Word: ailey
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...Look!" cries Choreographer-Dancer Alvin Ailey. "Look what you've made! Look how beautiful it is. It's yours. You did it out of adversity. Don't you feel a little dignity about yourself? Be proud...
...Ailey's impassioned plea is directed at his American Negro brethren. His mission is to awaken an appreciation of "the trembling beauty" of the Negro's cultural heritage-through dance, through "the exuberance of his jazz, the ecstasy of his spirituals, and the dark rapture of his blues." Trouble is, nobody is listening-in the U.S., that is. But in Europe the message is echoing loud and clear: the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, consisting of eleven young Negro dancers, has created perhaps the biggest sensation on the Continent since the tour of Jerome Robbins' Ballets: U.S.A...
...company's repertory ranges from the raw brutality and passion in Talley Beatty's classic jazz ballet, The Road of the Phoebe Snow, to the chillingly abstract study of loneliness in Anna Sokolow's Rooms. Ailey's own Roots of the Blues and Revelations are danced with savage grace and élan. Roots traces the evolution of the blues from the barrel houses of New Orleans to the speakeasy era; Revelations, drawing on Negro spirituals, evokes the hope and despair of a beleaguered people...
Most successful offerings: Alvin Ailey's Feast of Ashes, a tragic, turbulent story of matriarchal domination; Stuart Hodes's The Abyss, a tale of rape and lost innocence eloquently danced by Lone Isaksen, a young Danish girl who sticks out as the troupe's most promising soloist; Alley's Ariadne, highlighted by a fearsome battle between Theseus and a horde of minotaurs. Tradition was provided by Prima Ballerina Marjorie Tallchief (Skibine's wife and sister of the New York City Ballet's Maria Tallchief) and the famed Danish dancer Erik Bruhn as guest artist...
...tiger of the title (Alvin Ailey) is an inarticulate rebel, snarling and moping about the house. Mama pins her faith to a framed telegram, a next-of-kin death notice for another son killed in World War II, that hangs on the bleak wall of her shanty on the outskirts of New Orleans. It is proof that the boy, who she feared would end in jail, died a hero's death instead...