E-Mail This Article to a Friend Wind-up Alvin Ailey; Cyberarts; ‘Ten’s the Limit’ BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

The dance season sprints to a climax with more than 20 attractions crammed into the next five weeks. Leading off was last week’s annual Bank of America Celebrity Series visit from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Wang Theatre.

The Ailey has a lot to be proud of in its 47th year. Not just a dance company, it’s become a proper noun signifying successful black artistic and educational enterprise. An Ailey performance evokes enthusiasm bordering on hysteria in its audience and a sense of mission joyfully shared. Ailey is not just popular modern dance, it’s a social victory in a time of tarnished ideals.

The most tangible monument to this success is the new Joan Weill Center for Dance, Ailey’s headquarters in New York. The $54,000,000 building houses 12 studios, a black-box theater, offices, and facilities for the dancers and designers of the two Ailey companies. It’s a dancer’s dream of efficiency and light, and also a busy working and meeting place for a multi-racial, all-ages, laypersons-and-professionals community you wouldn’t have believed could still function in today’s niche-based America.

To certify all this, there’s Ailey Spirit, a lavish new book of photographs with a worshipful text of quotes from former associates edited by Robert Tracy. The book seems to signal a new stage in the gradual elevation of Alvin Ailey, who died in 1989, from dancer/choreographer/founder to mentoring saint. Ailey Spirit is a beautiful memento of many dancers and dances I’ve known over the years, but it’s no substitute for Jennifer Dunning’s 1996 biography, or Thomas DeFrantz’s thoughtful study Dancing Revelations, which Oxford published last year.

Love Stories, an interesting collaboration involving Ailey artistic director Judith Jamison, Rennie Harris, and Robert Battle, made its Boston debut last Friday at the Wang. Each of the choreographers was responsible for a section. The dance is a glamor machine, a fusion of styles, and another suggestion that the words of Alvin Ailey amount to holy gospel. It shows the development of a dance company in which a variety of talented individuals can emerge through the solidarity of the group and the wisdom of its guiding spirit.

Sayings by Ailey are projected on the backdrop and vaguely heard on an over-amplified tape — they’re sprinkled through Tracy’s book, too. The dance begins with Clifton Brown in a quote from Ailey’s Reflections in D, a much-loved solo that later belonged to Dudley Williams — who by the way is retiring this spring after 40 years as a dancer with the company. Brown continues with a solo of quick changes and restless, weightless leaps. He’s joined by 11 others who show off for each other two at a time. There’s an exuberant number that incorporates hip-hop and breakdance moves. The dancers, including the women, launch themselves into Rennie Harris’s acrobatic shoulder spins and slides, no-handed cartwheels and propellers, as if they’d been doing them alongside their arabesques and tendus every morning of their lives.

Battle’s section is more formal, with the group striding and jumping together ecstatically, more quotes, from Ailey’s Blues and Revelations, and a strange false ending. The dancers line up and walk upstage, their clasped hands upraised in a bridge, melting into silhouette against a backdrop of stars. Before the audience can fire off its ready ovation, a woman comes into a spotlight and begins another, floorbound solo — perhaps a closing reference to Cry, the solo Ailey made for Jamison about black mothers. While she dances, a man holding a light moves past the line of silhouettes behind her, stopping at each person to rekindle the spirit. Then the group come forward, pumping fists at the audience, and again retreat upstage as the lights go out.

I hadn’t seen Robert Battle’s Juba, which he made in 2003 for the Ailey, and I thought it very accomplished, another essay on group togetherness with dark overtones of a chain gang. After an establishing line dance that looked Balkan or Greek at times, minstrel-show at times, the individuals in the quartet danced out in solos. In a slow section, one man seemed to be trying to escape, but he finally reconnected with the group. The last section churned up a tremendous storm of rhythm and intensity, the group pounding out the pulse with their fists, their whole stamping bodies. The dancers, Hope Boykin, Matthew Rushing, Kirven J. Boyd, and Samuel Deshauteurs, crescendo’d to an orgiastic circle of leaping and yells. They were sensational.

