Ailey’s Angels: A Look at the Company’s New York City Center 2024 Season
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Artistic Director Emerita Judith Jamison once said, “Through dance, we’re as close to God as we’re going to get—until he calls us home.” Jamison was ‘called home’ on November 9, 2024, leaving the Company—and the dance community at large—in deep mourning. She was an incomparable dancer and Ailey’s muse. He selected her to be his succeeding artistic director, a role she held for 21 years. The Company’s New York City Center 2024 Season (which ends on January 5) is dedicated to Jamison’s life and legacy and evokes the sensation she alluded to: dance bringing us as close as we can get to the ultimate unknown.
The New York City Center 2024 Season includes many of Ailey’s classics and acclaimed works as well as several world premieres and new productions. One performance last week featured two of the premieres—Hope Boykin’s Finding Free and Lar Lubovitch’s Many Angels—as well as the 25th-anniversary staging of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace.
Finding Free
Boykin, a former Ailey Company member and sought-after choreographer, collaborated with composer and pianist Matthew Whitaker to create a new work about “life’s peaks and valleys” and personal freedom.
The piece begins with Whitaker’s original score filling the auditorium before the lights even go down, setting the mood with otherworldly sounds. Then the curtain lifts to reveal the cast of eleven dancers standing tall in hazy light. They wear long tan sleeveless coats with high collars and striped belts, designed by Boykin with Jon Taylor, looking somehow both noir and futuristic. One dancer starts spinning, slowly, then the others gradually join in. They twitch mid-beat, jab their elbows, push their palms out to the side and pump their chests. The dancers are cool and detached, perfectly asynchronous until they come together again and stare out at the audience. They aren’t looking at us, though. They are looking over us, beyond us.
It is here, in these moments of coming together, that Boykin’s choreography is most impressive, when the ensemble dances her slick-staccato contemporary movement in tight unison, moving together like one serpentine cyborg. And it is in Ashley Kaylynn Green’s solo that the work’s message is most resonant. Green stands at center, ropes attached to her limbs, reaching out to the four corners of the stage. She struggles, pulling and kicking, then falls and gets tangled up. Finally, she breaks free of the ropes, gathers them up and carries them offstage. The movement is spare, but it is a scene I may never forget.
Whitaker’s jazzy, gospel-inspired score never stopped surprising me, and the costumes (diaphanous shifts beneath the stiff coats) were stunning in Al Crawford’s eerie lighting. Some sections, though, felt disjointed, and I often found myself wondering what the beings on stage wanted, where they were going and what, exactly, they were looking at. I couldn’t quite grasp the narrative arc. Finding Free is not wholly abstract, not just an atmospheric exercise. Boykin is also a writer and filmmaker—there is always a story there, but I wasn’t sure what that story was. I look forward to seeing it again in the future when the work has found its footing and settled into itself.
Many Angels
Many Angels is world-renowned choreographer Lar Lubovitch’s first work for the Company. It is set to Gustav Mahler’s soaring “Adagietto” from Symphony No. 5 in C-Sharp Minor and inspired by an impossible question posed by the 13th-century theologian St. Thomas Aquinas: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
The curtain rises on a backdrop of clouds shot through with heavenly light (designed by Lubovitch), which elicited actual ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ from the audience. A pile of carefully arranged bodies at center stage starts to gently billow, arms reaching up and out, then separate into five dancers dressed in pale sheer material (designed by Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme) ideal for absorbing Clifton Taylor’s soft lighting. They spin and glide around each other with curved arms and pointed feet. They arch over each other, lift each other, get lifted. It is full of Michelangelo-esque moments.
Everything is lovely—the music, the movement, the shapes—but loveliness can get monotonous, and just when it threatens to become so, Yannick Lebrun raises Jacquelin Harris onto his shoulder, her face lifted and chest open to the sky, and everything stops. The other dancers back up in awe and now we all realize at the same time—she is the angel! We have the answer to Aquinas’s question, and it’s one. But then the dance continues, and they are all ethereal again, nearly floating away. So maybe the answer is not only one but also many.
Grace
The program closed with the 25th-anniversary production of Brown’s Grace, created for the Company in 1999. The work is about the journey to the promised land and the grace that is all around us.
While the Company got a chance to show off their impressive range through Boykin’s contemporary movement-language and Lubovitch’s balletic modern technique, they seemed most at ease. Brown’s mix of Modern dance and West African idioms is like home for the performers, and the joyous music (a variety of songs including Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” Roy Davis’ “Gabriel” and Fela Kuti’s Afropop beats) was much needed.
From the moment Constance Stamatiou walks onto the bright blue stage and begins her solo, a low undulating blessing of sorts, we know we are in for a spiritual experience. And when the other ten dancers join her in their flowing red and white costumes (designed by Omotayo Wunmi Olaiya), the party begins.
Grace gets closest to what Jamison called “God,” and the audience could feel it. The dancers danced their hearts and souls out and ended in a glistening sweat. Here is dance as an offering, as a celebration of life and death and everything in between.
During the well-deserved standing ovation, I thought, “What can’t they do?” But after I left, it was the women I kept thinking of: the angels Ailey had gathered together that evening—Green, Harris and Stamatiou—and Jamison shining through them.