Edges of Ailey, the blockbuster exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art that examines the life and times of Alvin Ailey is curiously splintered into two tranches: visual art in the 5th floor gallery and occasional live performances by the Ailey company and guest artists in a theater on the 3rd floor.
I caught a performance of excerpts from three works that together represent the early half of Ailey’s creative career between 1958 and 1972 – from Blues Suite’s evocation of the honky-tonks of Ailey’s childhood in rural Texas, to his joyful response to Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending and the minimalist rigor of Streams, set to percussion schemes by Miroslav Kabeláč. The program opened with a solo from the lush, enigmatic Divining, a 1984 creation by Judith Jamison, who took the helm after Ailey’s untimely death at age 58 and who herself was laid to rest just a few weeks ago.
Throughout, the dancers of the Ailey II company performed with a technical and artistic polish practically indistinguishable from that of the main company. The superb quintet of Xhosa Scott, Kamani Abu, Xavier Logan, Darion Turner and Alfred L. Jordan II had to get somewhere fast in “Mean Ol’ Frisco” from Blues Suite (“Tell me why that train don’t wait”), driving their taut arms like the coupling rods on a steam train. Nervy twitches of hip and shoulders preceded some impressive stag leaps and triumphal spins with arms and back leg flung skyward. Trapped in the “House of the Rising Sun”, the elegant Jordyn White, Kayla Mei-Wan Thomas and Jennifer M. Gerken stared into their own private hells (“it’s been the ruin of many a poor girl”). They took invisible gut punches and arched their backs precariously.
The carefree Kiri Moore soared balletically on the strings of The Lark Ascending. She hit a thermal, with assist from the towering Xhosa Scott, and coasted, draped exquisitely across his shoulders.
The austere and gripping Streams from 1970 felt timeless, the company shading knife-like phrases with a sense of menace. At one point they slipped in some samba-like hip action, but their primary mode was stealth.
In the numinous solo from Divining, to an eerie score of African percussion by Kimati Dinizulu and Monti Ellison that occasionally evoked birds and spaceships, the statuesque Corinth Moulterie hit rock-solid balances and navigated a series of thorny promenades and sinuous spirals with cool self-possession.
Though too brief at 30 minutes, the programme illustrated how Ailey deftly fused Graham and Horton modern techniques, ballet, theatrical jazz, and the Afro-Caribbean rhythms which he first encountered in Katherine Dunham’s work – and how he trained generations of dancers to excel across them.
Separately, the 5th floor exhibit provides astonishing visual and textual backdrop for Ailey’s pioneering distillation of the Black American experience into a newly expansive genre of dance. This experience of exclusion and exploitation, of rootlessness and migration, from which great American literature, art, music and dance emerged, is captured in the powerful paintings of William H. Johnson, Clementine Hunter, Kerry James Marshall, Geoffrey Holder, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and many others, the harrowing linocut prints by Hale Aspacio Woodruff, the photographs of Carl Van Vechten, the tributes to Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes and other musicians and literary figures of the time.
But it was a strange curatorial choice to banish live dance from the main exhibition space. For history also courses through dancers’ bodies, etched in their movement. History is evident, too, in the many-hued skin tones of Ailey dancers – the legacy of Alvin Ailey’s resolute integration of his company during a time when segregation still blighted American society.
Equally strange is the absence of a screening room in which to view Ailey works on film during exhibition hours. (Uptown at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the smaller-scale exhibit devoted to The Joffrey + Ballet in the U.S. has somehow managed a screening room).
The majority of Whitney museum-goers will not time their visits to catch a live performance. Their experience of Ailey’s dances will be limited to a monster video montage of terribly grainy performance clips, interspersed with interview soundbites. This impressionistic video runs on a continuous loop on a wraparound multi-screen wallscape above the wondrous jumble of paintings, sculptures and archival material.
Viewers must crane their necks to watch snippets of Ailey’s Revelations. This is his signature dance suite, to gospel and blues: a towering reminder that the work of liberation encompasses the ritual sharing of grief, the preservation of memories of suffering, and the communal discovery of joy. Edited down into fragments and blown up like a billboard across Times Square, competing with other great art for our attention, this view of Revelations has drained it of much of its power.
Edges of Ailey runs until February 9th 2025
