AILEY II

REVIEW BY CELIA IPIOTIS

After welcoming everyone, Francesca Harper, Director of Ailey II, dedicated the season to Sylvia Waters’ 50 years with the company. Links to legacy streamed throughout the evening beginning with founding father Alvin Ailey’s 1958 character study, Blues Suite.  It gets up close to the pained and hurried lives of people in search of love and more. 

In Mean ol’ Frisco, the urgent dancersAndrew Bryant, Patrick Gamble, Spencer Everett, Jaryd Farcon, Alfred L. Jordan ll chug bent arms against the musical sound of a train rushing forward…perhaps part of the Great Migration? The clutch of muscled male dancers roll their shoulders, snap their hips and pitch backward over the standing leg.

This melts into the traditional folk song House of The Rising Sun. Three women in white dresses Maya Finman-Palmer, Tamia Strickland, Maggy van den Heuvel sit on a stool in a separate spotlight. Hardly traveling out of their spots, backlit by the hot, full sun on the back scrim, they achingly elongate their legs and suck their breaths back in, stuck in time and space. Watch closely because elements of Blues Suite remerge in Ailey’s landmark Revelations from the stools and visible boiling sun, to the men on the run, like “Sinner Man.” 

Lyrical and balletic, The Lark Ascending leaves earth for flight. Kali  Marie Oliver’s arms airly soar overhead, as her torso elongates up and over. In contrast, Streams compacts the male dancers in a staccato pulse moving forward.

Divining (Excerpt) by Judith Jamison, former dancer and artistic director of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater challenges Maya Finman-Palmer  into building a staircase of isolated movements emanating from the shoulders, torso and legs. Dancing to a complex, polyrhythmic score, Finman-Palmer navigates complex leg lifts, held high while rotating on the supporting leg with frank nerve.

Asa & Baye deliver a new work John 4:24  based on an earlier duet. In fact, the whole work is structured around a series of duets. Some couples crab walk over each other in playful romps, and others are romantic, divisive or competitive. Always tinged with a bit of mystery, Baye and Asa’s choreography steps in and out of darker shades of awareness both physically and visually.

Alert to patterns, much of the interest arises through the architectural dynamics. There’s also some wit wedged in, like the section where a few dancers form a line behind the main event swiveling their hips and hands looking a lot like the Raelettes singing “Hit The Road Jack.”

A standout, Willam Forsythe’s Enemy In The Figure plunged dancers into rapid fire moves bundled into energy capsules that streak in lightning quick turns, off center extensions and balances. Definitely not a dance for the faint of heart. Ailey II dancers excelled in this piece.

A string of yellow lights, resembling the lights from the old style film projection booths, dot the middle of the darkened back screen in Francesca Harper’s 2023 piece Luminous. Imbued in legacy, Harper, who danced with Forsythe and whose much loved mother was Director of the Ailey School, draws a long memory across the stage dotting it with points of resistance from Duke Ellington to the Watts riots and continuing through the current aim for social justice. Lines of dancers march in a diagonal towards a light, determined and resistant to denials.

A mix of balletic stretches are kissed with Ailey touches like the hand fluttering over someone’s bent back. A kinetic storyteller, Harper’s background in film and jazz seeps through the dancers’ syncopated step combinations, grounded progressions and visually alert staging.

Altogether, the program underlined Ailey II’s dynamic and dedicated dancers. 

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Celia Ipiotis