DANCE REVIEW: ALVIN AILEY

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's Antonio Douthit and Jacqueline Green.

Movement in parts

By Ed Rampell

What the Tuskegee Airmen did in aviation, the Harlem Globetrotters did in sports and Porgy and Bess did in opera, the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater accomplishes in choreography and dancing. Indeed, with the dancers’ aerial escapades which seem to defy gravity, propelled by a graceful athleticism with an operatic expressiveness, the ensemble combine elements of all three of these pioneering groups.

Founded in 1958 in Manhattan, this “all Negro” -- now primarily if not exclusively black -- troupe now numbering about 30 dancers has become synonymous with modern dance and expressing the African-American experience through movement. And, as the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater’s name indicates, there is a strong theatrical component to the artistic expression of this company, whose eponymous founder studied not only with Martha Graham, but with Stella Adler, that apostle of a version of Stanislavsky’s Method who, among many others, also taught Marlon Brando.

Ailey’s comets are soaring across the stage and illumining the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through April 21 with three programs, all of them containing the iconic Revelations, created by Alvin Ailey himself in 1960. Drawing on his Southern roots, Ailey distilled Negro spirituals through the medium and rhythm of modern dance. Presented as part of Program A on opening night as the third and final act, Revelations opens like a freeze frame in a film, with amber-clad hoofers’ crouching, arms outstretched, spread to reveal their wingspan. The dancers then swing their extended arms like propellers, as if they are about to take off. Later in the piece women modestly attired in white ankle length gowns and broad brimmed bonnets twirl hand fans that appear to be woven from fronds and a parasol, as bare-chested males in ivory slacks join them. Somehow stools become part of the ensemble. The backdrops are simple yet effective, ranging from hellish flames to reddish and lavender sunrises to ribbons of bluish cloth suggesting a river in the piece set to Take Me to the Water, adapted and arranged by Howard A. Roberts. At times Revelationsreminded me of a baptism or church social, evoking what W.E.B. DuBois called “the souls of Black folks.” Gyrating across the stage these spiritually moved and moving dancers are literally holy rollers.

And rockers, as Act II’s Minus 16, choreographed in 1999 by kibbutz-born Ohad Naharin, demonstrated, with movements and music ranging from the throbbing surf beat to cha cha to techno to mambo to the Israeli folk song "Hava Nagila" to Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen’s "Over the Rainbow." At some point during Minus 16 the dancers leapt offstage into the Chandler Pavilion, returning to trod and foxtrot the boards with male and female members of the audience of various ages, who raucously, impishly improvised along with the professionals, much to the crowd’s delight.

A spirited grey-haired ticket buyer unwittingly became the evening’s star, dancing along with her young male partner, proving, as the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky put it, “There’s no grey hair in my soul.” And, as that immortal philosopher Jimmy Durante astutely observed: “Everybody wants to get into the act!” I haven’t seen so much audience interaction at a public dance performance since my South Pacific days, when during their grand finales the Polynesian fire and hula dancers would grab spectators and refuse to let them go until they joined in on the hip shaking, hip-notizing merriment. The appreciative sold out crowd of Ailey fans at the Chandler was clearly predisposed to love the show and artistes.

The premiere opened on a more somber note with another religiously tinged composition called Grace, choreographed in 1999 by Ronald K. Brown. The score includes pieces by Duke Ellington and Fela Kuti’s Afro-Pop rhythms (the musical play Fela! makes a return engagement at the Ahmanson April 26). Spiritual yet sensuous, after the scrim lifts female dancers with white halter tops and bare midriffs, their gauzy material lit from above by bluish light, flow across the stage, kicking, splitting, leaping, twirling whirling dervishes, whirlwinds and windmills of poetry in motion.

