Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Sadler’s Wells Theatre September 2023

Depending on your age, a performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater tells you as much about history as about dance. My guest for the company’s opening night in London, its first since 2019, was a woman from South Carolina who had first seen the troupe in Florida and had always wanted to join it. Of the four pieces, she only recognized Revelations, which closed three of the four mixed programs, with a rehearsed encore invariably tacked on. Except for Ailey, she didn’t know the choreographers’ names and she’d never seen these dancers, but the cumulative excitement of their sass, energy and needle-sharp precision brought her to tears.

Nearly twice her age, I saw the performers as the latest incarnation of the vision that led Ailey to establish a company for African-American dancers in 1958. Originally seven black dancers, from 1963 the fully integrated troupe featured black, white and Asian artists.

By 1958, Ailey had studied and performed with Lester Horton, whose Los Angeles school was among the first racially integrated dance schools in the country, and danced on Broadway and in several movies. Yet to satisfy his desire to support black artists and express their cultural heritage, he needed to make his own dances for his own ensemble.

Its gradual success can be traced in its addresses. In 2004 when the company opened the doors of its first permanent home, it had moved seven times since 1958. Its brand-new, eight-story facility in New York now houses AAADT, Ailey 2, a flexible performance space, a school, a library and offices. It contains 12 studios, some with glass walls that reveal the activity inside to every passerby, and the company claims it is the largest building in the country devoted exclusively to dance.

The school has trained 75% of the troupe’s current members; initially launched in Brooklyn in 1969 with 125 students, it now attracts more than 3,500 pupils each year. As it’s turned out, an artistically inspired leap into the unknown has become a respected institution.

While modern dance struggled for survival in the 1960s, Ailey’s determination to make it both accessible and relevant shaped his choreography and the repertory he chose.  At Sadler’s Wells, the company danced four of his pieces and six more— five by black men and one by Twyla Tharp, a white woman—in various combinations. Whatever the assortment, the result  offered a contemporary celebration of what the troupe’s director Robert Battle calls “our common humanity. Where words fail, dance excels.”

Jazz by Duke Ellington, Wynton Marsalis and Roy Eldridge slapped rhythmical exuberance onto several works. Revelations rode on the fervent emotional currents of traditional gospel songs, and a pounding mixtape of hip-hop and R&B powered the cool robotics and sensual teasing of Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings?

Battle outshone them all with a stunning duet, Unfold, set to an aria from Gustave Charpentier’s Louise. Meant to project the profound impact of first love—Battle describes it as “the feeling that life stands still”—for me the couple’s physical separation and rooted, twisted poses evoked absolute desperation, hopelessness rather than hope.

Having referred to the “luxury of ambiguity” in dance, Battle might be delighted that Duet would be interpreted differently by different viewers. He might also agree with the African artist El Anatsui, who said recently that his abstract work is “not about what things look like, but what meanings things can have.”

Ailey habitually picked dancers with vibrant stage presence, for whom he could create dances that made the most of their personality. Decades after his death, the personal vibrancy that once ignited every piece seldom comes across the footlights. Spirit has replaced soul, scrupulous preparation now masks personality. No one could miss the dancers’ skill, but I kept wishing they’d crack open their polished accuracy and dance as if dancing really mattered.

At Sadler’s Wells Theatre until September 16

Ailey 2 celebrates its 50th anniversary with a U.K. tour, September 19 - October 28.

See https://danceconsortium.com/touring/ailey-2/  for details of performances, masterclasses, open rehearsals and workshops.