DANCE: BACK TO THEIR ROOTS

Tears were the first bond. They glistened on Judith Jamison's face as she stood beside an elderly woman veteran of South Africa's liberation struggle. They trickled down the cheek of a younger South African woman who knelt beside the flower-strewn memorial to her brother, felled by a police bullet on June 16, 1976, the first day of the Soweto uprising. After lighting candles, the kneeling woman and three other family members softly intoned their new national anthem, God Bless Africa. "That's when I lost it," Jamison said later. "I identified with them as black people, and immediately the image of slavery came into my head. This is an extraordinary survival and triumph. That's why I'm glad we came here."

Jamison, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and 28 members of her internationally acclaimed troupe began an emotional 15-day tour of South Africa last week. In Johannesburg, Pretoria and the sprawling black township of Soweto, the troupe presented hands-on workshops and dazzling stage performances of Ailey classics, including Night Creature, Vespers and Revelations. Enthusiastic audiences clapped, whooped and sometimes danced in the aisles.

It is the first time that the Ailey company, the pre-eminent African-American dance troupe in the U.S., has visited the African nation, long deprived of access to international artists by the cultural boycott of the old apartheid regime. South African officials hailed the visit as a major event. "This is the end of a long drought," said Johannesburg executive-committee chairman M.C. Matjila after the premiere performance Thursday night in the city's Civic Theater. "We are back in the international arena and able to host world-famous theater groups like this. It gives us pride after what we fought for all these years." Calling the tour "an inspiration for the whole metropolitan area," Johannesburg Mayor Isaac Mogase proclaimed June 18 as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Day.

The trip has been Jamison's dream ever since Nelson Mandela's release from Victor Verster Prison Farm in 1990 signaled the beginning of the end of apartheid. "I feel like I'm coming home," said the majestic 54-year-old former dancer who took over the company following Ailey's death in 1989. "This is my homeland, my lineage. South Africans are not the same as African Americans, but we greet each other as brothers and sisters because we've both been through turmoil and we understand that. We have so much to learn from them, and they have a lot to learn about us."

The job of turning Jamison's dream into reality fell to the company's executive director, Sharon Luckman, who had to find $300,000 to cover the cost of the trip. Initial overtures to potential American underwriters got nowhere. Nor were funds forthcoming in South Africa, because, says Luckman, it is deemed "politically incorrect to raise money for foreigners to come here when so little was going to local arts groups." The project was about to be abandoned when the J.P. Morgan Bank, based in New York City, agreed to sponsor the tour to showcase its start-up this year of a Johannesburg branch.