The Alvin Ailey company are an American institution, a much-loved embodiment of the ideal of the melting pot nation. But for UK audiences, it can be hard to get the measure of a company that seems at once so physically dynamic and stylistically so old-fashioned.
The company has a reverence for its own history that can make its repertory appear overburdened with past work. In its signature piece, Revelations, this respect for tradition makes sense. Ailey’s celebration of his African-American heritage was pioneering in 1960 – and, danced as well as it is by the current company, it remains grandly expressive.
There seems no reason, however, to accord the same respect to George Faison’s Suite Otis, from 1971. Its music – a vintage collection of Otis Redding – can certainly claim classic status, but its fusion of jazz choreography and mainstream modern dance has not aged well. Most of the sequences look as though they’ve been lifted straight from the classroom, and for all their perky, flirtatious allusions to the songs’ lyrics, they are irritatingly deaf to the music of Redding’s thrilling voice. Clifton Brown is one of the few dancers who manages to impose some elegant phrasing of his own. Otherwise, Otis Suite has lost whatever soul it once possessed.
