A Hymn for Alvin Ailey

Filmmaker Orlando Bagwell is only one of the collaborators on this extraordinary tribute to the great modern-dance choreographer. Hymn the film is based on Hymn the collage dance made by Judith Jamison, who inherited the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater after Ailey's death 10 years ago. The film adds another layer of distance and paste-up, but its effect, curiously, is more personal and moving than the dance on stage.

Hymn is built on movements from Ailey's dances, taped interviews with company members, alumni, and friends, and live reconstructions of those interviews by Anna Deavere Smith. In the film Jamison and Smith sometimes even duet with the dancers. There's archival footage -- too little, of course -- of Ailey dancing, and of Jamison in the tremendous work he made for her, Cry.

The film, to be aired later next month on PBS, abandons the usual Dance in America format, which entails making a record of dances as continuous pieces of choreography. The series has been invaluable in preserving the fragile dance repertory -- if only more of those videos were commercially available or watchable in reruns. But Hymn as a dance was meant to commemorate Ailey, and to carry on his message beyond his dances themselves. The film made me think of Ailey as a moral force who offered us dancing to celebrate people's diversity and reminded us of trouble when trouble had subsided.

-- Marcia B. Siegel