Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Renaldo Maurice, Constance Stamatiou and Jacquelin Harris in Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations.”
Danica Paulos/ Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Alvin Ailey was one of those rare artists whose spirit feels undying, eternally passing from one generation to another. But this continuation can never be taken for granted.
That’s why, in a world of deep uncertainty, it was no small comfort to welcome Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater back for Cal Performances’ “Ailey Week” at Zellerbach Hall on Tuesday, April 7. It was a particular joy to applaud Alicia Graf Mack, the illustrious former company member installed 10 months ago as the New York troupe’s fourth artistic director.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday April 8-9; 8 p.m. Friday, April 10; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, April 11; 3 p.m. Sunday, April 12. $42-$184. Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. calperformances.org
Mack is longtime Ailey family, a star during the legendary Judith Jamison’s leadership tenure, so it was no surprise to see she’s kept the Ailey constants dependable. Her curtain speech was gracious, the dancers were spectacular, and the “Rocka My Soul” finale of Ailey’s 1960 classic “Revelations” received a standing ovation and a clap-along encore.
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Still, every annual Ailey visit brings variables, too, including a crop of new commissions and acquisitions from the company’s fall home season. The East Coast critics typically carp about these new works, questioning whether they stand up to the greatness of Ailey’s best-known masterpiece. To me, that measure is misguided. Almost nothing can compare to “Revelations.” The more useful question is whether the new dances prove worthy of these powerful dancers.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Caroline T. Dartey in Medhi Walerski’s “Blink of an Eye.”
Paul Kolnik/Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
On Tuesday, when the first of four different programs featured three Bay Area premieres, the answer was yes, absolutely not and sort of.
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Medhi Walerski’s “Blink of an Eye” began the program in the resounding “yes” category. To be sure, Walerski — a former Nederlands Dans Theater member who now leads Vancouver’s Ballet BC — recycled some trendy tropes in this 2011 creation. An industrial lighting grid rises, fingers waggle, and dancers run and slide on slippery socks. We’ve seen all that before.
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But Walerski is responding to Bach violin partitas and sonatas, with their ingenious way of flickering through the whole spectrum of human emotion, and he keeps his selections brisk, avoiding the relentless dourness that marks NDT’s recent repertoire.
Just as importantly, he knows how to develop a motif. The dancers repeatedly hold a foot behind the head in a turned-in back attitude, this position evolving through pretzel-like partnering, virtuosic turns and stop-on-a-dime resolutions. It all shows off the dancers’ dynamic prowess most entrancingly, especially as costumed with bare torsos for the men and black gymnastics-style leotards for the women (reimagined by Jon Taylor from Walerski’s original design).
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Matthew Neenan’s “Difference Between.”
Paul Kolnik/Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Matthew Neenan’s “Difference Between,” alas, ricocheted the audience to the “no, not worthy of these dancers” territory.
Neenan is a co-founder of BalletX, and a prolific creator of quirky works popular with mid-sized suburban ballet companies. “Difference Between” follows his usual formula, but with a sprinkling of abstruseness. The alt-pop and Americana-influenced music by MacArthur “Genius” fellowship recipient Heather Christian and her band the Arbornauts is highly lyrics-driven. “It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard,” one selection repeats in harshly intoned tight harmony, while another, sung in a Stevie Nicks-like warble, describes how “instead of drowning, you become a holy roller.”
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Presumably Neenan had a rapturous personal response to this poetry, but at Zellerbach Hall both the sung words and his ideas remained obscure. The excellent cast of seven mostly seemed to reel their arms in lines. Mason Evans and Xavier Mack did all they could with a milquetoast duet, later crawling forehead-to-forehead around the perimeter of the stage. Pajama-like costumes by Karen Young did not help.
Yannick Lebrun in “Song of the Anchorite” by choreographer Jamar Roberts
Paul Kolnik
Between these extremes, former Ailey dancer and past resident choreographer Jamar Roberts’s “Song of the Anchorite” had the virtue of connecting us to the company’s history, inspired by a mostly lost Alvin Ailey solo, “Hermit Songs.”
In that 1961 work, Alvin Ailey held branches that evoke a crown of thorns and danced to music by Samuel Barber. In Roberts’s response, the bare branches hovered in a projection overhead, and a solemn Yannick Labrun danced to a jazz trumpet reinterpretation of the adagio from a Ravel piano concerto. It read, often touchingly, as an allegory for the artist committing himself to a lonely, sacrificial vocation. My only reservation is that in Roberts’s choreography, the action — Labrun lifting what at first seems to be a shroud, then putting on a robe — seems to happen abruptly, driven more by the dancemaker’s symbology than by the dancer’s embodied character.
What would it look like for movement to seem both symbolic and fully human, with immediacy of emotion flowing through? An answer arrived in the eternal Ailey closer, “Revelations.”
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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations.”
Danica Paulos Photography
Lebrun was devastatingly beautiful in the “I Wanna Be Ready” solo, hinging into those backbends with crystalline control and pleading eyes. Sarah Daley-Perdomo was even more affecting in “Fix Me, Jesus,” her extensions all steely strength, her face all surrender. Renaldo Maurice was shaking with the spirit in “Wade in the Water.”
Then one of the most loveable of Ailey dancers, the always radiant Patrick Coker, blazed across the stage in “Sinner Man” and brought sheer sunshine to “Rocka My Soul.” Let the encores commence.
Rachel Howard is a freelance writer.