Skip to main contentAs it visits Portland this week for a two night White Bird engagement,
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is celebrating an anniversary, anticipating
changes and offering a big slice of Americana.
Since the its inception in 1958,
the New York-based company has danced a lot of work (by its founder and others)
and covered a lot of ground, serving as cultural ambassadors both here and
abroad. It has been capably led for more than 20 years by
dancer-turned-director Judith Jamison, who will retire this summer, leaving the
company in the care of another dancer-turned-director, Robert Battle.
Even at this crossroads, the company looks confident. The two programs it has brought are a mix of past and present, expertly danced. Last night's performance to a packed house opened with Matthew Rushing's Uptown, a narrative piece invoking the Harlem Renaissance. The live narration by Abdur-Rahim Jackson hardly seemed necessary—subtitles such as "Rent Party" and "Cotton Club" set the scene well enough—but the piece had several high points, among them the footloose swing dancing coached by Clyde Wilder and the movement sketches of such famous folk as W.E.B. DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston (begging the question, if writing about music is like dancing about architecture, what is dancing about writing like?) If Uptown verged on corny from time to time, nobody seemed to mind.
Ronald K. Brown's Dancing Spirit
stood in a significant contrast. An abstract work set to a fascinating musical
collage of Duke Ellington, War and reworked Radiohead, it began with a
recurring combination overlaid with variations on the theme, shifting gradually
from jazzy contemporary to African-influenced gestures and torso rolls.
That left the company's
signature piece, Revelations, along
with Celebrating Revelations at 50, a
short film on the work's creation. A truly American creation steeped in the blues,
spirituals and gospel music, it has won fans since its 1960 debut at the 92nd
Street Y (the viewer to my left, a PR professional by trade, first saw it age four
with his grandfather and keeps coming back for more). With its vivid sets and
costumes, the religious imagery reflected in its movement and the twin senses
of struggle and joy that the dancers convey, this piece—and the dancers that
perform it— are key pieces of this country's artistic legacy.
Revelations and Celebrating Revelations at 50 are on
Ailey's program tonight, along with Battle's In/Side, Ailey's Night
Creature and Christopher Huggins' Annointed.
WWeek 2015