Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, January 2, City Center: “Ode,” “Fandango”, “Mass,” “Revelations”
The company’s 2020 version of their founder’s “Revelations” wasn’t undeniable. Though nobody could resist the brio of the pint-sized Japanese dancer with a big strut (Kanji Segawa) or the tall dark and angular sister (Khalia Campbell) who seemed like a new Jamison. (Her lindy-hop was double-dutch precise but suffused with her own grown womanly thing. Once she’d lifted off, you waited breathlessly for her to jump to it again.) Yet “Revelations’” pious spin on the last Afro-Am’s century of Saturday Nights and Sunday Morns still felt hoary/folkie. Received audience response didn’t help. Clunky clapping as the dancers encored on down reminded me of red diaper babies trying to drown out Dylan in 66 (though these righteous clappers aimed to please not quash). As lights came up, a white elder’s pale post-“Revelation’s” praise for the dancers—“They’re special.” —bespoke an undead popular front combo of hosanna and condescension only Jesus could fix. (Per Charlayne Hunter-Gault who once murmured to herself after a 90s screening of a flic about white men in struggle against apartheid—“God save us from white liberals.”)
OTOH, pissing on old liberal verities isn’t exactly punctual in the Age of Trump. I’m just now reminded a family friend recently linked me to a happy brotherly Louis Jordan number, “Choo Choo Ch’ Boogie,” in the New Deal/Fair Deal nimbus, which I wasn’t with until I heard the couplet that moved my correspondent: “I love to hear the clickety clack/pal around with Democratic fellows named Mac…” That train is gone but there are plenty of reasons Democrats might want to ride it again. Same goes for a warhorse like “Revelations.”
If aspects of “Revelations” seem to reflect a time when black strivers felt a need to be amusive, the first dance of the night on January 2nd bowed to Malcolm X, scourge of beamish integrators. The score for the new piece by the Ailey company’s young choreographer, Jamar Roberts, is the late Don Pullen’s “Suite (Sweet) Malcolm (Pt. 1 Memories and Gunshots).” Not that Roberts has gone to extremes or back to black agit-prop. His main stretch—and that is the word given his dancers’ lovely extensions—is making his own meld of hip hop and quirk fit Pullen’s jazzy rhythms. “Suite” ranges from In-the-Tradition chords to Out raging swirls of notes. It begins and ends with sweetness but gets avant-dissonant in the middle. Pullen was never afraid to abrade. One reason, no doubt, why he i.d.-ed with Malcolm X. Yet his uncompromising “Suite” went beyond agro protest or hard persona-mongering. Pullen tried to get down with the whole Malcolm. His Black Arts musing on loss took in private and public grief/anger. That’s why Roberts sensed “Suite’s” tonal contrasts were right for his own subject. His “Ode” is a “tribute” to “youthful victims of gun violence” which he started to conceive during that awful season a few years back when cops couldn’t stop killing young black men. Roberts took his title from another great Pullen elegy, “Ode to Life,” but that “Ode” lacks Pullen’s characteristic swirls, which Roberts needed to make sure his own tribute wasn’t too soft…
Though it didn’t turn out to be overwrought either. Each dancer takes his turn on the killing floor, but they avoid melodramatic Ends. As I watched them expire on stage last Thursday night, I flashed on a trivial old plaint that defined the distance between my childish fantasies and Roberts’ dance of remonstrance. When I played soldiers as a kid, I couldn’t stand war gaming with others, because their pretend-deaths seemed bogus—over-the-top or too flat. “Ode’s” enacted deaths, however, are the opposite of irreal. And they carry a heavy hit. No child or teen will ever be able to imagine what it’s like to be aged, but, per Roberts’ dance, way too many black youths have come near death in their tender years. If only they could be as clueless as me and my friends were when we came up. Roberts’ nod to Malcolm-the-Unillusioned is on point here.
Images of Malcolm and other Movement martyrs or survivors tend not to grow old; it’s always a shock to realize all over again how young they were back in that day. But Roberts’ gen, along with their immediate precursors, have had their own fatal trials. And the choreographer is intent on tracing his cohort’s mortal thoughts. Simple, uniform costumes—pajama-ish bottoms and bare torsos underscore a shared situation, as does the Kehinde Wiley-y flowery backdrop. Solos coalesce into group-gropes with an existential Threat. Roberts treats his dancers as representative brothers, without massifying them. His art dances around commendations of “special” talents like the one voiced by that “Revelations’” fan—commendations which only bring home how speciality is no guarantee of safety. Nor would such praise do even if creativity afforded protection since all black lives matter. Not just those of a talented tenth…
But I’m argufying now and Roberts’ “Ode” isn’t a case statement. The dancers’ moves are more welcoming than I’ve implied, even those twists and feints tuned to Pullen’s attack modes. Roberts has said he hopes to offer a balm. And, on January 2nd, “Ode”‘s healing grooves preceded another charged palliative. The next dance, “Fandango,” a pas de deux choreographed by Lar Lubovitch, could’ve been renamed “Sexual Healing.” The audience throbbed along with the couple, Jacquelin Harris and Yannick Lebrun, as they limned a sexy plurality x 2, transcending static notions of tops and bottoms or any constraining notions of gender (including those upheld by dimmer defenders of trans imperatives). “Fandango” was hot perfection, a wonderfully lucid vision of how sexual intercourse naturally resists social construction.
If “Fandango” stages the variousness of “straight” desire, Robert Battle’s “Mass,” the last dance before “Revelations,” dares to play with more diffuse energies. Battle has said that he was juiced by seeing/hearing Verdi’s “Requiem.” He took that performance as a challenge to make a group dance that would compel as much attention as Verdi’s grand chorus. He didn’t work with silence but the original score he uses is only one component that sparks his piece’s little and bigger bangs. Mass movements alternate with more atomized gestures. Robed dancers march together, play circle games and get the shakes in huddles even as outliers break away, pairing off before jumping back into the crowd or blooming on their own. “Mass” seems to be a creation ritual derived from Asian then African sources. Yet it isn’t a roots move; the choreography (and costumes) aren’t locked on any particular culture or color. “Mass” makes humanity over into a beautiful oddity. Mr. Battle could give Tyler the Creator and the OFWGKTA crew art-life lessons.
Of course, as Artistic Director of Ailey Dance Theater, Battle has had someone closer at hand to mentor. He’s helped Jamar Roberts get lit. Thanks to the two of them, down the line, the Ailey company is sure to provide more surprises than “Revelations.”