A Rich & Inventive Work, but Short of a ‘Revelation’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
In 1960, Alvin Ailey choreographed the extraordinary “Revelations,” and his company has been performing it on a steady basis ever since. With its shiveringly good medley of spirituals and its vibrant dancing, “Revelations” has proven universally irresistible: They love it in Peoria as much as they do at the Acropolis, or at City Center, where it anchors Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s annual New York winter season. (“Revelations” will be performed 22 times this December.)
For 45 years, Ailey’s fans have been waiting for the next “Revelations.” Various choreographers have tried and failed to reproduce its magic, but few have come as close as the Brooklyn-born choreographer Ronald K. Brown did in 1999, when he produced “Grace” (which the company will reprise later this month). “Grace” achieved the Ailey fantasy: It pleased both a pop audience and the critics. Mr. Brown returned in 2001 with “Serving Nia,” another promising outing. So Wednesday’s world premiere of “Ife (My Heart),” the new piece by the 39-year-old Mr. Brown, was cause for anticipation.
In “Ife,” the lights come up on an arresting image: a man perched in a shoulder stand, his legs suspended in the air. A voice chants an African prayer, and the sound of it, like the man’s movement, is both beautiful and mystifying. He drops down to the stage and begins cycling through patterns, his rising and falling echoing the incantatory rhythms of the prayer. He wears flowing white trousers and a white safari shirt. It is all very sacred and still. Then the onrush begins.
As full-fledged gospel bursts forth, four dancers come on, dressed in white flowing African clothes meant to distinguish them as a cohort.A couple enters, their white clothes more antebellum in flavor.Then comes another couple, in early-20th-century whites.
In interviews, Mr. Brown has stated that “Ife” is about three families in three cultures, but this opening series of introductions is more apt to confuse than delineate. With all that billowy white fabric whirling around, the image was abstract and dreamy, like sheets whipping in the breeze on a clothesline. Yet one felt pressured to resist such pleasures and concentrate instead on cataloging the characters.
Later, Mr. Brown increased the flood of information, layering Nikki Giovanni’s involved poem, “My House,” over the music. Here again, the audience was presented with an unpleasant choice: Pay attention to the message and lose track of the dance, or pay attention to the dance and lose track of the message.
I chose the dance, and was glad of it. The Ailey dancers are among the best in New York – sure-footed, keenly musical, wonderfully versatile – and “Ife” gives them a chance to strut their stuff. There are tense, quick motions followed abruptly by loose, luxurious releases. A dancer will pound out rhythms with her feet then suddenly stop, oozing calm. After a series of quick, precise twirls, a dancer flops her arms and hands from the elbow. There is a kind of folk-dance circle around which dancers shuffle and skip; sometimes they bend their elbows back like wings and flap them. In the final group section, the dancers raise their knees with attitude, dropping each foot down like an exclamation point, and their arms throw off the moves as if dealing out a deck of cards.
But all Mr. Brown’s rich, inventive movement does not add up to a piece. Wednesday’s performance of “Ife” reminded me of a very good FM station: just one strong track following another. The fact that “Revelations” followed on the bill threw the weaknesses of “Ife” into particular relief.
Ailey’s first iconic image of that pyramid of dancers rising up – arms curving and fingers splaying, hands to heaven – is coherent, burnished art. As the choir sings, “I’ve Been ‘Buked’ and I’ve Been Scorned,” the group separates, swirling into disarray, but here the genius lies in the fact that the dancers both resist and crave the formation, always returning to it.
Later, in “I Wanna Be Ready,” as Guillermo Asca balanced on the floor on one hip and grabbed out for salvation in awkward, desperate thrusts, there was satisfying, parable-like simplicity in the merging of text and movement. “I wanna be ready to put on my long white robe” is not something the brain had to register and acknowledge; it seeped in through the pores of the dance.
This is not to say that Mr. Brown might have created a work on the scale of “Revelations” by emulating Mr. Ailey’s best dance; the counter-examples to that line of reasoning are strewn across decades’ worth of old program bills. Mr. Brown needn’t stick to a single line of text or a single cohort of characters in each scene. But the final impression of “Ife” – overly complicated, obscuring its own titular heart – stands in sharp contrast to the vivid stage pictures drawn in “Revelations.” There is one exception: the triumphant opening solo of “Ife,” which possesses a lovely, rich simplicity. Forty-five years after “Revelations,” we know how hard it is to create that simplicity. We can hope that the talented Mr. Brown will go on trying.
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s season runs until January 1 at City Center (131 W.55th Street,between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, 212-581-1212).