ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
It’s no mean feat to have headed an American nonballet company that’s into its second generation. And Ailey is a distinctly American choreographer, someone who was combining ballet, modern, and jazz idioms decades ago. The all-Ailey evening was meant to demonstrate his diversity, and it did. Opus McShann (1988) and For Bird–With Love (1984) were originally scheduled but had to be canceled when a dancer broke his leg. The substitutions were Masekela Language (1969) and Revelations (1960).
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Streams (a revival of a 1970 work) opened the evening. It shows Ailey at his most abstract: the choreography is closely tied to the music, a vaguely oriental work for percussion ensemble, Eight Inventions by Czech composer Miloslav Kabelac. The dancing seems vaguely oriental too, the dancers sometimes resembling Indian gods and goddesses, arms and legs akimbo. But I think Ailey was also setting himself an abstract problem, one related to the puzzle solved by the composer: How do you make music from individual percussive noises? How do you make dance from a series of poses? The mundane but appropriate image is to “connect the dots,” and the dancers did seem to be streaming through long fluid phrases occasionally punctuated by striking briefly held poses. But Ailey is not a very abstract choreographer, and by its end Streams becomes much more dramatic; in the final three sections the dancers often pair off, and certainly they register more emotion than at first.
One of the best things about Ailey is his obvious care for continuity. In his own dances, he pays tribute to black musicians of all stamps; as artistic director of a well-established company, he’s generous to lesser-known choreographers. On Thursday evening, the Ailey troupe offered Talley Beatty’s The Stack-Up (1982), Ulysses Dove’s Bad Blood (1986), and Donald Byrd’s Shards (1988).
Bad Blood has a kind of story, too–something about a man left out who eventually gets his girl–but it’s not very important. The images that serve it are; in the most affecting, the man catches his leaping partner by clasping her around the buttocks. She has her back to us, so what we see are her small buns cradled in a man’s large, powerful arms. She’s the child to his adult, and it’s an image of such absolute mutual possession that we understand in our blood and bones what it means to be excluded.