OVER THE WEEKEND, the Boston Cyberarts Festival produced a two-day conference on dance and technology, "Ideas in Motion," and the first of several media-related performances. Sunday’s events at the new Boston University Dance Theater persuaded me that though technology exerts a perennial dizzying attraction for dancers, a true integration of movement and the monster is as rare as it always was.

Most media dance so far has used the technology either as an independent scenic element or as previously generated imagery projected onto live dancers. Alwin Nikolais was the master of this, beginning in the 1950s. He covered whole stages with projections to create environments that the dancers inhabited. Merce Cunningham seized Life Forms animation and motion-capture technology when they were still emerging as dance tools. Although the devices have changed, from cameras and slide projectors to computers, the challenge remains.

At BU, in one section of Wear & Tear, which was performed by Mei Yin Ng of Mei Be Whatever company, with media by Eric Koziol, the dancer stood in a designated spot and vanished. One minute we saw her body — naked except for some bits of transmitting apparatus — and the next minute she had dematerialized. A blinking white pinpoint bloomed into a mandala and moved down from where her face had been. Her torso peeled open and a huge vertical eye stared out.

Visually stunning and maybe thought-provoking, this kind of process uses the dancer as a target. Even when she moves, her path and her activity are prescribed to coincide with the focus of the projections. Where the technology quest seems to be heading is toward the dancer’s controlling the audio/visual possibilities at the moment of performance with freer, more dancelike movement.

In the world of microchips, the dancer can even control the on-off switch. The repertoire the Alvin Ailey company brought to the Wang included the spectacular 1982 David Parsons solo Caught, where the dancer zaps himself into visibility in mid jump by clicking on a strobe light.

The digital dance-theater company Troika Ranch is pushing the technology toward choreographic fusion, through collaborating artists Mark Coniglio and Dawn Stoppiello. A 30-minute excerpt from 16 (R) evolutions amounted to a demonstration of several eye-opening and ear-bending gambits made possible by sensing devices attached to the dancers’ bodies, sampled sounds and visual transformations, Life Forms programming, motion capture, and even more occult new gadgetry.

A woman stood and exhaled with little puffing breaths. White bubbles popped out of her mouth. She roared and belched balloons. Dancers moved in front of a background of converging lines. Their shadows made the lines vibrate and shimmer like layers of moiré cloth. A man and a woman sat down to breakfast. As they chewed their cereal, it sounded as if the building were about to come crunching down around us. A woman swooped and soared through the space, leaving calligraphic trace forms behind her on the backdrop.

For me, the trick in all this raging technology is to quell my curiosity about how it’s being produced. You can’t get away from the fact that machines, new machines especially, fascinate us as much as the fantasy worlds they open up.

And then, there’s always history to teach us a little humility. Jody Sperling has re-created the dance of the pioneering Loie Fuller, who manipulated yards of silk with projected colored lights at the beginning of the 20th century. Sperling’s The Elements, which she calls a "continuation" of Fuller’s work, evoked flames and foaming surf, rippling waters and floating creatures of the air. I thought Sperling’s expansive musicality and expert manipulation of her enormous costume were perfectly analogous to the solution today’s technological sophisticates are still searching for — not just a merger of dancing and media but a transfiguration of both.

CRASHARTS’ FOURTH ANNUAL ‘Ten’s the Limit’ showcase at Green Street Studios offered a couple of convincing 10-minute pieces, but most of the eight entries, which were curated by Jim Coleman, looked like excerpts from longer pieces or uncooked prospective new ones.

Debra Bluth’s solo Dodge was a dialogue between the dancer/choreographer and some off-stage force that she both desired and feared. She advanced toward it tentatively, shrank back, went through a series of emotions that were gripping without being pantomimic.

Rebecca Rice’s Midstream, a duet for Ann-Marie Cofield and Caitlin Novero, used an evolved ballet-modern vocabulary that made real demands on the dancers and had an interesting minimalistic score by Martin Case.

Lorraine Chapman presented movement from her recent St. John Passion dance, now in development toward some other use. The Rite of Difficulty, to music by Michael Gordon, was an anguished, even violent, outburst for six dancers that preserved its formal patterning as the individuals’ movement headed out of control.