Special Repertory Highlights
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Opera House
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, DC
February 2, 2010
by George Jackson
copyright 2010 by George Jackson
Ailey's opening nights at Kennedy Center are social occasions. The dressy audience has to be seated early, just after 7 PM, and intermissions are short so that the post-performance partying doesn't last too late since Washington rises early on weekday mornings. During the show, applause is thunderous. Beforehand, sponsors and board members get a few moments on stage and then Ailey's director, the inimitable Judith Jamison, has her say. She thanked lots of people and, of course, came to speak about her company's late founder. Jamison's words triggered my memory of the two occasions on which I'd gone backstage after a performance to see Alvin Ailey.
On my first backstage foray, 1963 in Rio de Janeiro, I found Alvin Ailey complaining bitterly and shedding tears. He had just been booed by the opening night audience that filled a huge sports arena. This too was a "social" occasion: the reason for the crowd's displeasure wasn't Ailey's artistry but that he and his dancers were seen as representing the USA.The Cariocans accused him of appropriating Black folk material and using it on behalf of Wall Street imperialism.
It had been my seat neighbor who asked me to accompany him backstage. He was Dr. Benjamin Kean, Ailey's tropical disease physician and also at the time the husband of Rebekah Harkness, one of the Ailey company's patrons. Kean hoped we would be able to comfort Ailey and distract him a bit. After Rio, Ailey was heading alone into the Amazon, from where I had just come. His aim was to visit the Black tribes. These were descendants of Africans brought to work the Brazilian rubber plantations - enslaved people who had escaped into the jungle and set up new African communities. Their music and dancing was said to be unique and Ailey was eager to experience it first hand. I cautioned him that getting there wouldn't be easy and gave him what little advice I could. Finding things in the jungle takes patience and luck. Kean and I left Ailey, not consoled, but perhaps thinking of things other than his reception in Rio.
My second backstage foray, in Washington during the 1970s, was also due to a seat neighbor - on this occasion the choreographer Rudy Perez. He was my house guest and his "Countdown", one of the great solos, was in the Ailey company's repertory, so he had to stop back and say hello. Alvin Ailey was complaining about something when he caught sight of Perez and gave him a very warm welcome. I reminded Ailey that we had met in Rio on an evening he would rather have forgotten. He laughed, but not being done with complaining, returned to the topic that had set him off - contractions. It seemed that no one but Martha Graham and he knew how to do contractions anymore. He demonstrated to his dancers and to us visitors, and he lectured. He was seldom satisfied.
Would Alvin Ailey have approved of the highlights program his company was performing for its 2010 opening night in Washington? The passages from Talley Beatty's "The Stack-Up" and Jamison's "Among Us" merged with Ailey's "Cry". Nor was "Uptown", Matthew Rushing's illustrated lecture on Harlem, distinctive. Everything was danced relentlessly, even Ailey's singular "Revelations". The company's power is amazing, but for art's sake and to see the dancing breathe it is perhaps best to skip going on so social a night.
