The Next Stage

Built like an Adonis, and performs like a god.

Seemed to have wings.

It’s a privilege to observe such mastery and beauty.

Incandescent.

Proving that even the impossible is possible.

He can fly…

For any dancer, reviews describing you as more than human—or, at least, gifted with the power of flight—would be intoxicating, never mind seeing that in The New York Times and Men’s Health. Who ascends to the very pinnacle of the international dance world? Who makes a living as a dancer? A handful of people. Your career lasts as long as the body does. If you’re hungry enough to make it, you don’t just want to dance; you need to dance. You keep going, because if you leave there are literally millions of equally talented people ready to take your place. You dance until your joints grind together. Until your toes are gnarled as tree branches. You bleed. You rub on liniment. You slap on heat packs and ice packs and grit your teeth through pain, though once you are out there on the stage, everything disappears, including the aches and twinges. And when your cartilage and muscles give out to age and wear and tear, you choreograph. Or start a studio. In New York or Paris, of course.

Last December, when The New York Times reviewed Alvin Ailey’s current season, its dance critic effervesced over St. Louis–born Antonio Douthit-Boyd’s performance of “Awassa Astrige/Ostrich,” a piece that, as the Times noted, only a supernaturally gifted dancer can carry off without seeming absurd. Antonio convinced the audience that the ostrich was God’s most gorgeous, rather than his goofiest, creature.

“Among the many superb dancers of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Antonio Douthit-Boyd has recently risen to a special magnificence,” the Times wrote. “In the company’s current season at City Center, he’s in his prime.”

Antonio’s husband, Kirven Douthit-Boyd, was called out as another company luminary, praised for his electric and near-shamanic performance of David Parsons’ “Caught.” It’s a technically tricky piece that requires a dancer to be almost constantly leaping into the air, triggering a strobe that lights him only when he’s airborne. When done flawlessly, it gives the illusion that the dancer is flying. Though their superpowers are different, they are both seemingly beyond human. As Antonio has observed, Kirven’s movements are pinpoint accurate—no one can execute a turn like he can—whereas Antonio is all about line. And anyone who knows anything about dance would tell you, they’re both in their prime, could easily dance in New York for five if not 10 years if they chose.

But what they have chosen is very different. Antonio, often with Kirven at his side, has returned to St. Louis each January to teach at the Center of Creative Arts. This January, the couple arrived in St. Louis as usual but, this time, made a huge announcement: They are moving to St. Louis to serve as co–artistic directors of COCA’s dance department. That doesn’t mean three months here and nine in New York. It means all in. Year-round. Total commitment. Stepping down from the company at Ailey, leaving New York, and giving up the stage, the glamour, and world travel for a much quieter existence in the Midwest.

In America, where people stand in line for two hours for the chance to audition with their ukuleles for a shot on America’s Got Talent, some people might ask: What? Are you guys crazy?

If the Douthit-Boyds are exceptional dancers onstage, they are equally exceptional human beings offstage. For the past decade, they’ve both returned at least once a year to the small schools that nurtured them: COCA for Antonio and Boston Youth Moves for Kirven.

They’ve been together for almost a decade, almost as long as they’ve danced side by side in the company. (Antonio joined Ailey in 2004, the same year that Kirven joined the junior company, Ailey II). They were friends first; both were dating other people when they met. After those relationships ended, Kirven asked Antonio to Starbucks and was so nervous, he spilled hot chocolate on his jeans. After the jitters ebbed away, their compatibility was so obvious, the other Ailey dancers referred to them as the Douthit-Boyds years before they got married.

Alicia Graf Mack danced with Antonio in Dance Theatre of Harlem before following him to Ailey in 2005. She’s now in St. Louis, too; she attended Washington University several years ago, and her husband’s here. She’s also eight-and-a-half months pregnant and on hiatus from Ailey. But in past seasons, when she lived in New York, she stayed with Antonio and Kirven. “I think of them like my brothers,” she says.

Antonio was made to be a dancer, she says: “He’s flexible and strong at the same time. Onstage, he just looks like this masculine, amazing creature. After that first glance, you can’t take your eyes off him, he’s just so striking as an individual.”

Because he trained in both ballet and contemporary dance, he can do nearly anything, including hip-hop. But so can Kirven. “He’s more of a powerhouse dancer,” she says. “He also has a very keen sense of interpretation. It’s always so unique, yet always staying within the realm of what the choreographer wants. I always kind of imagine him as very similar to Alvin Ailey himself… He’s also extremely musical. His body sings.”

Talent was a mutual attractor, she says, but “they both have hearts of gold. I think that’s what brought them together. They’re also very determined, focused, and smart people.” Antonio, she says, has a mature seriousness about him but is also a goofball and charmer. Kirven is searching, curious, always seeking out new experiences.

