Resurrecting a ‘Firebird’ and Transcending a Choreographer in a Single Bound
<First published online in the New York Times on November 30, 2007>
For those of us who attend too many galas, Wednesday’s opening night of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater season at City Center was a happy model of how these things should be done. The onstage speeches projected good humor; a sense of pride in work and in colleagues; and belief in the work, the cause and indeed the whole art form of dance. Especially in the personality of the company’s artistic director, Judith Jamison, they built a showbiz sense of anticipation before each dance.
The dancing began with a company premiere (“Firebird,” by the late Maurice Béjart) and ended with a performance of “Revelations,” Ailey’s best-loved work, which featured sensationally good live musical accompaniment. This was a gala that was introduced as a special event; the Ailey dancers then fulfilled all expectations, though I suspect it is their hallmark that they perform this way at all performances and not just galas.
Béjart died on Thanksgiving Day. I am afraid I don’t recall saying or writing anything kind about his choreography during his lifetime; is this production of his 1970 “Firebird” the moment to start?
Not quite. Performed to (taped) highlights of Stravinsky’s score, it neatly picks up on the way the music evokes the Firebird at the end of the ballet. In the ballet’s original story, she doesn’t appear onstage at all during the final scene; the music makes her simply an inspiring memory, the absent spirit who has changed human lives. In Béjart’s version, the Firebird is male, dressed in scarlet, and the final scene shows how one Firebird dies but, phoenixlike, is replaced by another.
The ballet suggests that the Firebird is a spirit of inspirational energy. Béjart may also have been toying with political meanings. Since his other eight characters are dressed in Maoist gray suits, his Firebird’s flame-red costume leads me to assume that he was hinting — or at least encouraging audiences to infer — that his Firebird might be the galvanizing spirit of communism.
The characters in gray start inhibited, uniform, but the Firebird’s presence soon kindles them into enthusiasm. At the end, the flame passes from one glorious leader to another. Mind you, this interpretation works best if you don’t try to work out whether one of these glamorous young men in tights is Marx and the other Chairman Mao.
The problem with Béjart is that the dances are seldom interesting and often proceed by ignoring most features of their musical accompaniment. I have forgotten what I wrote of this choreography when first I saw it in 1980, when “Firebird” began an all-Stravinsky triple bill with “Petrushka” and “The Rite of Spring” performed by Béjart’s company, but I can never forget the critic Clement Crisp’s opening line in The Financial Times: “Béjart and Stravinsky is one of those fabled partnerships, like Romeo and Goneril, or bacon and strawberries.”
Béjart’s wrongness for Stravinsky is most evident in the second musical excerpt used here, which Stravinsky originally intended to accompany the quietly lyrical dance for the Beautiful Tsarevna and Ivan Tsarevitch as they fall in love. Quiet lyricism wasn’t Béjart’s thing, and he just plows on regardless with his depiction of the Firebird’s inflaming the proletariat. At their most inflamed, at the climax of the Danse Infernale, they then do the kind of dance phrases (a hopping arabesque to this beat, a big upper-body gesture to that one, next a double pirouette, then a jump) that look, for all their energy, like mere rote work.
Yet the Ailey dancers don’t make Béjart’s choreography look as foolish as I’m making it sound: their kind of technical rigor excavates everything that’s appealing about it. Whereas Béjart’s lead dancers used to perform their roles with more makeup on than Martha Graham and Robert Helpmann combined, the Ailey dancers deliver it unadorned.
Clifton Brown, as the main Firebird, looks powerful, but unspontaneous and slightly overexposed: when he has mastered the role’s breathing and has stopped playing it as if addressing the classroom mirror, he will be doubly effective. But he and Antonio Douthit as his replacement Phoenix already make something tremendous of the Firebird’s most exciting step (one that occurs elsewhere in the Ailey repertory), a forward jump that arrives with the front leg stretched high above and the torso and head arched right back.
In Ailey’s 1962 solo “Reflections in D,” created in response to Duke Ellington’s music, Matthew Rushing’s lyrical control proves riveting, beautifully attuned to Eric Scott Reed’s live performance at the piano. Mr. Rushing then reappeared in “Revelations,” and there was a moment (during “Wade in the Water”) when ripples passed up and down his torso at a speed that proved the evening’s most phenomenal moment.
But “Revelations” is phenomenal anyway. I am happy to confess that until Wednesday I was the only member of the human race who had never seen this most famous of Ailey’s works; somehow I had hitherto managed to catch the company on non-“Revelations” nights. Now I am almost sorry I will never again see it for the first time.
Its secret is that it moves from one kind of dance theater to another. If it was all along the lines of either the ritualistic-gesture idiom of the opening or the Broadway exuberance of the “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham” conclusion, it would be a far thinner work. Instead, these are just parts of a wide spectrum of responses to the spirituals that accompany it.
Marvelously, the dancers never overmilk its emotion. The innocence with which Amos J. Machanic Jr. performs the highly controlled floorwork of his solo “I Wanna Be Ready” is particularly touching, as is the objectivity with which the dancers present the big knockout ensembles. Best of all on Wednesday night were the singers. To Marion Moore, for the tone-filled legato beauty of her account of the solo introduction to “Sinner Man,” a special cry of “Brava!”
@New York Times, 2007