Moving Between Cool Style and Broadway-Flash Pizazz

<First published online in the New York Times on December 3, 2007>

The Alvin Ailey season’s first three performances were completely different in repertory, except that all three ended with Ailey’s 1960 classic, “Revelations.” There was no doubt that the audience was happy about that. People don’t applaud just what happens in this piece; they applaud some of it before it even starts to happen. The beginning of a new section or the first glimpse of a particular dancer can be cause for whoops and screams. I prefer it when its spirituals are sung live, as at Wednesday’s opening-night gala at City Center, but performances on Thursday and Friday, when taped music was used, won even more hollers from the crowd.

Because of this guaranteed success, I’m grateful for the cool manner with which most of the dancers present this beloved work. At each performance so far, as at thousands of others in the past, they repeat the “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham” finale of “Revelations” as an encore, and only then do they switch on the we-know-this-is-a-hit-and-we’re-loving-it bright eyes and smiles that might seem natural to the brilliantly Broadway-type big ensemble piece with which Ailey concludes. Otherwise, they maintain that cool. A few grins and twinkles are emerging as the season advances, along with some suffering expressions in the darker earlier passages of the work, but most of the dancers present the movement as if it will carry all its own meaning. It does, and the more powerfully.

In Ailey’s “Night Creature,” however, the dancers are bright-eyed and bright-smiling from the first — “selling it,” as Broadway folk would say. I assume that company tradition deems this the right way to deliver this assortment of jazz-ballet numbers to Duke Ellington music, but I am startled to find that the same dancers also deliver Twyla Tharp’s “Golden Section From ‘The Catherine Wheel’ ” in the same way. The Ailey dancers are attractive, accomplished, powerful and often sexy, but this flashy delivery certainly robs Ms. Tharp’s choreography of spontaneity and therefore of much of its deepest sensual allure.

I seldom love the (to my ear stale) harmonies of Ellington’s later big-band compositions anyway, so “Night Creature” is seldom to my taste. I admire the variety of dance idioms and groupings with which Ailey keeps varying the choreographic tone; in one ballet section five dancers do rapid little beaten steps and Bournonville-type jumps, witty in their very improbability as a dance accompaniment to this music. But the main mood is showbiz drained of freshness. In the leading female role, Renee Robinson gives a star performance, but with no softness anywhere; both facial expression and steps are hard.

“The Golden Section,” new in 1981 as the spectacular all-dance conclusion of “The Catherine Wheel” but long since performed on its own, has things in common with “Night Creature”: Ms. Tharp also tries a variety of dance styles and changing subensembles. But David Byrne’s music has its own urgency, and there is a hot, liquid flow to Ms. Tharp’s response that makes much of this choreography feel like molten lava. Clifton Brown, probably the most powerful virtuoso of the Ailey men but one relatively shy of applying any Broadway pizazz, comes into his own here; he rises to Ms. Tharp’s challenges as if he’s been released, and his absorption becomes transporting. Elsewhere, the dancers’ intense consciousness of the audience, which tells us which moments are the wow effects, keeps stopping the dance from creating its own world and coherence even when the physicality is almost sweeping us along.

When it comes to Ulysses Dove’s “Urban Folk Dance” and “Vespers,” the Ailey dancers revert to cool, only here it’s something more like attitude. “Urban Folk Dance” is a study of two parallel and identically dressed male-female couples, on left and right of the stage as if in adjoining rooms. Man and woman start on either side of a desk, but whatever teacher-student or employer-employee situation might be implied is soon abandoned for a more intense, aggressive and partly sexual relationship. Just as you’re wondering if one couple is a parallel universe of the other (since the same situations keep finding different emotional/behavioral resolutions), they run around and interrupt the other; a certain amount of partner-swapping occurs before the couples revert to their original room allocation.

The intense but near-mechanical dynamics of Mr. Dove’s choreography tell us that all this behavior is schematic. The main point of his view of male-female behavior is to show how neatly he can reduce it to choreography.

A similar worldview, and very similar dynamics, prevail in his “Vespers,” in which six uniformly attired women sit, in impassive containment, on chairs in between dancing fast, furious but machinelike and seldom individualized solos. You can say that Mr. Dove was handling the tensions of male-female relationships in “Urban Folk Dance” and the strong impulses of women in “Vespers,” but really his emphasis was reductive. His attention was to polished surface effect, not to expressiveness.

Especially in “Vespers,” there is no mistaking the strength and control of the Ailey women, and Friday’s programming placed the work neatly just before Hans van Manen’s “Solo,” in which three men (Mr. Brown, Glenn Allen Sims and Matthew Rushing) are put through their paces. But Mr. van Manen does give each dancer individualized material, though they have too many consciously quirky flourishes of head and arms and a too relentlessly left-right tick-tock phrasing to become serious. The Ailey men make “Solo” playful when in other hands it could be frenetic.

Broadway presentation is used, probably rightly, in Fredrick Earl Mosley’s “Saddle Up!” Set to an assortment of taped music by Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer and Mark O’Connor, this dance, which had its premiere on Friday, is a cheerful cartoon version of the none-too-wild West as remembered from innumerable minor cowboy movies. It has the new sheriff, the big fight with the bad guy, the showgirls, the love scene.

I have no quarrel with any of this, but almost no memory of it either, though the fresh-faced Mr. Brown is appealing as the young sheriff. “Saddle Up!” is jolly, agreeable, unoriginal, insincere and, yes, forgettable.

@New York Times, 2007