“He likes to go out to dinners and go see the Sistine Chapel,” Antonio says. “I’m always, like, well, I just want to go to sleep—let’s go home! It’s great because he makes me go out and explore and do all these things… I think it’s kind of like building a house. I have all the wood and nails, and Kirven is the cement. He holds it all together. With the combination, we work really well that way.”

Even during the six grueling months of touring with the company, the two have maintained a relationship that stays in beautiful equilibrium. But just as a graceful en pointe pose looks effortless onstage, it takes a lot of effort—though it’s effort that doesn’t feel like work, because it’s done out of love.

“They respect each other on a human level and on an artistic level,” Graf Mack says. “I think it would be hard to be in the same company with your mate when you have new choreography coming in and new choreographers. You have to audition, so both of them would be auditioning for the same part, and you have to be encouraging to your partner. But for them, I think it’s, like, ‘Your success is my success.’”

The two men come from strikingly different backgrounds. Kirven grew up in Boston, surrounded by a large family that supported him when he came out. (He says it helped that he had a cousin who came out first.) Enrolled in gymnastics and dance classes, he always knew who he was and where he was going. “He came in with a group of kids who were super crazy passionate about dance,” recalls Jim Viera, artistic director at Boston Youth Moves.

“They were in the studio every single day, whether they had classes or not. They would spend weekends going to each others’ houses, watching videos, and teaching themselves the dances. Once, we had a local TV station do a spot on our youth program, and they interviewed him. He was 14 years old. He said, ‘I want to dance with Alvin Ailey.’”

Antonio grew up in North City. He recalls playing in the library as a boy after spending the night at Christ Church Cathedral. At one point, his family stayed at Hope House as his mother struggled with addiction issues. When he began taking classes at COCA and with the Alexandra Ballet, she had a difficult time understanding why dance was worth pursuing and even cut up his dance belt, thinking, he says, that it was women’s underwear. She also didn’t understand his sexuality. In interviews, he is frank and betrays not a trace of bitterness about any of it, though you can sense hints of sadness.

When he began training, he was 16, old for a dance student. Where he ended up is a testament to his natural talent—and a testament to the loving people he was surrounded by, including Indigo Sams, COCA’s former director of community services.

“I always call him my firstborn child,” Sams says, chuckling. “He’s actually not that much different today than he was then. He knew what he wanted in life. He knew he wanted to travel the world and express himself through dance. He’s always been very clear about what he wanted.”

Sams used to take Antonio to the airport for auditions, talk him through his nervousness, and explain to his mother why it was so important that her son keep dancing. “I made a promise to her that I would see this through,” she says. “I’ve cared for him ever since.”

And for Kirven, too. “They’re yin and yang to each other,” Sams says. “They balance each other. And they’re best friends.”

Naturally, Sams attended Antonio and Kirven’s wedding. The two say there was no thunderbolt-out-of-the-sky proposal story. It was clear to them that the Defense of Marriage Act would be struck down, and getting married just made sense. “It was about how we feel about each other and all the things that we want out of life,” Kirven says.  “We did it without even thinking that it would make any kind of a statement.” (As it turned out, it would make national news, with pieces on The Huffington Post and The Grio.)

On June 7, 2013, the two men donned matching gray suits with blue pocket squares. They stood in line at New York’s Office of the City Clerk and were married by a justice of the peace, exchanging matching diamond bands. Twenty-five years after Ailey’s clandestine death from AIDS, the company issued a press release announcing the Douthit-Boyds as the first married same-sex couple within the company’s ranks.

The reception took place at the Alvin Ailey Center. Kirven’s mother and grandmother brought soul food. Kristin Colvin Young, the company’s stage manager, baked a cake. The couple arrived wearing shorts—the better to dance in—and black blazers. Kirven assembled the playlist for the reception but refused to tell Antonio what was on it.

As the strains of the first song came over the PA, Antonio realized why: It was Oleta Adams’ “Get Here (If You Can),” the song his mom sang to him over the phone after he’d left for New York. She didn’t understand his choices, and he was perplexed by hers, but she loved him. She was trying.

“There are hills and mountains between us, always something to get over,” the lyrics went. “If I had my way, surely you would be closer…”

It brought Antonio to tears. The couple embraced.

Antonio’s mother wasn’t there to see the wedding. In the end, addiction had shortened her life. She’d died in 2004, the same year that Antonio joined Alvin Ailey. But the pair chose to get married on June 7 for a reason: It was his mother’s birthday.

