As if to make up for their long absence from Edinburgh stages, the legendary Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (65 years old and going strong) brought two programmes to the Festival – one all-Ailey and one featuring work by contemporary choreographers Twyla Tharp and Kyle Abraham, both programmes ending (of course) with performances of the company’s calling card, Revelations.
Programme One opened with Twyla Tharp’s 1997 piece Roy’s Joys, a sleek and sophisticated romp through the music of Roy Eldridge, a slightly neglected jazz trumpeter who fell somewhere between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. And joyful it was, with the company let out to play somewhere in 1940s Harlem. With smoochy blues and some high-octane trumpet solos, music ranged from ‘I Remember Harlem’ to the (truly intriguing) ‘Une Petite Laitue’, and it was all marvellously atmospheric. There were all the Twyla moments – movements that started as one thing and ended as another, languorous arms-in-the-air solos, unconventional lifts and the constant undercutting of expectation. A woman was thrown off-stage into the wings. Loose-limbed macho men ambled carelessly around the stage as if just too cool to dance, and then broke into a bit of aggro (‘just kiddin’, bro’) before strolling off again. It was a great start.
Next up in the first programme was Kyle Abraham’s Are You In Your Feelings?, To a mixtape of blues, hiphop, R&B (and a bit of Beatles), this was a contemporary yet Ailey-style hymn to black culture, created for the company in 2022. Gloriously clad in loose pink-and-purple, the dancers came and went through various encounters and fragments of relationships, including a lovely slo-mo duet for two men, a masterpiece of control. Lots of upper-body work clearly suited the company well, as did the sculptural shapes they made. However, owing to a last-minute programme change (the Twyla Tharp replaced a new piece ruled out by injury), there was a sameness about these two pieces. Both allowed the company to show off its confidence in embracing choreographic styles other than its own, and each in its own way was lovely to see but, with their flowing meetings-and-partings and half-narratives, both might have been better seen in isolation. Revelations, closing the evening, raised the roof and generated so many curtain calls that the company looked dazed.
Programme Two was all the main man’s own work, and the better for it. Ailey’s work is shot through with spirituality, and Memoria - a piece from 1979 celebrating the life of his colleague Joyce Trisler – had it in spades. In the first section, a grief-stricken woman in grey (Sarah Daley-Perdomo) danced her sorrow alone until she was joined by others in white who could have been angels. This might be one of Ailey’s most classical pieces: at times her solo was pure Swan Lake and the couples who surrounded her carved slow, sorrowful arcs. But the mood turned from memorial to jazzy celebration (how carefully Ailey chose his music) until in the end she was borne aloft in a scarlet dress, a truly life-affirming image that reflected not only the individual but our survival in a post-covid world. Twenty or so young dancers, recruited from all over Scotland, formed a joyful and day-glo chorus, melting seamlessly into the main company as if they’d been doing it all their lives. Bravo to them!
Another piece from the archive, The River brought the whole company onstage for a piece that celebrated water (and life) in all its moods: a journey to the sea, ‘Giggling Rapids’, a lake – you made your own mind up. It was perhaps the piece that showed off the company best: a fabulous mixture of classicism and contemporary, with a bit of chorus-line hoofing thrown in, celebrating a company very much made up of individuals. (Which is why it was so difficult to single out particular dancers in any given work: they came and went with such speed and élan.) Speed and grace; the power and athleticism of its men, powering through the air and landing like feathers; their loose-limbed nonchalance; cheeky girls out-dancing them; the turn-on-a-sixpence change from classical to jazz and hip-hop…
And then there was Revelations again. However many times you watch this piece – and however many generations of dancers have performed it – it never fails to move. Although rooted in Ailey’s memories of his black southern childhood with its deep-seated faith in church-going and spirituals, it speaks directly to audiences anywhere. From the Sunday-go-to-meeting southern belles in white to the dancers of ’Sinner Man’ set against the flames of hell, this was an electrifying closing piece. And anyone who says they left the theatre without ‘Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham’ playing in their head, is lying.
