year-old had spent the summer “pushing buttons at the log flume ride” at New York’s World’s Fair, when she auditioned for a television special. She did not get the job; “I was really bad,” she said in a TV interview. But unbeknown to her, the choreographer Alvin Ailey had been watching, and a few days later he called and asked her to join his company, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT).

For 15 years she was one of the company’s most popular and vivacious dancers, and a muse to Ailey. When he died in 1989, she took over as artistic director and the predominantly African American company thrived under her stewardship for 22 years, nurturing new generations of dancers and passing on Ailey’s, and her own, sense of a higher purpose.