ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
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Hymn is a very strange work, part lesson on dance, part promo for the company, part genuine revelation of the people in it: Anna Deavere Smith’s “libretto,” drawn from interviews with Ailey, current artistic director Jamison, and individual dancers, makes up a good part of the sound track. At first I was offended by all the preaching, by the bald statements and rambling talk. But the things the dancers said, and the way they danced their statements, won me over: a reminiscence about a black dress Jamison once wore, a confession about the anguish caused by the search for “perfection,” a meditation on smiling and wearing masks, a statement of belief about what’s beautiful. Watching Revelations, which immediately followed Hymn, I kept thinking about Jamison’s spiritual dicta, which she got from Ailey: Go to the wall. Go further, try harder. Show us yourself.
The choreography in Hymn is largely forgettable, but much of the dancing was not. We could see Karine Plantadit Bageot’s sunny pleasure in herself in the proud definition she gave her torso; Michael Thomas’s quirky, almost syncopated movements revealed his belief that we’re drawn to the odd dancer because he’s sending us a message. For a lot of reasons Hymn is a very personal work, and in that sense the opposite of the dance that preceded it, Billy Wilson’s The Winter in Lisbon: Wilson’s ideas about what’s sexy, what’s musical, what’s revealing about people are so easy they border on the generic. Yet once again the dancing transcended the choreography and carried it. In fact, only one of the new works on the two programs I saw went beyond the expert and occasionally thrilling to create a choreographic vision.
Donald Byrd’s Dance at the Gym, on the same program, does not pull us in. Though it’s blessedly free of the obvious trappings of a high school dance and expert in its way, its ideas are predictable. It opens with a single woman and four men whose spiky, jabbing limbs make them look like thorny plants or spiny animals. Add hostile, bored looks and you’ve nailed adolescent defensiveness and sexual antagonism. At first the men and women tend to travel in herds, but gradually they pair up: the piece ends with four couples in romantic clinches, their melting, caressing motions the opposite of the staccato ones at the beginning.
