Alvin Ailey - Black History Month in Dance, 2021
Black History in Dance Month 188. I have already touched on Alvin Ailey and “Revelations” in previous posts this month (with reference to Louis Johnson, Renee Robinson, Carmen de Lavallade). But it’s important to address Ailey and the Ailey phenomenon full-on. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre has long been an established institution of New York cultural life with immense national and international impact.
I first watched the Ailey company in 1990, the year after the death of Ailey himself. Strange though it remains to me, I never saw “Revelations” until 2007, my first year as chief dance critic of the “New York Times”. I didn’t conceal my “Revelations” virgin status in my review - with the result that, for days and weeks afterwards, people kept approaching me in curiosity, wanting from me a greater sense of what it had been like to me to experience something that had always been part of their lives.
Just about any surviving work by Ailey has very firm choreographic construction: you know you’re in the hands of a master who knows how to shape time and space in terms of human energy with easy and unpretentious authority. You also know that you’re in the hands of an artist of considerate largeness of spirit. But “Revelations” goes far further. It takes you through a startlingly changing spectrum of styles, so that you experience the feelings within spirituals, gospel, blues, and soul music from one theatrical approach after another.
It’s an immersion into multiple facets of the African American view of life, the religious rigours of the spirit, the cultural legacy of slavery, and the transcendently affirmative capacity for joy, so surely shaped that it’s available to people of all backgrounds. I watched it so many times in 2007-2018 that its music and dance imagery return powerfully to memory as I write, like old friends. It’s such a New York institution that the audience has long applauded not just the great moments when they’ve happened but in eager anticipation before they loom into view. Some of the transcendence is there in the casting: the opening dance, and some of those that follow, always show you a range of skin colours: the sense of the African American mind is never that of a ghetto but of something embracing the world.
I’m always sorry I missed Ailey himself - some photos show that he was an unusually beautiful man in his youth - but few artists have left so powerful an identity behind them. Here’s to seeing the Ailey company again.
Sunday 28 February