Program A, Ailey Spirit, will be repeated on April 20 during the evening performance. Program B, 21^st Century Ailey, is being presented on April 18 and during the April 21 matinee, and includes: Another Night, Petite Mort and Strange Humors. Program C, Classic Ailey, takes place on the evening of April 19 and the April 20 matinee, consisting of selections from: Memoria, Night Creature, Phases, Opus McShann, Love Songs, For "Bird" - With Love, Hidden Rites and Cry, all choreographed by the namesake himself. The music may be taped but the choreo is always live, alive, lively and life affirming during Alvin Ailey’s extravaganzas.


The Alvin Ailey Dance Theater performs through April 21 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave, Los Angeles. For tickets: (213)972-0711; www.musiccenter.org.  

 

DANCE REVIEW: RITE OF SPRING

A scene from Joffrey Ballet's Rite of Spring.

Without weapons

By Ed Rampell

L.A.’s Music Center is celebrating the 100^thanniversary of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) with performances of the work that rocked the classical dance world’s sense of decorum with a rendition by the renowned Joffrey Ballet that strives to reconstruct its May 29, 1913 contentious premiere at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. That dazzling debut danced by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes -- with music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, scenario and designs by Nicholas Roerich -- rather infamously made a bewildered Parisian audience go wild in the seats, with a near riot and firing of apocryphal gunshots. After only a handful of performances, the controversial production was shutdown, and Le Sacre du Printemps was rarely presented as first seen and heard until the Joffrey’s 1987 reconstruction of the original.

The good news is that while the Angelenos filling the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion did not appear to be pistol-packing, Le Sacre du Printemps still packs a punch a century later. And while the seats might have been sold out, the creators’ artistic vision, which the Joffrey endeavors to faithfully recreate here, has not been sold out. With its primordial strong sexual undertones the story which the quartet (if you include Diaghilev) of collaborators sought to tell is suggested by the mythology and primitive pagan past of the fearsome foursome’s native Russia. In essence, it is the expression of an ancestral ancient fertility ritual and sacrificial offering through sound and sight, the latter in terms of choreography, costuming and painted backdrops. The finale hints at what may be a gang rape.

The ballet opens with the plaintive plea of a bassoon, but this serene solo swiftly explodes in Stravinsky’s score, which has more bars than Dublin. More woodwinds and strings join in, followed by brass and percussion as what appears to be shepherds, farmers, hunters and gatherers in a rural setting garbed in toga, Roman sandals, colorful peasant blouses and harlequin type costumes engage in a sort of convocation of the tribes. Together they dance the Augurs of Spring, expressing their adoration of the fertile, life-giving soil, giving thanks to Yarilo, the Slavic sun god of legend. As the 1913 program put it, “Everyone tramples the Earth with ecstasy.” Indeed.

As the often dissonant music builds, Nijinsky’s choreography ranges from the sublime to stamping and stomping, from the harmonious to the herky-jerky. In Act II, The Sacrifice, the menacing music, with much pounding of the sharkskins and trumpet blaring, almost seems to be announcing that the Polynesian Luana is going to be tossed into a volcano a la Bird of Paradise or that King Kong enters stage left. Indeed, in the second act, like those filmic vestal virgins Dolores del Rio or Fay Wray, a maiden (and presumably her maidenhead) is sacrificed to the heathen god, as she literally dances herself to death.

At least three of Roerich’s pastoral backdrops are reproduced here. All seemed to my eye to be in the Fauvist mode then in vogue with the European avant-garde, as typified by Henri Matisse. But Roerich’s expressionistic, mural-size paintings are far less joyous than Matisse’s canvases, and in all of them cumulus clouds gather ominously. Jack Mehler’s subtle lighting (after Thomas Skelton) changes the coloring of the clouds which, like the Joffrey’s whirling dervishes, are aswirl. This version’s costumes and decors are after Roerich, with scenic supervision and costumes executed by Robert Perdiola and Sally Ann Parsons.

The ballet’s heady mix of sex and violence can still cause 2013 spectators, like their Parisian forebears in 1913, to exclaim “Sacre bleu!” at Le Sacre du Printemps. (Indeed, a recent acid attack on the Bolshoi’s artistic director has caused the company’s 100^th anniversary performances of the ballet to be postponed. Apparently some still regard The Rite to be a bad acid trip.)

