Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has returned to New York City Center for a three-week season looking sharp and energized. In their first live shows in over a year (apart from performances of Rennie Harris’s Lazarus and Alvin Ailey’s Revelations at Lincoln Center’s outdoor “BAAND Together Dance Festival” last August), the modern dancers are presenting more than a dozen works ranging from new commissions to classics drawn from six decades of repertoire.
Premiering in the high-octane “New Works” program on December 3 (and repeated on December 9) were two pieces adapted from dance films released earlier this year: Holding Space by Ailey’s choreographer-in-residence Jamar Roberts, who retires this season as a company dancer, and For Four by Robert Battle, who celebrates his tenth year as artistic director. Both were commissioned at the height of the pandemic. In the initial versions of each work, the dancers were socially distanced, which limited the choreographers’ use of space (neither work, for instance, contained much partnering). Though this particular hurdle was removed from the live versions, the updated choreography still played with feelings of confinement, frustration, and release.
Holding Space, first on the program, was a mysterious and complex work that rose above its therapy-speak title. Standing in vertical lines, each dancer began performing a different sequence of torquing movements while dressed androgynously in shimmery, pale-gray Tee-shirts and roomy pants. (In a recent interview, Roberts mentioned he played on the word “space” by giving the twenty-four-minute piece a futuristic, otherworldly look.) Every element of the production progressed towards harmony. Tense, disjointed movements eventually gave way to rounder and more expansive shapes. The lighting warmed up from steely blue to orange to white. Tim Hecker’s ambient electronic sounds began alone in the first section and were later softened by a loose keyboard melody. Near the end, the dancers moved in unison and sunned themselves calmly in the glow of the stage lights. Sprinkled throughout the piece were beautiful deep backbends and wavelike successions of movements punctuated by held arabesques.
“Holding space”—a trendy phrase that roughly means helping others process their feelings—was represented literally. Around halfway through, a large cubed frame appeared at the back of the stage. Standing inside, a single dancer performed a complicated, introspective solo, only pausing to notice the audience after several minutes. Eventually four dancers grabbed hold of the frame and slowly move it around the stage, “holding space” for the soloist in the middle. Each of the dancers swapped places with another for a turn performing inside the cube. While the program says that Roberts’s work is at its core about “healing and the quest for sustainable pathways towards wholeness,” the price paid for tackling such a nebulous subject is an emotional one—the tenor throughout remained cool and distant.
Battle’s For Four, number two on the program, was a fizzy quartet set to “Delfeayo’s Dilemma,” a seven-minute piece by Wynton Marsalis in 4/4 time from his 1985 album Black Codes. Festive and frenetic, the performance featured two male and two female dancers dressed in retro blazers, jazz dance shoes, and sparkly suspenders. Alternating between square formations and solos, the dancers packed a bewildering number of steps into every beat. While the nameless characters in Holding Space seemed detached from the audience, the For Four dancers were desperate for attention, egging each other on with audible claps and even heckles. The steps were cheekier, too—the dancers whipped through balletic turns, shimmying shoulders, silly heel-first walks, shuffles, and log rolls. It was not all laughs, though, as the dancers’ showbiz grins sometimes gave way to winces suggesting frayed nerves. The program mentions “pent-up energy” and the “drive to perform”—Battle’s little piece was a fun, if manic, romp.
These remnants of pandemic-era paranoia were smoothed away by the pure lines of Revelations (1960), the company’s signature work concluding nearly every night this season. Probably the most viewed contemporary dance piece in the world—since its founding in 1958, the company has performed for an estimated twenty-five million people in seventy-one countries, usually with Revelations on the program—the piece is divided into three sections (“Pilgrim of Sorrow,” “Take Me to the Water,” and “Move, Members, Move”) reflecting aspects of Baptist worship and set to a soundtrack of African-American spirituals, work songs, and blues.
The dancers brought forth an abundance of gracefulness underused in the first two works. The softly draped brown fabric costumes worn in the first section accentuated the dancers’ gorgeous extensions and formations. A lovely duet to “Fix Me, Jesus” was danced by Michael Jackson Jr. and Corrin Rachelle Mitchell, whose softly floating fingers and slow promenades complemented Jackson’s gentle lifts. A quick trio for three male dancers, scored with a spiritual, “Sinner Man,” put on display the technical virtuosity of James Gilmer, Chalvar Monteiro, Patrick Coker, all of whom soared across the stage performing powerful split jumps. In “Yellow,” the last section, a group of female dancers dressed in yellow gowns danced with large fans while seated on stools arranged like church pews; the men joined in for a rip-roaring finale.
Ailey called his earliest dances (including Revelations) “blood memories” drawn from his churchgoing childhood in rural Texas. Though the piece lacks named characters, each dancer seems to represent a real individual rather than a shaky abstract concept. The result is potent—the pain of hardship, the relief of being washed clean, and the joy of sung worship are felt deeply. It is easy to see why the piece has become a classic.