Legendary dance troupe performs at the Fox April 30 and May 1
By K. Curtis Lyle
For the St. Louis American
One of the hallmarks of Modernism is the ability to capture, possess and then use the material culture of the entirety of the human family.
I have wandered through old bookstores, peeked into tribal apothecaries, bought that single beer in a bodega at 1 a.m. to settle in for the afterglow, and stood outside a particular abandoned Baptist church roaming the world of the spirituals alone and without controversy. I live in the modern world, but I prefer the tribe.
In the twentieth century, the three lynchpins of modernity in the arts have, arguably, been music, dance and painting. Of the three, dance has resisted the fall into the arena of tradable commodity most successfully. It doesn’t translate to video or sound recording well and by its nature demands an initial gut-level commitment from the other.
A choreographer is a muscular visionary who needs a dancer/translator. A dancer needs an audience to give credibility to his or her special moment that begins inside and eventually steps outside of time.
Alvin Ailey was a modern master of choreography and dance, who created a company that has become a powerhouse of American and world artistic influence. The company began on a wing and a prayer in 1958, when the 27-year-old Ailey and six friends began dancing together at Manhattan’s 92nd Street YM-YWHA. The story of that first performance and the subsequent premier of Revelations, the work that has become the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s signature piece, is worthy of more copy than a newspaper can spare.
Alvin Ailey and the company he created built a repertoire based in African-American experience but expressed through multi-racial personnel. It is Modernist in its demand that the insight and energy of the world tribe be the palette from which the technical, lyrical and formal elements of the dance are drawn.
The credo of the Modernist consists in the interruption of time. The intensity of this interruption, this break in the ordinary flow of things, can be generated by anyone by applying the principle of intent. Intent means you have to want it really bad. The impact and longevity of Ailey’s work – and the awesome legacy represented by his collaborators, especially with Judith Jamison, Dudley Williams, James Truitte and Masazumi Chaya – seem to indicate that he wanted it really bad.
Ailey used music, spirituals, blues and jazz as his interrupter and his vehicle of integration between audience and performer. His classic work dedicated to bebop pioneer Charlie Parker, For Bird – With Love, comes to mind. In a poem dedicated to Bird, he conjures a recurrent image from the work of 19th century French author Charles Baudelaire: “Exiled on earth among the shouting people,” the line reads, “his giant wings hinder him from walking.”
The spirituals of his mother’s church, notably, “I been ‘buked and I been scorned,” and the hard blues of his dusty southeast Texas ancestral home provide a great deal of the motion-as-freedom that defined his art and his personal character. In the early years, in its camaraderie and commitment the company was much like an ashram where every adversity could be overcome by swallowing the world’s pain and throwing it up as art.
Alvin Ailey at the Fox
This visit to St. Louis by the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre will present three major pieces: Love Stories, Hidden Rites and Ailey’s masterpiece, Revelations.
Love Stories celebrates Ailey’s vision and legacy in a journey through past, present and future. “It’s about love of dance, love of sheer movement, love of Alvin,” Jamison told Dance Magazine.
Each section is by a different choreographer. Jamison recalls the company’s first days. Rennie Harris takes today’s hip-hop to new levels of sophistication. Robert Battle’s full-throttle finale blazes into a hope-filled future. The work incorporates recordings of Ailey’s voice and music by Stevie Wonder remixed by sound engineer Darrin Ross.
Ailey’s Hidden Rites is a dance of celebration and ceremony, drawing on the rhythms and rituals of Africa, set to a throbbing score by French composer Patrice Sciortino. Elemental and mysterious, Hidden Rites has been restaged by Associate Artistic Director Masazumi Chaya, who was a dancer with the company when Ailey created the work in 1973.
Ailey was a fledgling choreographer with only nine dances to his name in 1960 when he drew upon the music and memories of his Texas childhood to create Revelations. The work has become one of the touchstones of twentieth century modern dance.
Powered by African-American spirituals, gospel songs and holy blues, Revelations is a timeless and universal celebration of faith and humanity. In three sections – “Pilgrim of Sorrow,” “Take Me To The Water” and “Move, Members, Move” – the music carries the dancers from contrition to mourning to an explosion of jubilation.
Performances are at the Fox Theatre on Saturday, April 30 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, May 1 at 2 p.m.