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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater "Program 2"
New artistic director Robert Battle gives the Ailey company a shot in the arm --- a shot of fun. For a number of years the troupe has had a whiff of the museum to it. Yet as the Ailey ur-text, "Revelations," makes plain, the master himself never hesitated to mine the veins of humor and the everyday. Battle does the same.
The second program, which repeats at the Auditorium on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, includes his first commission for the 54-year-old organization: Rennie Harris's hip-hoppy "Home." (It's about time somebody renovated the troupe's notion of street dance.) Also on the program: Battle's loopy, physically exacting 1999 solo "Takademe," which brought down the house, and Ailey's 1979 "Memoria" and 1960 "Revelations." (The first program, which repeats Friday and Saturday nights, features the company premieres of Ohad Naharin's populist "Minus 16" and Paul Taylor's "Arden Court" as well as "Revelations.")
Following in the Ailey tradition, Harris's "Home" is not just a pyrotechnical showcase. Harris made his bones by bringing hip-hop into the concert hall; his "Rome & Jewels," for example, riffed on Shakespeare. Here the subject is surviving HIV infection, which of course killed Ailey in 1989 (a fact Battle mentioned in his curtain talk Thursday night but that Ailey himself preferred to keep on the DL). By rooting "Home" in the 80s house scene, which made dance clubs a haven for many HIV-affected people of color, Harris gives a serious subtext to this mostly upbeat piece for 14.
You can see that subtext in the slow-moving opening and conclusion of "Home." You can hear it in the clapping that marks these sections, which recalls the African-American traditions of juba and gospel. Sometimes Harris slows break-dancing to contemplative levels. Tracks by Dennis Ferrer ("Underground Is My Home") and Raphael Xavier ("I See...Do You") include abstracted sounds of the breath and a barely audible recording of a fire-and-brimstone sermon. But where Ailey was churchy, and undoubtedly suffered because of that when he became ill, Harris is spiritual: he anchors transcendence firmly in the everyday.
Unlike Donald Byrd's "Dance at the Gym," created for the Ailey company in 1991, "Home" isn't about hooking up. Seduction isn't the aim; sweating it out together, in a community, is. Fast footwork and vigorous yet loose shoulder popping help that happen. Some of the Ailey dancers haven't yet got this style down, which means they look like they're performing choreography they're not very happy about. But for most of the 14 dancers, led by the expressive Matthew Rushing, it's like breathing, like home. Performative moments are what make this piece.
As danced by Kirven James Boyd, Battle's "Takademe" wowed this crowd. And it's funnier and more human than ever. Echoing the mood created by singer Sheila Chandra as she translates the rhythms of the tabla to the voice, Boyd is both just a guy trying to get through these exhausting three and a half minutes and a superhero anticipating and precisely replicating the Byzantine rhythms of Indian music.
When "Revelations" is about to begin, you can feel the audience both settling into their seats and sitting at the edge of them, anticipating something good, something that's as good as ever. Sometimes this dance is just gloriously right, and this time brought home to me Ailey's remarkable authority at this early point in his career. Carving the space as surely as a master sculptor, he's never simply majestic, confidently indulging his freewheeling impulses and shifting the mood to reveal the many facets of the African-American Christian experience.
Ailey's "Memoria" --- a tribute to his friend Joyce Trisler, a former Ailey dancer who died in 1979 --- is, like most of his works, a pale copy of "Revelations." Both solemn and rollicking, it achieves liftoff in the second half, when 25 Chicago-area dance students get added to the mix. As coached by Ronni Favors, they're accomplished and charming, falling with apparent ease into the Ailey style.
Overall the message of "Memoria" is clear: new generations will take up Trisler's legacy. And they'll take up Ailey's, but I hope not slavishly. Battle makes promising inroads into the new in these programs, expanding the range of acceptable sources to a world-renowned Israeli choreographer and a modern interpreter of ancient Indian traditions. Savvy but self-deprecating, he proceeds with both caution and a sense of adventure in his new role. I hope Battle breaks out even more in future and sets his own new work on this marvelous company.
