Clifton Brown of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Maurice Béjart’s Firebird. Photo by Paul Koknik.
"Dancing-10, Choreography-5" has been the verdict on an Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performance for so long that it is all too easy to remember those joyous evenings when you were proved wrong. They were the evenings that offered a rare Ailey revival or introduced us to the works of a Ronald K. Brown, a Robert Battle or another dancemaker gleaming with promise.
Wednesday (March 5) was not one of those evenings. AAADT opened its annual Cal Performances week at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall with enough bravura to light a small city. The company’s members remain paragons of speed, sensuality, character and emotional focus. On this occasion, one experienced the usual pyrotechnics on stage accompanied by the customary screams from an audience which had apparently never seen an arched back or a double air turn before. But what they were frothing about was mostly inferior material, some of it recently hatched and some of it exhumed from the graveyard of formerly trendy ballets. Ailey’s classic Revelations completed the program (as it will most of this week), and after the dross of the previous 90 minutes, this enduring 1960 masterpiece from the company’s founder has never seemed so welcome.
It is inconceivable that any company, least of all AAADT, would want to revive a moldering slab of 1960s agitprop like Maurice Béjart’s Firebird, the sell-date of which had expired even by 1977 when the San Francisco Ballet became the first American company to perform the work. The bird of the title is a fellow in red tights who leads a group of 10 drab proles into revolution. The effort does in the poor guy and at the end, another chap, also in scarlet ("the phoenix"), builds on the efforts of his predecessor. A suite from the Stravinsky ballet score (heard in a tubby recording) accompanies this "summer of love" scenario and no one could claim that Béjart uses it with a excess of musicianship. One tires quickly of the reaching arms, the pretentious patterns and the shifting closed knees, one of the choreographer’s signature moves, which seems to communicate a weak bladder and little else.
But the real problem is that Béjart’s Firebird (staged here by veteran Béjart dancer Shonach Mirk Robles) is a ballet and the Ailey forces, despite their superlative training, remain modern dancers. Their center of gravity is lower, their balances less commanding, their extensions less elegantly shaped. Yes, it matters here, as much as it did when AAADT disappointingly retrieved Ailey’s ballet, The River, from ABT. The tension one remembers from the SF Ballet performance of Firebird and, more recently, from the Paris Opera Ballet, is missing in this new staging.
That said, heaps of praise are due Clifton Brown, whose splendid contribution to AAADT for the past several seasons reaches its apogee here. Brown’s eloquent arms, his speed in turns and his air of heroic vulnerability were reason enough for the revival. Jamar Roberts’ phoenix impressed, too. What was once an all-male ballet now includes women, and Linda Celeste Sims, Alicia J. Graf and Ebony Haswell were spotted in Wednesday’s corps.
Brown and Sims returned for another retread of Elisa Monte’s Treading (1979), a work AAADT has imported too often to Berkeley. Watching two superb dancers pretend, for 20 minutes, that they are mating earthworms, oozing into all kinds of configurations on the floor before coupling doubtless holds some appeal. For me, Monte’s striking essay is compromised by her accompaniment, Steve Reich’s magisterial minimalist masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians. The composer’s obsession with metamorphosing detail and the evolving movement trajectory seem at odds with each other.
The single new work on this program (which will be repeated Friday at 8 p.m.), Camille A. Brown’s The Groove to Nobody’s Business (2007; West Coast premiere) isn’t much of anything. The dancers cavort in J. Wiese’s approximation of a Manhattan subway station to recordings by Ray Charles and Brandon McCune. They all bop, twitch, jive and make faces for a quarter of an hour, and if Brown were a more acute observer of human interactions, the piece might have looked like more than a throwaway. The always thrilling Matthew Rushing runs away with it in "Lonely Avenue," while veteran Renee Robinson leads the irrepressible women’s contingent in "More Time than Anybody."
No harm done, I suppose. But both the Monte and Brown could, in my judgment, been replaced by the company’s well-received revival of Ailey’s Flowers, a searing meditation on the rise and decline of Janis Joplin. It’s a work a new generation should see. But outgoing artistic director Judith Jamison’s tour repertory planning for Berkeley has always been a bit problematic. Maybe, next year.
Fortunately, this year’s representation of Revelations is solid, even eloquent in its evocation of faith in Ailey’s native Texas. Linda Sims and Glenn Allen Sims blended proved tender exponents of "Fix Me, Jesus," while Roberts, Antonio Douthit and Kirven J. Boyd mastered the slipping and sliding of "Sinner Man" with verve. The foolish patrons who left before the performance deprived themselves of a wonderful experience.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs at Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, through Sunday at 3 p.m. For tickets, call (510) 642-9988.
