Portrait of a Lady
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Alvin Ailey’s “Flowers,” partially a portrait of Janis Joplin, was created in 1971, the year after Joplin died of a heroin overdose. The Joplin role was originally danced by Lynn Seymour, a guest from London’s Royal Ballet. Like both Joplin herself, as well as Ms. Seymour, “Flowers” is sui generis — unlike anything else in the Ailey repertory. Last week the Ailey troupe revived it, after an inexplicably long absence of nearly three decades, and it was a gripping experience.
The Joplin-esque heroine arrives on stage in silence, then starts to strut and pose for photographers as Joplin’s voice rings out in “Down on Me.” Throughout the song, Ailey has craftily composed a virtually photographic reproduction of the body language and locomotion that accompanied Joplin’s public persona: the bantam walk, the slugs from a bottle of booze, the oscillating vibrancy of speech and movement.
Basking in acclaim, the celebrity singer is still riding high as she begins boogalooing her way through a thicket of men, dressed in wonderfully apt hippie attire (the costumes are by A. Christina Giannini), while Blind Faith supplies the audio. Here we see Joplin’s promiscuity and emotional desolation play out before us. As man after man rejects her, she succumbs to the solicitation of a drug pusher. He seems to have wandered in from John Butler’s “Portrait of Billie,” which to some extent provides a template for Ailey’s “Flowers.” Joplin’s own drug supplier would probably have worn long hair and an earring instead of suit and tie, but Ailey’s folding of Joplin’s story into his own more characteristic cultural milieu is admirable. The pusher can seem an outer manifestation of inner demons, an embodiment of her urge to self-destruction.
As a segue of two trippy tracks by Pink Floyd begin their fuzz-box drift, the pusher, helped by a stagehand, removes the stage furniture and props, re-setting the scene for a glassy-eyed odyssey. Joplin reappears, now in pointe shoes, recalling dream scenes from ballets like “La Bayadère,” where the hero’s opium hallucinations enable him to visit his late beloved. The green feather boa she waved in the first scene is now the border of a caftan that envelops her. Her guys are back, too, wearing moonglow briefs and jackets, and together they are privy with her to a long, lulling, secret interlude.
The end of the high is indicated by pusher and stagehand re-setting the stage to bring us back to the first scene. Joplin reappears, dressed as she was in the opening scene, but much the worse for wear. She is no longer numb or euphoric, but rather shaky on her feet and fading fast. Clutching and staggering, she turns on her public and on her herself while she wails her way through “Kozmic Blues.” She then flatlines, and the photographers return to snap her corpse. Roses are pelted from the wings; her bouquet has become a funereal tribute.
Linda Celeste Sims was electrifying as Joplin as she soared into artificial paradises — giddy enthrallment with public adoration as much as narcotic indulgence — and crashed into the abyss. In this role of so many different pieces, everything in her performance fit together. Clifton Brown, who’d earlier in the evening zanily danced up a storm in Camille A. Brown’s “The Groove to Nobody’s Business,” was again a potently sinister presence, as he had been in last year’s revival of “Portrait of Billie.”
One thing that differentiates Ailey’s “Flowers” from most of his repertory is that all the music is courtesy of white rock groups. As in Ailey’s “Cry,” made the same year, in which one of the musical selections was by Laura Nyro, Ailey seems to be making a bid for inclusiveness and recognition of how white performers personalized these black lexicons. Joplin drew upon black soul, blues, gospel, and R & B, as well as white folk, country, bluegrass, and psychedelic rock, and made her own unique synthesis from them. So did Ailey make a work of multiple reference points in his “Flowers.” The piece is both slick and heartfelt. At the time, ballets set to rock music were doing quite well at the Joffrey Ballet, and Ailey may have felt the need to appropriate this territory. Rock was also permeating the mainstream cultural radar, and Joplin remained a white-hot symbol of a cultural consciousness of an era that was just ending.
“Flowers” comports with Ailey’s enduring interest in the lives and work of flamboyant performers, and ultimately it registers as a work of courage and conviction. He confronts the audience with an unpredictable and sometimes ambiguous evocation of individual, culture, and consciousness that is also part morality play: We in the audience are indicted as well. From first to last on Saturday night, “Flowers” and its cast kept us in a state of suspended animation.