In a behind-the-scenes video of a new commercial by Intel, Fraser shares the story of how she overcame her physical struggles and became a professional dancer. After graduating from the Ailey/Fordham BFA in dance program, Fraser spent two years dancing around the world with Ailey II, the highly selective junior company of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She is a founding member of Visceral Dance Chicago and is currently in her third season with the company.

Watch Fraser’s story below.

Courtney Celeste Spears stepped out of the Fordham classroom this fall and onto a world stage as a member of Ailey II, the highly selective junior company of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Spears, a senior in the Ailey/Fordham BFA program in dance at Lincoln Center, recently completed her final Fordham class toward a minor in communications and media studies. She did it remotely while on a six-week tour that took her to Italy and across the United States. Through her professional work with Ailey II, she will also earn the last of the dance credits she needs to complete her BFA before May.

“I am excited to travel and keep feeding myself artistically so I can keep giving to others,” she said shortly before officially joining Ailey II. “I see dance as a vessel to put good back into the world.”

Ailey II’s first stop was Towson University, in her native city of Baltimore, Maryland.

“That was a homecoming for me, and to start off the tour like that was wonderful,” she said. “Between my family, my friends, my family’s friends, my entire old dance studio, and even my first dance teacher, there must have been about 60 people at the two performances.”

As if turning pro and kicking off the tour in her hometown weren’t enough, Spears also learned earlier this year that she had been selected to receive a Princess Grace Award for Dance. The award includes a full-tuition scholarship for her senior year.

Spears is not the only Fordham senior on tour with Ailey II this season. Her friend Gabriel Hyman, a Gates Millennium Scholar and fellow Ailey/Fordham senior, is also in the company. In fact, if you include Spears and Hyman, “more than half of the company [members] this year are Ailey/Fordham BFA grads,” said Spears.

As part of Ailey II’s tour, company members teach master classes to elementary and middle school students in different cities. For Spears, who has taught dance classes in the Bahamas, the classes were the best part of the touring experience.

“I’ve always felt that, as important as dance is as a performing art, it’s also meant to reach people, to communicate something meaningful,” she said.

In particular, Spears was struck by the class she taught in Italy with Troy Powell, Ailey II’s artistic director.

“The students didn’t speak English, so there was a language barrier. But it melted once we started dancing. We forgot we were from different countries and different parts of the world, and somehow they just understood our corrections and our instructions, and we understood them.”

Before she officially started with Ailey, Spears said she felt that much of what was happening was a bit “surreal.” Now that “it’s go time,” she said, “it does feel more real to me. But there are still those moments when I think, ‘Wow, I really get to do this.’”

A Baltimore native, Spears is a senior in the Ailey/Fordham BFA program in dance at Lincoln Center. She is also pursuing a minor in communication and media studies.

“I’ve always felt that, as important as dance is as a performing art, it’s also meant to reach people, to communicate something meaningful. I’ve always wanted to be able to share that,” she says.

The ability to combine academics and dance is part of what first attracted Spears to Fordham. She was set on being able to “dance rigorously and also have a rigorous academic schedule,” and felt that most other universities would force her to compromise one or the other. At Fordham, “it’s like they both got amplified.”

“I was also drawn to the Jesuit mentality of outreach and helping others,” she says, “of continuing to love what you do and excel at it while bringing others up with you.”

Spears has taught dance classes in the Bahamas, her mother’s homeland; completed an internship in Alvin Ailey’s public relations department; and auditioned for professional dance companies. At the end of her junior year, she was invited to become a member of Ailey II, the highly selective junior company of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Her dedication, passion, and desire to help others have earned her recognition. At Fordham, she is the recipient of the Denise Jefferson Memorial Scholarship. And, this past summer, with the help of the Office for Prestigious Fellowships, she earned a Princess Grace Award for Dance. The award includes a full-tuition scholarship for her senior year.

“It’s still surreal to me,” says Spears. “Financial aid certainly played a huge part when I came to Fordham. I felt a personal responsibility to learn all I could about Denise Jefferson [one of the founders of the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program] when I received the scholarship [named in memory of her]. And I know the Princess Grace Award will not just help me but give me a platform and the connections to reach people, raise awareness, and spread love of and resources for the arts.”

However surreal it may seem to Spears, those who know her are not. “Courtney completely immerses herself into anything she takes on. She understands that being a dancer is greater than the individual. And she brings goodness wherever she goes. I think the Princess Grace Award will allow her to meet artists in other fields and open even more doors for her,” says Tracy Miller, Ailey/Fordham BFA program administrator.

In the fall, Spears will begin her professional dance career as she travels across the country and abroad to Italy with Ailey II.

“I am excited to travel and keep feeding myself artistically so I can keep giving to others. I see dance as a vessel to put good back into the world,” she says.

These experiences, she said, along with her Fordham education, wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the Robert E. Campbell Scholarship and the Denise Jefferson Memorial Scholarship—two of more than 600 donor-funded scholarships awarded annually to Fordham students.

The Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. in Dance program student and others had a chance to thank their donors in person on April 27 at the University’s annual Scholarship Donors and Recipients Reception, held at The University Club in Manhattan. She was among 300 students and donors who attended this festive gathering that celebrates the spirit of giving and the promise of a Fordham education.

“The financial aid I received has helped turn my dreams into opportunities,” said Ballentine. “If not for the scholarships and the generous donors who make them possible, I simply would not have had these chances to shine.”

