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Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

“I wanted to dance—so I did,” Antonio Douthit says simply. “Born to dance, love to dance … it’s the same thing.”

But a mere love for the art would not earn a dancer the quick and straight trajectory to the New York stage that Douthit has followed. A principal dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, he’s the man The New York Times called “the splendid Mr. Douthit,” as it praised his “heroic line, from his elegantly parted fingers to the force of his pointed feet,”  proclaiming him “not so much a star in the making: he’s arrived.”

For a newly crowned star, Douthit is refreshingly devoid of ego. He chats not about himself, but about other people, whether it’s Ailey artistic director Judith Jamison or the young dancers he and fellow company member Kirvin Boyd worked with at COCA this winter.

“We got the structure of a ballet out in two days,” he says brightly. “They learned it, we polished it—it’s so amazing to see that same discipline, how COCA is still pushing dancers beyond their limit.”

Douthit himself is an alum of COCA—that’s where he took his first dance class at age 16. Though he studied everything from jazz to hip-hop, he was particularly fond of ballet, which led to studies at Alexandra Ballet in Chesterfield, the Joffrey Ballet and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, which brought him into the fold upon his graduation from high school in ’99. In ’04—shortly after being promoted to soloist—he spotted a notice that one of Ailey’s dancers had dropped out midseason; Douthit says the fact he aced that audition still doesn’t feel quite real to him, repeating that old show business maxim: “You’re only as good as your last performance.” If that is the case, he has nothing to worry about: The Times raved about his recent interpretation of Maurice Béjart’s The Firebird, a new addition to the company’s repertoire. Douthit returns home this month with Alvin Ailey to perform that work, along with several other pieces, including the company’s signature work, Revelations.

“It’s very spiritual,” Douthit says of Revelations. “You don’t need a Christian background to get what it’s saying. Every time I go out onstage, it’s a new experience—it’s live theater, and you never know what could happen. Not everything we do is like that, but I think a lot of dance is a humanistic, spiritual thing. Everybody can dance, and it can heal people all over the world … so it’s the beauty of the human spirit that we’re giving to you.”