by Leigh Witchel
Dance careers have always been a race against time; even more so during a pandemic when short performing careers were even further curtailed. A holiday season that looked to be a resumption of normality and community, albeit with surgical masks, got scuttled – at least for the time being. Luckily, Jamar Roberts’ farewell to the stage happened at City Center without any clouds on the horizon before Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s season got cut off.
An immense tree of a dancer, Roberts joined the company in 2002 and was named resident choreographer in 2019. He opened the celebration with a solo for himself, “You Are The Golden Hour That Would Soon Evanesce.”
Jazz pianist Jason Moran played his own composition onstage. Roberts began by reaching over, touching his legs, arms and torso as if to test them. His movements – isolations, rapid spins – showed how much control he has over his body. It could have been bravura, he could have been showing off, but the mood was pensive, hemmed in. For all his extraordinary abilities and the twisted complexity he could call out of his body, the solo was purposefully clotted. The contradiction underlies many of the company’s solos.
Moran’s playing stayed legato; Roberts shifted between allegro and legato. The short piece ended as the lights dimmed and he walked to the back of the stage. It was a mood piece, and the audience understood the mood.
Between Roberts’ solo and his “Holding Space,” there was a lengthy talk by director Robert Battle. He shamelessly worked the audience, a convention they understood just as well.
Roberts’ new piece for the company premiered online in the summer and onstage during this season, began with a smoky, dark stage, with white lights pointed at us in harsh fluorescence. The soundtrack began with a cacophony of noise, and twelve dancers dressed in filmy white reached, spun, and thrashed.
The noise died down; the fractured movement came into synchrony. Ghrai DeVore-Stokes began a solo as a group of the others watched. That group varied in size as people came and went imperceptibly; a man took up her solo, and then another dancer. When each was done, they paced the perimeter of the stage.
The agonized crowd was polished, but familiar. In a slow section a couple danced in front while DeVore-Stokes danced inside the skeleton of a cube. There’s been plenty of dances in the past two years using imprisonment as a metaphor, which is justified. But that doesn’t always make it compelling.
The music by Tim Hecker segued into fuzzy repetitive piano and mechanical noises. Four dancers came and moved DeVore-Stokes’ cage front. Another woman got in. The others moved and rotated it as she flailed. And each got a solo turn.
The lights came back on, now yellow, and everyone returned, for a slow group dance in the ghostly light. Everyone gradually left; the music and lights grew louder before and abrupt cessation of both.
“Holding Space” was built with clean craft and a tried-and-true logic that made the dilemma of oppression clear, but also predictable.
Battle’s “For Four,” also first made for virtual performance this year, was a shorter work to Wynton Marsalis that became an uptempo contrast to “Holding Space.” Renaldo Maurice started the quartet in a simple black pants and white shirt blinged-out with bedazzled suspenders. Solomon Dumas, Belén Indhira Pereyra, and Samantha Figgins ran in with constant entries and exits that made the cast feel twice as large.
There were several brief solos; one for Pereyra whipping her hair. Dumas danced and pointed his index finger as if he were playing the piano accompaniment by hunt-and-peck typing. As upbeat as the piece was, there were fleeting hints of something darker. Maurice’s solo was shirtless and spasming, and at the end, he rolled on the floor and the others posed with their hands up and crossed at the wrists as if bound.
After intermission, Roberts danced in “Revelations,” at this show to a recording. The perennial work remains the functional introduction to the company that “The Nutcracker” can be for a ballet company; it’s the first place you see many of the dancers in a featured part.
And like Balanchine’s ballets for New York City Ballet, it contains the themes and style that influence the next generation of company choreographers. “I Wanna Be Ready,” a male solo performed by Jermaine Terry, is an adagio showpiece; sustained positions and emotional contractions as a man begs to be ready for heaven. The mood tied back to Roberts’ own solo: virtuosity tempered by sadness as well as joy.
“Sinner Man” is the virtuoso showpiece of “Revelations” and the trio of men sold it hard – in a good way. Michael Jackson, Jr. raced out, trying to flee his fate; Christopher R. Wilson shot across the stage in open and full split jetés and Kanji Segawa spun to the floor at top speed.
The finale, Roberts’ last dance onstage with the company, was appropriately in front of a brilliant setting sun. The final dances were done in a group, but the group in “Revelations” isn’t a corps, it’s a community. While they all did the same step, there was latitude and differences. At the encore, Roberts improvised at the back before he got back into line with the other men. And when he finally came out of the group for a solo bow, the women in the cast knelt down and pounded the floor in appreciation.
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
“You Are The Golden Hour That Would Soon Evanesce,” “Holding Space,” “For Four,” “Revelations” – Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
New York City Center, New York, NY
December 9, 2021
Cover: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in “Holding Space.” Photo credit © Christopher Duggan.
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