ALVIN ALLEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER.

ALVIN ALLEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER 

CITY CENTER DECEMBER 2, 1998-JANUARY 3, 1999

Plenty of champagne corks were popping during Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's fortieth-anniversary season at City Center, and deservedly so. Artistic director Judith Jamison has streamlined her troupe of thirty-one dancers into one of the most engaging and commercially successful of dance companies, while retaining Ailey's vision of a unique dance group that combines modern, ballet, and ethnic movement into a highly theatrical hybrid. No other dance company at present can expect to book City Center for a five-week run and consistently fill the house.

Seen only at the gala opening was Reginald Yates's rousing homage to Ailey and his African roots, which brought on stage representatives of the now far-reaching family: students from the Ailey school, the Ailey Repertory Ensemble, and alumni of the company, all dancing an Ancestral Homage to Alvin Ailey.

To honor the anniversary celebration, the Ailey company paraded a staggering number of dances to placate the hungry audiences, including four premieres, four revivals, a new production of an old classic, and eleven other repertory favorites. As an unexpected twist to the proceedings, the revivals turned out to be more interesting than the ambitious premieres.

One surprise hit of the season was the new production of Geoffrey Holder's 1968 ballet, The Prodigal Prince, a hypnotic and elaborate pageant depicting the mystic revelations of the Haitian painter Hector Hyppolite during a voudoun trance. With splendid, riotously colored costuming and a driving score (both by Holder), St. John the Baptist and Haitian goddess Erzulie stir up a ceremony, while a mambo-frenzied female chorus in veils circles the stage with minimal steps to maximum effect. It's as if Busby Berkeley had met a Caribbean shaman. Particularly delicious are Jeffrey Gerodias as the blissfully near-naked Hyppolite and Dwana Adiaha Smallwood as a strutting, outrageously feathered Erzulie.

Another audience pleaser was the premiere of a striking production of French choreographer Redha's Lettres d'Amour, set to a collage of music by contemporary composers, ranging in mood from Indian motifs to symphonic strings. Utilizing the supreme athleticism of the Ailey dancers, Redha creates remarkable stage images, such as a dancer rolling onto the floor, subsequently being swallowed into her partner's arms without a hitch in the transition; or those of women standing on the shoulders of their kneeling men and being raised slowly in waves. The direction of this postapocalyptic, sexy, Mad Max cocktail party is too vague, despite its aggressive and tormented moments. Judicious editing and a less arbitrary ending would have been beneficial.

More fully developed characters would have helped Jamison's new work, Echo: Far from Home, a somewhat autobiographical study of a young girl finding her way in the world of dance and exploring her African ancestral roots. Jamison is smart to compensate for the fuzzy dramatic motivation by giving her dancers smoothly crafted phrases of highly physical movement in the Ailey tradition. Especially notable were Benoit-Swan Pouffer as the Father, Matthew Rushing as the Mentor, Kristofer Storey as the Lover, and Smallwood as the gracefully naive Daughter.

If Jamison is looking to promote a school of choreography from within the company ranks, the less-than-auspicious debuts of short works by dancers Lisa Johnson and Troy O'Neil Powell don't exactly do justice to the Ailey legacy. Johnson's ballet, Restricted, took the title a tad too literally, with the dancers, dressed in silver lame bondage wear, tugging at a rope and each other. Slightly better was Powell's Ascension, in which three male beach boys toss their teasing female love machine (the always-impressive Desiree Vlad) into the wings so they can continue their self-absorbed dance. Both pieces would have been better in a workshop setting rather than under the scrutiny of audiences at City Center.

Highly welcomed, however, were three Ailey revivals of the season, The River (1970), Streams (1970), and Masekela Langage (1969). Duke Ellington's score for The River could easily rank among the top ten commissioned dance scores of the century. It is hard to imagine why American Ballet Theatre, for whom the piece was done originally, dropped this lovely abstract ballet from its repertory nearly twenty years ago and never returned to it. Especially compelling performances came from Richard Witter in the Spring section and, gracing the steamy adagio Lake segment, the fluid Linda-Denise Evans, who was a company dynamo throughout the season.

Streams, scored by Miloslav Kabelac, is a further exploration of aqueous, sculptured shapes, with the pantherlike Uri Sands and Gerodias excelling in the virtuoso Scherzo, and the entire company gliding through the Danza with its marimba rhythms.

Perhaps the most pleasurable surprise of all was that Masekela Langage does not look dated, and may have actually grown in its expressive power over the years. Set in a tense South African beer hall, but clearly conjuring up images of the Chicago race riots, Alley demonstrates his intuitive theatricality with a dance-drama that still packs a mean punch to the solar plexus. Guillermo Asca as a street fighter, Evans as an angry urban woman, and Powell as an ignored victim of savagery give the right impact to the choreography. And one of the most hauntingly memorable performances of the season was that of Renee Robinson as a South African woman whose hollowed-out spirit has been raped and numbed by the oppressive violence of apartheid.

One last word about the amazing Alley dancers. They dance with unflagging energy in every piece, they attack movement without inhibitions, and across the board they are gorgeous enough to strut the catwalk during Fashion Week in New York City. Alvin would have been very proud.