Word: ailey
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...DANCE COMPANIES offer as wide a spectrum of style and tones in one night's repertory as does the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The company is known for its unique blend of ballet, modern and jazz dance, and the format of this week's Boston performances--in which any four of 15 pieces may be presented on a given night--shows up this range to good advantage...
...contrast to most other American dance companies where the movement itself is the most important element of the performance. Ailey tries to synthesize other elements in his theater--memorable and often modern plot and characters, music that can stand on its own merit, and sets that linger in the mind. The musical repertory is as diverse as the dance styles, adding Miles Davis and the group Earth, Wind and Fire to the more traditional Mendelssohn. Bach and Ravel "Revelations," set to chotal Negro spirituals, glorifies the Black experience through folk dancing and Biblical motifs...
...Royal Ballet, the Alvin Ailey Dancers, Broadway hit "Sweeney Todd" and the Metropolitan Opera will highlight the first season of the renovated 4200-seat theater, one of the largest in the world...
...observation symbolically confirmed by Richard Rodgers' recent death. Experimentation must proceed, but it must always be with an eye toward quality. Fortunately, the '70s provided us with two prime examples of art forms able to meet this difficult balance. Dance flourished as never before, because groups like Alvin Ailey and Pilobolus, never afraid to innovate, refused to stoop to low artistic levels to reap maximum profits. More established ballet troupes continued to provide, for the most part, first-rate productions, and the audiences responded. Jazz reasserted itself in the clubs, churches and music halls, in part because...
...forms, dance has experienced perhaps the greatest growth during the past decade. The bold experiments in modern dances during the '60s have come to fruition in the '70s; audiences regularly pack theaters to see such well-known troupes as Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, and Pilobilus. And the trend toward innovation has so spread that now companies in back-country towns like Northampson, Mass. perform works once restricted to New York's Greenwich Village. Fifteen years ago dance in Boston meant the Boston Ballet, which recently staged Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty"; today the number of dance and ballet companies...