NEW YORK - The holiday performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, in the midst of a monthlong run at City Center, is both a two-hour review of the Ailey company and a three-step lesson in the blues, from the sounds of the Earth to the sounds of the city to the sounds of the heavens.
The blues here is not so much a style as a frame of mind, what the late Ailey's friend, critic Albert Murray, has robustly described as "The Extension, Improvisation and Ritualization of the Stylization of the Beliefs and the Feelings and Emotions of the Lifestyle of a Particular Culture." In at least one version of the current Ailey show, presented by longtime artistic director Judith Jamison, the blues can mean the sob of a fiddle, the clash and clatter of hip-hop or the claps and shouts of a choir.
"Heart Song," which opened in 2003 and was performed Saturday night, is the sparest and most elemental of the three sections, set against a plain, dark backdrop. The male dancers are often bare-chested and women wear flesh-colored halters. Movements are cued to a fiddle, a simple drum or bass pattern or a lone, worried voice.
The performances are variations on timeless conflicts: a woman almost literally torn between two lovers, a man pushed back and forth in the tick-tock rhythm of a metronome's needle. The highlight is a long, reflective male pas de deux, their looks of both fear and wonder suggesting a kind of forest primeval in which they are pioneers at the dawn of civilization, or survivors at the end.
The dancers in the evening's second piece, "Love Stories," are dressed in bright and modern street clothes and know well that others, too many others, share this planet. In the city, there is no time for quiet self-regard. Dancers move fast, and move on. They are energized and individualized, at times cheering each other on, at times soloists amid the crowd, obeying their own, internal rhythm.
"Love Stories," a world premiere this season, is choreographed by Jamison, Rennie Harris and Robert Battle to the music of Stevie Wonder. It can be as simple-minded and self-consciously athletic as a music video, but videos should all excite like the extended workout to the booming beat and frenzied harmonica of Wonder's "Fingertips, Part I," a smash 40 years ago and bumped up to hip-hop speed for the new millennium.
When the dancers thrust their hands to the sky during "Love Stories," they do so in celebration, as if demonstrating the heights of human achievement. When they lift their hands during the last part, the classic Ailey piece "Revelations," they do so in humility, as if lamenting the limits of human achievement.
With the music turning to the spiritual, familiar movements take on new meaning. Bodies cling not out of passion, but out of dependence. When a male dancer raises his female partner's leg and arches her back, her balance is more than an athlete's discipline. It's a high-wire defense against fate itself.
"Revelations" includes the only live music of the evening and its mood builds from the lonesome "Pilgrim of Sorrow" segment to the self-defining "Move, Members, Move," as men in Sunday suits and women in white leap under a make-believe, plantation sun. If the finale feels more like a ritual than a spontaneous celebration, it also reaffirms the life of the blues, which compel action in a world unforgiving of those who sit still.
The Augusta Chronicle ©2012 Morris Communications, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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