When we go to see dance, what we want to see is the illusion of something beyond human: muscles right off a Hellenic statue, the leap through the air that ends with an impossibly cat-soft landing, the balance on toe-tip. As the red and blue gels fade out and the lights darken and the curtain falls, chances are, no one in the audience is thinking about the bloodied toe shoes, the hours of rehearsal, the constant scrutiny of scale and diet. Why ruin the beauty and pleasure of it all?

“The career, and especially dancing with Ailey, is a very respected and sought-after career. You travel the world. You perform for kings and queens and presidents. You perform on television,” Graf Mack says. “The underlying reality is that it’s probably one of the hardest jobs on the planet and can be painful, too. They’ve been pretty healthy during their careers, but you definitely deal with your individual aches and pains every day. You’re away from your family. They’ve been in Ailey for 11 years. They’ve never had a Christmas, because we perform on Christmas. Thanksgiving is the week before opening night in New York, so if you do make it home for Thanksgiving, you can only stay that evening. And you’re not going to want to enjoy the food, because you’re going to be in a unitard the next day for check rehearsal.”

“They’re both on the same track as far as what they want to do with their lives,” Jim Viera adds. “It was a little shocking to me that they decided to, at their highest moment, step down from the company into this other facet of their life.”

And, by turn, they hope to change other people’s lives. “I’ve always wanted to give back to St. Louis,” Antonio says. “You kind of want to leave when you’re at the top; you don’t want to do it when you have one leg in the door and one out. And it kind of helps COCA, because we’re still fresh, we’re still young, and people still want to see us dance.”

Jeannette Neill, executive director of Boston Youth Moves, says that the Douthit-Boyds are two of the most generous people she knows, and it makes perfect sense that they would want to contribute something larger to the dance world. “Certainly, education is a huge component of that,” she says. “I know Kirven is extremely aware of that. And when I’ve spoken to Antonio, it has seemed that they both are looking ahead—not just their own personal careers, but in a way they could have an impact on this art that they both so passionately love.” It’s a sad thing, she says, for people like herself who aren’t going to see them perform as often.

“But I don’t think they will be leaving the stage for all time,” she adds.

The Douthit-Boyds say they’ll still be involved in Ailey and plan to bring the company, in various forms, to St. Louis. They can never sever that connection, even if they’re no longer on the East Coast. “We would like to make it like the Ailey School in New York, giving kids very good training,” Kirven says of COCA’s dance program. “We don’t want to make it a company. We want the kid to choose where they want to go or to be able to audition for a company right out of high school. We want the kids to have the option to do anything they want to do.”

For now, the two are focusing on dancing as they finish up their last tour with Ailey, which ends in July in France and Germany. “Then, they land here in August,” says Kelly Pollock,

COCA’s executive director. “Their first day will be company auditions.”

The move has been in the works for years. “We really made it official this past spring and then had to keep it quiet for the past, what, nine months?” she says with a laugh. “The good news is, they are coming into a very successful dance program with a great foundation.”

Now, they hope to build on that foundation. They’d like to get more boys involved, grow the ballet program, make COCA a regional dance training hub, recruit dancers from other states, beef up the intensive summer program, make COCA a destination for dance and dance training.

“I think they’re going to do great,” Sams says. “They know COCA’s needs and the kids’ needs. But I think it’s like most things: When you change careers, even though you’re in a related field, you know you have to be on the front end of it—explaining your work is going to be a different thing. When you’re dancing, you’re performing someone else’s thoughts. Now, you’re going to have to explain your own thoughts and how you’re doing things. That will take some time and practice. That will be a different thing for them, and I think they know that. It’s one thing to be able to visualize what you believe things should look like and a whole other thing to inspire other people to see that vision.”

nd, of course, there will be other adjustments that won’t be quite so challenging—such as having a yard for their two dogs. “We’ve been on Zillow and realestate.com and all of these websites almost every single day,” Kirven says, laughing.

They want to put down roots. They want to have a family. They want to let the muscles relax, just a bit. “[Kirven] hasn’t been settled since he was 15 years old; he’s never really had roots, because he was always on the road,” Viera says. “He is very close to his nephews. He is great with kids. And now he has the opportunity to put down some roots and raise a family. I am sure both he and Antonio will be amazing parents.”

“I love that they have made the decision to do this together,” Graf Mack adds. “Antonio’s the one who has the connection here in St. Louis. I think it’s amazing that Kirven, who has no family here in St. Louis, is, like, ‘Yeah, I will follow you. I want to see the St. Louis community grow as well.’”

Isadora Duncan, one of dance’s most otherworldly figures, once said that dance must be the highest intelligence in the freest body. The Douthit-Boyds know all too well that the softest, most graceful landings are ones that are practiced, focused, intentional. And that all airborne creatures, no matter how high they fly, must eventually come back down to earth.