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Entertainment-Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater recreates founder’s masterpiece Survivors In new production, coming to Chicago’s Auditorium Theater March 8-12, 2023 visit auditoriumtheatre.org, alvinailey.org for more

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Moving tribute to Nelson Mandela is centerpiece of program featuring Ailey’s Memoria and Survivors

 

Photo: The Company performs Revelations (1993)

 

By Dwight Casimere

 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater kicked off the holiday season with a moving perspective of its founder’s landmark works, including Memoria (1979), his landmark Revelations (1960), and Survivor, a new production of his impassioned tribute to Nelson Mandela and Winnie Mandela and South Africa’s struggle to freedom from 1986.

 

Alvin Ailey Dance Theater returned to the stage at New York City Center for a comprehensive and thoughtfully executed program that paid homage to the genius of its founder in selections that spanned the life of the company.

 

Memoria (1979) was a riveting tour de force that included the complete company with Members of Ailey II and Students from the Ailey School. Staging for Memoria was created by Masazumi Chaya with additional staging done for Ailey II and the Ailey School Students by Ronni Favors, assisted by Lakey Evans-Pena. Costumes design was by A. Christian Gianni and Lighting was set by Chenault Smith. With the pensive music of master pianist Keith Jarrett, this was Ailey at its best, showcasing a superlative cast of dancers and their unique expression of physical art.

 

Subtitled In Memory-In Celebration, Ailey said in his program notes “This work is dedicated to the joy…the beauty…the creativity and the wild spirit of my friend Joyce Trisler.”

 

Here’s a bit of background. Joyce Trisler was a dancer and choreographer who met Ailey as a teenager very early in both of their careers. She later became a dancer and choreographer with the first Ailey Company in the early 1960s. The two remained close friends and collaborators even after she formed her own company in 1974. Her untimely death from a heart attack in 1979 at age 45 was a crushing blow to both Ailey and the Company, so he created an emotional tribute to her that same year to both honored her memory and celebrate her life and work.

 

Memoria was not only a celebration of a life in dance, it was an all-consuming expression of the importance of dance in the non-spoken vocabulary of human expression. It was a work that stirred the deepest of emotions while exciting feelings of hope through the exuberant performance of the combined forces of the company and its students and Ailey II.

 

The centerpiece of the program was Survivors, Ailey’s highly emotional tribute to Nelson and Winnie Mandela. The company put forth its tightest core of dancers to present this seminal work: Vernard J. Gimore, Ghrai DeVore-Stokes, Michael Jackson, Jr., Christopher R. Wilson, Khalia Campbell, Courtney Celeste Spears and Samantha Figgins. Music especially designed for the piece, was by legendary drummer Max Roach and Peter Phillips, with the screaming voice of Roach’s wife and collaborator Abbie Lincoln providing dramatic emphasis. The hard-driving expressiveness of the music heightened the sensation of suppression and struggle symbolized by the dance.

 

Filled with mournful moves that reflect the excruciating agony of the freedom struggle in South Africa, Survivors was created by Masazumi Chaya, former Associate Artistic Director with the assistance of Mr. Ailey. Chaya staged this new production, working with the current company of dancers to reimagine emotional outcry over the inhumane treatment of South Africa’s citizens. The set was dominated by a steel cage that hovered ominously. Agonized movements by the dancers represented the emotional outcry and struggle of oppressed people.

 

Notably, the company visited South Africa in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s release. Even though the experience of the company members was thousands of miles and hundreds of years removed from the African experience, there was still a deep connection.

 

“He knew ‘Us’,” Artistic Director Emeritus Judith Jamison said of her colleague and mentor Alvin Ailey. “He took our history and turned it into powerful dance.

 

“After Nelson Mandela was released from prison, we felt that it was time to go to South Africa. I thought, ‘this is some outreach!’ We went to Johannesburg, Soweto and some other townships that were really in dire straits, and it dawned on me that here we were in the seat of Africa, and we’re trying to teach these people how to dance?! We soon realized that it was our ‘African American-ness’ that they were interested in and the culture that we had developed over the last 400 years. We found the audiences in South Africa just as thrilled and excited as ones we encountered in Europe and all over the world.”

 

Designated by Congress as “a vital American cultural ambassador to the world,” Alvin Ailey Dance Theater is the most internationally traveled of any dance company in the world. Audiences everywhere thrill to the creations from Mr. Ailey and the company’s current leaders and choreographers, including its current Artistic Director Robert Battle and Associate Artistic Director Matthew Rushing.

 

There is no more universally engaging dance performance than Revelations. No matter how many times it is performed, it still has the power to move audiences. At times sorrowful and often joyful, Revelations is a celebration, not only of Black culture and the power of faith, but the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. The company’s performance in its season finale was no less spirited and deeply emotional.

 

The introspective Fix Me, Jesus was given a profoundly personal subtext through the interpretive movements of dancers Ashley Mayeux and Jereboam Bozeman. The signature celebratory Wade in the Water from Jacquelin Harris, Renaldo Maurice and Courtney Celeste Spears, brought audience members directly to the edge of the river to be spiritually cleansed in its healing waters. Vernard J. Gilmore extracted tears of both sadness and joy in his transformative interpretation of I Wanna Be Ready.

 

Sinner Man with Christopher Taylor, Christopher R. Wilson and Kanji Segewa brought the pulsating rhythms and clarion voice of Nina Simone’s masterpiece to full fruition.

 

Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham is the very embodiment of the soul’s celebration in its coming Salvation. The Company conveyed that feeling with verve, eliciting a rousing response of hand clapping and dancing in place during a prolonged standing ovation. It was the perfect vehicle to put the true spirit of the season into play.

 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will return to Chicago’s  Auditorium Theatre March 8-12, 2023. For more visit auditoriumtheatre.org and alvinailey.org.

 

 

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