Word: ailey
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...always had a small audience. Never firmly established, it has remained dependent on financial funding from foundation grants and universities. Perhaps it is the academicism in the atmosphere, that has infected these professional dancers with an over-concern with form, at the expense of felt experience. Choreographers like Alvin Ailey and Donald McKayle have rooted their works in their experience, importing the riches of jazz and blues. Their works are alive, far more powerful than those of Merce Cunningham, who rips his dances out of all reality without leaving any reference posts. If it was depressing to see the beautiful...
...details. The resulting three-week season of 25 performances features the Ohana-Purcell double bill, conducted by Richard Dufallo and staged by Paul Emile-Deiber, alternating with a rollicking treatment of Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, conducted by Roland Gagnon and superbly staged by Alvin Ailey. By sprinkling a few gilded names among the less familiar artists who will get exposure at Mini-Met, Chapin clearly hopes to attract subscribers from the parent company as well as tap a new and younger public. On opening night, for example, a gifted newcomer named Nancy Williams sang Phaedra...
...Though Ailey toyed with Hollywood long enough to get a dancing part in 20th Century-Fox's Carmen Jones (1955), he soon was off to New York to study modern dance with Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, ballet with Karel Shook. Since the rise of his own company, he has continued to freelance extensively as a choreographer. His iconoclastic Feast of Ashes, created for the Joffrey Ballet in 1962, signaled a new fusion of classic ballet and modern dance styles, or the advent of what can only be called the Ailey style. "What I like," he says...
Tattered Sweater. Ailey's latest application of this mixture is in the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein Four Saints in Three Acts, which he directed for the opening this week of Opera at the Forum, the Metropolitan Opera's new minicompany devoted to works too special or small to be staged in the 3,800-seat main house...
When Bachelor Ailey is not busy pursuing his favorite pastimes (pastries, girls, diets-he has just shed 50 Ibs.), he can usually be found at his company's Manhattan headquarters, puttering around in a tattered red sweater and rolled-up slacks, dreaming up new jobs for himself. He has, for example, decided to become a curator as well as an innovator in dance. He now regularly revives old works by the likes of Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham and, of course, Lester Horton. That involves the company, says Ailey, "in making one arm of ourselves a museum of classic American...