Ailey town

A hymn to Alvin

by Marcia B. Siegel

Dance companies start to look like communities after they've lived long enough. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at 40 has fed several generations of dancers into the mainstream of dance. It has provided a stage for choreographers and other artists to create a repertory and a style. By now the company doesn't simply perform dances. Just as Martha Graham's dancers always represent heroic sex martyrs and Paul Taylor's appear as sometimes tormented, sometimes slap-happy modern souls, Alvin Ailey dancers wear the painful, triumphant heritage of the oppressed. From dance to dance, they carry the company's histories, they speak for its founders and gods, they propel its mystique.

Judith Jamison's Hymn, which opened the program I saw during the Ailey's six-performance stay at the Wang Center last weekend, pays homage to the artistic director whose mantle she's worn since his death, in 1989. Celebrations are a longstanding company ritual. Alvin Ailey was consistently gracious in acknowledging his teachers, collaborators, and artistic forebears, for whom the company has staged new dances, gala performances, and entire seasons over the years. With Hymn, Jamison and Anna Deavere Smith create what the program calls a "picture-biography of Mr. Ailey's loving legacy."

The dance is like a series of recollected Ailey moments. We hear Anna Deavere Smith's taped voices reconstructing anecdotes and cherished conversations that were evidently first told by company members. The 31 dancers surge in and out in emotional waves of tribute, using a movement vocabulary that combines the ever-aspiring Ailey technique with intentionally specific borrowings from his dances -- the hunched-over jumps of Sinner Man, the uppity struts and stares of his Blues pieces.

Like most of Ailey's choreography (including the other two pieces on this program), Hymn is plotless, "abstract," yet it's overlaid with character. Except for the exaggeratedly sexy walks, Jamison stays away from the populist references Ailey often used. She favors balletic stretch, speed, and over-the-top projection, as in a section where seven men wait staunchly on a diagonal for one woman after another to rush into their arms and pitch into a six o'clock penché arabesque. But there are also solos and smaller groups where the mood is quieter, introspective. A trio huddle together, protecting and comforting one another. A woman reflects on the meaning of performing. Veteran Dudley Williams, now the paternal figure in the company, invokes some of his well-loved solos.

When the dance opened and closed with everyone moving in almost militaristic unison, spaced over the stage and facing the audience, I cringed from the insistent spectacle of it. But Ailey wasn't afraid of show biz, so that's part of his legacy too.

Talley Beatty's The Stack-Up (1983) provided a pretty thorough elaboration of the vernacular side of Ailey and the black dance idiom he more than anyone invented. At the beginning we see costume-coded groups of characters hanging out: ordinary couples, a group in slick gym clothes, some innocents in squeaky clean satin, a couple of slouchy oddballs and two overdressed women in wigs. Either a party or a turf war seems about to happen.

But then the piece reverts to an exposition of Beatty's high-powered, balletic but Graham-based movement, with just occasional hints of street drama thrown in. There are drug dealings, insults, half-hearted rivalries, and one guy who gets high and eventually seems to have been killed. But all this is incidental to the dancing. Compared with those in Jamison's piece, the dancers here looked more flexible, more expressive. The rocking pelvises, vibrating torsos, stretched-out runs and small rhythmic suspensions of Beatty's choreography, the contrasts between tight and loose moves, the jazzy interpolations -- all introduced variety without sacrificing big effects.

Despite its balletic movement and its murky scenario, Fin de Siècle (1997), by Donald Byrd, fit right into the Ailey ethos as a piece that insists dancers are never "just" dancing but are always signifying other things as well. Four separate elements succeeded one another in the dance but didn't quite mesh: a central couple doing a barefoot pas de deux observed by a male corps de ballet; another couple in black who may have been their contemporary alter ego; and a mysterious, tormented woman who opened the dance in a peculiar satin gown and ended it in her underwear.