Interestingly, however, the sacred Le Sacre du Printemps didn’t score the evening’s biggest standing ovation. Also on the program preceding it were the ballets Age of Innocence, In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated and After the Rain. It was the second part of the latter which had the Chandler’s denizens leap to their feet hurling kudos and “bravos” at the male and female duet who tenderly danced a pas de deux containing more sensuousness and passion than any porn flick. With her exquisite extensions, if not precisely prim and proper, the pink leotard clad dancer put the prima into ballerina. She and her bare-chested partner danced to Spiegel im Spiegel, with the breathtakingly executed choreographed lovemaking wrought by Christopher Wheeldon and music composed by Estonian Arvo Pärt.

The Music Center’s presentation of The Rite of Spring launches L.A.’s Rite: Stravinsky, Innovation and Dance, a festival honoring the composer who became an émigré here in the City of the Angels during WWII. The festival will include the participation of longtime L.A. Phil conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and intermittently take place through October 2013, the centennial year of Stravinsky’s most influential -- if only rarely glimpsed in its original sound and fury -- work. All one can say is: Rite on! All power to the ballerinas!  

 

Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) runs tonight, 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 3 at 2:00 p.m.  at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. For more info: (213)972-8555; www.musiccenter.org

 

AFI 2011: PINA

Ditta Miranda Jasifi in Pina.

Moving beyond death

By Ed Rampell

German director Wim Wenders’ Pina is full of filmic flights of whimsy. Wenders, of course, has directed highly regarded features, such as Paris, Texas, but he has also helmed the nonfiction Cuban concert pic, The Buena Vista Social Club. At Pina’s first AFI Film Festival screening Wenders told the audience that it took him a long time to make this documentary because “I didn’t know how to do justice to Pina” Bausch, the choreographer and guru of the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

After grappling with this aesthetic dilemma for 20 years, the return to prominence of the 3D process solved Wenders’ creative conundrum because he was now able to render the plasticity of dance. But just as he was about to commence making the doc Bausch suddenly died, leaving Wenders in the lurch, again. However, her dancers urged him to “make the film for Pina,” and after a few years he did shoot the film, which is a testament to her remarkable talent and personality.

The result is a work that alternates between visual splendor and repetitiousness, as the Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers reflect on their fallen instructor and perform a variety of modern dances set to classical, jazz and other music. Many of the routines are a treat to behold, such as the opening rendition of much of Igor Stravinsky’s jarring The Rite of Spring. Some of the dances are full of wit and are sort of choreographed physical comedy a la Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati. Others have monotonous movements and are boring to sit through as the Pina-heads perform the same motions over and over again.

Wenders makes great use of Wuppertal, located in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, east of Düsseldorf, where Pina’s Tanztheater is located. There are great shots of and in a moving overhead monorail that looks like it came straight out of Fritz Lang’s classic sci fi silent film, Metropolis, that expertly utilize the 3D technique. A hallmark of 3D technology is that objects are tossed straight at the camera -- such as flaming spears in the 1950s potboiler, Drums of Tahiti -- to jar and remind auds that they are watching three dimensional imagery. Wenders attains this effect with leaves scattered by a leaf blower, splashing water, billowing curtains and sometimes with dancers who seem to be defying gravity, but he hasn’t completely mastered this complex medium yet.

The performers are multi-culti and multi-generational -- one female hoofer comments on the fact that Bausch continued working with dancers 40 and over -- and they often prance, romp and leap to and fro in revealing outfits. In The Rite of Spring number the women’s tops cling to their nipples and they lift filmy skirts to reveal their panties; in another set piece a male dancer literally drops his drawers as he dances from one female to another. It seems to me that Pina’s choreography expressed a yearning to be liberated, to overcome restraints, and that her work included an erotic dimension along these lines.

Pina has no plot, some dialogue, and is mainly for fans of modern dance, 3D and/or Wenders. It is Germany's Official Foreign-Language Oscar Submission and part of the AFI Film Festival’s Special Screenings section.