An Incomplete But Valuable ‘Portrait'
The more information available about Billie Holiday's psyche, the more paradoxical and elusive she seems to become. John Butler's "Portrait of Billie," made soon after her death in 1959, attempts in the language of dance to describe Holiday's personal torment. In 1974, it entered the repertory of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which revived the piece Wednesday after a two-decade absence.
Butler's "Portrait" is certainly not a comprehensive one. Dance is better at conveying emotional truths and sensations than facts, and a woman who remains enigmatic even after a succession of full-length biographies cannot be captured by a relatively brief dance work. Dance can illustrate much emotional truth with immediacy and power, but the finest of contextual shadings and the explanatory details of backstories are denied in a performance piece without words.
The program notes describe the sections of the work as "The Young Billie," "The Man," and "The Stuff." But she seems to be in fitful state of withdrawal from the time the curtain goes up. Butler danced with Martha Graham, and there are echoes of Graham's heroines, both in the persistent ambivalence of advance/retreat and in Graham's use of props as complex symbols. The gardenia Billie pulls out of her neckline seems to be conflated with narcotics. She wields a clenched fist that becomes an expression of defiance as well as inevitably recalling someone giving herself a fix.
William Dufty, who ghostwrote Holiday's 1956 autobiography, told me once that despite the socially palatable position of contriteness she maintained in the book, she believed to some degree that drugs saved her life by calming a potentially murderous rage. Given the tragedy and chaos of her life, she considered it a triumph that she had not wound up in the electric chair.
Brutalized by her early environment, Holiday quickly became and remained throughout her life victimizer as well as victim. Her toughnes co-existed with a belief in her worthlessness that dogged her every move."Portrait of Billie," catches these axes of the polarized psyche: Butler's Holiday is a tigress as well as a child.
On Wednesday night, Asha Thomas's Billie was crafty, seductive, fierce. She was joined by Clifton Brown, meant to embody a bad strongman, one of the exploitative pimps/pushers/lovers in Holiday's life, although here again, Holiday was aggressor as well as prey. She had a weakness for pretty but ineffectual men as well, and was likely bisexual. Yet if Ms. Thomas and Mr. Brown's macabre duets of attraction and repulsion in "Portrait of Billie" did not give us the entire dossier on Holiday's love life, they provided all the stealthy tension one could want.
"Portrait of Billie" is performed to recordings Holiday made over a 20-year span, between the 1930s and '50s. As "Portrait of Billie" closes, Holiday sings "No More" in the resolute tone of a woman who's come to her senses but still retains the uniquely bruised, almost masochistic vulnerability of her singing voice. Onstage, Ms. Thomas's Holiday has thrown off her burdens but the monkey is on her back. As the work closes, she is unmistakably under the influence, until she's finally curled up on the floor — stoned, dead, or simply in a fetal retreat.
Butler's Holiday dominated Wednesday night's program, which opened with "Shining Star," David Parsons's inanely cheerful setting of Earth, Wind & Fire songs. The Ailey dancers boogied down with 1,000-watt effervescence that nevertheless contained some anxiety that this material needed all the salesmanship they could muster. Then came Hans van Manen's harmlessly cute "solo," performed by Guillermo Asca, Jamar Roberts, and Antonio Douthit.
After "Portrait of Billie" came Ulysses Dove's high-impact "Episodes," in which a constellation of Amazons and men on the run dance past each other. They take confrontational stances and vault high or slam low into each other's arms, but everything is glancing, every encounter a near miss.
Finally, it came time for the frequent question besetting every dance critic attending an Ailey performance: Stay for "Revelations" or not? There are no easy answers.
Despite having already seen the work in its entirety twice this season, I decided to stay to see Alicia Graf dance "Fix Me, Jesus," partnered by Jamar Roberts. Ms. Graf had been superb in "Episodes," as indeed had all nine members of the cast. In "Revelations" she brought a welcome tenderness to the role. At times, though, her very high and frictionless extensions almost worked against her. She didn't abuse her extensions, but her facility didn't allow us to see in them what Ailey surely intended: a culmination containing a muted note of victory over doubt or adversity.