“This is one of the most wonderful nights of the year for Fordham,” said Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham, as he compared the celebration to a Thanksgiving holiday. “It’s the only day of the year when all the generations come together to break bread and tell the stories that unite us as families. Tonight is our Thanksgiving. This is the story of the Fordham family.”

The lively conversations between donors and students revealed stories of the rewards of hard work and the desire to give back. Students shared experiences made possible by their scholarships, and their plans for the future.

Fordham College at Lincoln Center senior Elizabeth Zanghi met James P. Flaherty, FCRH ’69, and his wife Jane, whose scholarship helped to fund Zanghi’s studies in art history, French, and Orthodox Christian studies. “It has helped so much, especially because I will be going on to graduate school,” said Zanghi, who plans to become a college professor. She is among 19 recipients of two scholarships established by the Flahertys.

Scholarship recipient Amanda Varrone, a Fordham College at Rose Hill junior, said she is thankful for the scholarship that has helped finance her studies in English and Spanish. “I hope to go on to law school,” she said. “And I look forward to continuing learning and growing, not only as a student, but as a person.”

John R. Costantino, GABELLI ’67, LAW ’70, and his wife Barbara chatted with Ferdinand Ruplin, LAW, about everything from his childhood on Long Island to their last trip to Disney World with their grandchildren. “They really are like family,” Ruplin said. The Costantinos have become close to several recipients of the scholarship they established for business students who go to Fordham Law, and in two weeks, will even attend one’s wedding.

The spirit of the evening was captured by Fordham’s Board of Trustees Chair Robert D. Daleo, GABELLI ’72, who grew up in the Bronx and followed his late brother Paul to Fordham, where he received a Uniroyal scholarship that helped fund his education.

“I thought if I ever had the opportunity, I’m going to pay this back,” he said. “I now have the capability and desire to honor my brother with a scholarship in his name and repay Fordham.”

Written by Claire Curry

Inspired by contests of motion and gravity, the dancers displayed their artistic agility through original choreography by new artists such as Jacinta Vlach, Norbert De La Cruz III, and Kanji Segawa. Onstage, transformed by dramatic costuming and light, the undulating limbs and instantaneous spins evoked a suspension of space and time. (Photos by Eduardo Patino)

In 1930s New York, jazz was the music and Harlem’s Cotton Club was the place to hear it. Inside that famed nightclub on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue, the city’s elite white society packed the house to see and hear many of the best black jazz musicians and entertainers of the era. The club’s glitz and glamor is brought to vivid life on Broadway in After Midnight, a rollicking, sparkling production lit by dozens of vocalists and dancers—including four graduates of the Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. program: Marija Juliette Abney, Taeler Elyse Cyrus, Erin N. Moore, and Monique Smith.

Through more than 25 numbers, the show celebrates the years when Duke Ellington led the Cotton Club Orchestra. His songs, such as the sultry “Creole Love Call,” and his arrangements of others’ tunes, like the rousing “Freeze and Melt,” flow through the theater from the horns, woodwinds, and rhythm section of the Jazz at Lincoln Center All-Stars. The big band, handpicked by maestro Wynton Marsalis, rightfully sits not in an orchestra pit, but on stage, just as Ellington’s orchestra did at the old Cotton Club. It’s not so much a Broadway musical as it is a flashback to one spectacular, idealized night at the popular club, a night that almost begs for the Brooks Atkinson Theatre to remove some of its seats so theatergoers can jive along with the performers.

“That’s a special thing about this show,” said Monique Smith, FCLC ’02. “It doesn’t have a big story line or a whole lot of dialogue; it’s just based on the talent of the cast. That’s why I love being in this show.”

Smith, Abney, Moore, and Cyrus (in her Broadway debut) spin and swing across the stage, making six costume changes during the 90-minute show. It’s all about celebrating the flirty melodies and flighty improvisations of the kind of jazz that swirled around inside the club during its heyday.

“It was a time when big band jazz was really coming into its own,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of history and African American studies at Fordham. “Musically, it was unbelievable. This wasn’t jazz to listen to, this was jazz to dance to.”

Dulé Hill, from USA Network’s Psych, acts as the emcee for the evening, singing and dancing and dropping snippets of poetry by Langston Hughes, an Ellington contemporary perhaps best known for the opening lines of “Harlem” (“What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”). Hughes’ words hint at a complicated racial history that is largely absent from the show.

The Cotton Club, after all, was a whites-only joint run by the mob, showcasing black artists on stage while barring them from sitting at the tables as patrons. “It was a good time, but it was not egalitarian,” said Naison, who wrote the foreword to A Dancer in the Revolution (Fordham University Press, 2014), a memoir by Howard “Stretch” Johnson, a Cotton Club performer who went on to become a Communist Party youth leader and a professor of black studies.

“Some of the most powerful and chilling passages of the book,” Naison writes in the foreword, “describe the white underworld characters who controlled the Cotton Club and the upper-class whites who came to Harlem for all kinds of illicit thrill-seeking, people whom Johnson found himself needing to please, or manipulate, if he wanted to find any kind of work as an entertainer.”

Broadway shows are not racially exclusive places, like the Cotton Club was, but pleasing casting directors and finding theater work today may not be any easier than it was in Johnson’s time.

At the After Midnight auditions, the show’s producers were looking for “regality and refinement,” said Smith, who credits the Ailey/Fordham program for being “quite successful at training incredibly refined dancers.”

The program also demands discipline. Student-dancers complete Fordham’s core courses in liberal arts and social sciences, while taking more than a dozen dance technique and creative classes, as well as daily Horton- or Graham-based modern and classical ballet classes.