There’s something curiously unchanging about Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. I’ve been watching them for more than three decades now, and though the choreographers change – there’s Ailey himself, but also dance-makers as diverse as Ulysses Dove and Hans van merlaManen – the work always seems to come from the same place. It’s the way they dance it: that liquid-hipped African-American style from which a cool self-mockery is never completely absent, and which shades, suddenly and unexpectedly, from the goofball to the meditative, from virtuosity to plangent longing.
Even the less engaging pieces, like George W Faison’s Otis Suite, a ponderous 1971 jazz-ballet set to Otis Redding, contain this ice-chip of melancholy. It’s elusive, but it’s there, and it’s what gives the company’s best work its multi-dimensional quality, linking it not only to an artistic and choreographic past, but to the wider grandeur and sorrow of the African-American experience.
Ronald K Brown’s Dancing Spirit, choreographed in 2009, is profoundly inflected with this sense of past-in-present. The lighting suggests a twilit evening, and as Duke Ellington plays on the soundtrack, a diagonal of dancing figures crosses the stage. A pattern emerges, with the leading pair forming a choreographic phrase which they then pass onto those following. Something about the dancers’ rounded shoulders and loosely swinging arms is more African than American, and Ellington’s rhythms are trodden out with unhurried precision. The costumes are united by colour – blues, violets and whites – but the styles vary, from ruched antebellum to nightclub casual, enhancing the impression of intersecting time-frames.
