Review: Alvin Ailey Wants You to Feel Something Again

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s latest program just may be the first post-COVID show to bring down the house. 

For months after live theater came back, what escapism the stage offered was blunted by health protocols and attention spans shortened by struggle. Audiences were distracted, if not a little distant. Ailey, however, defies these return-to-the-world ills. Without succumbing to spectacle, Ailey’s milestone 65th season at the New York City Center strips away any numbness and captures audiences in a whirlwind of joy, love, sass, whimsy, longing and excitement. 

Ailey’s five-week residency, running Nov 29-Dec 31, features Ailey classics, like Revelations, and alongside two programs composed of premiere or restaged works. New productions of Ronald K. Brown's “Dancing Spirit” (2009), Alonzo King's “Following the Subtle Current Upstream” (2000), Hans van Manen's “Solo” (1997), and Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish’s world premiere of “Me, Myself and You,” capture Ailey’s trademark ethos without ever feeling sentimental.  

King's “Following the Subtle Current Upstream” is an auspicious start to the program, featuring dancers undulating on and off stage as if traveling upstream, reaching for that place where the river opens into the sea and they are free. At times, the dancers are suspended in a cool, fish bowl-like space as they build heat and momentum, creating a current all their own. In his most impressive feat, King fuses moments of pure silence with intricate resonate sound, as if the music is being piped through an ocean. The mixture adds a crunchy complexity to the work. Audiences were on their feet before the curtain dropped, clinging to the moment as if they could hold a piece of the joy created on stage. 

Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish takes that joy and makes it bittersweet. “Me, Myself and You” is lovely and tender as it considers one woman’s fight against loneliness. Set to an operatic version of Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood,” the piece is whimsical and dreamlike, yet haunting and devastating. Caroline T. Dartey, in a beautiful silver gown, tangles with her lover, James Gilmer. At one point, he rocks her as if she is a child before he disappears, back through a tall, shimmering mirror, and she is left with nothing but her reflection. It is a short piece sure to be more memorable than any evening-length work.  

It is to a curious and enchanted room that Ailey brings Hans van Manen's “Solo” and Ronald K. Brown's “Dancing Spirit.” Van Manen’s work charges forward with masculine bravado and silly sassiness -- forever chasing a laugh through the audience. Brown’s work is just as fun, if more traditionally Ailey. An homage to Ailey Artistic Director Emeritus Judith Jamison, “Dancing Spirit” is as heartfelt as Revelations, yet small things, like a pas de deux set to an orchestral version of Radiohead’s “Everything in its Right Place,” keeps the piece excitingly fresh. 

What Ailey offers is a night spent “in your feelings,” journeying from joy to loss to excitement and back again. As the curtain falls one last time, Ailey takes a bow before an audience brought to its very knees. 

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Tickets start at $32. 

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