High Hopes

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s annual December residency at City Center featured four world premieres. I caught two: Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” and Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels.” Both were in conversation with the troupe’s repertorial lodestar, Ailey’s spiritual “Revelations,” which closed the show. (As it does most nights, 27 times this season. Ronald K. Brown’s similarly uplifting “Grace” holds the finale honor 9 times, while Kyle Abraham’s “Are You in Your Feelings?”, Matthew Rushing’s “Sacred Songs,” and Alonzo King’s “Following the Subtle Current Upstream” close once apiece.) Like “Revelations,” “Finding Free” contemplated the path to heaven—with detours through the hell of oppression—while “Many Angels” started in a higher plane and stayed there. Both new dances were beautiful variations on the deliverance theme, making for an exalted Sunday night triptych.

Performance

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” / Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels,” / Alvin Ailey's “Revelations”

Place

New York City Center, New York, NY, December 12, 2024

Words

Faye Arthurs

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels.” Photograph by Steven Pisano

“Many Angels” sat in the middle spot on the program: a dream ballet palate-cleanser between the redemptive trials of “Finding Free” and “Revelations.” Lubovitch chose the famous “Adagietto” from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C-Sharp Minor for his first commission for the company (the AAADT also has a handful of acquired Lubovitch pieces in their repertory). Interestingly, Alexei Ratmansky used the same piece in his impactful “Solitude” for the New York City Ballet at the beginning of the year. Their approaches could not have been more different. Ratmansky employed this music for an anguished solo, depicting the true story of a Ukrainian man mourning the death of his young son in a civilian bus-stop bombing. Everything about this dance was weighty: the steps as well as the framing. The father wore drab separates in heavy fabrics as he worked through his grief on a darkened stage, with some clumps of muddy debris in the background.

Where Ratmanksy saw isolation and despair, Lubovitch saw camaraderie and light. “Many Angels” featured a quintet clad in diaphanous jumpsuits—by Harriet Jung and Reid Bartelme—who lifted each other into sculptural tableaux before a lovely cumulonimbus backdrop. He took as his premise the postulation of Saint Thomas Aquinas: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Lubovitch interspersed the winged imagery of bent knees and elbows, and the men carried the women around the stage in swirling can-opener lifts—pseudo-flying. James Gilmer and Samantha Figgins were gorgeous in a central pas de deux, and the strong cast was completed by Miranda Quinn, Vernard J. Gilmore, and Chirstopher R. Wilson.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels.” Photograph by Steven Pisano

Boykin’s “Finding Free,” conversely, was set where angels fear to tread. Ashley Kaylynn Green, wonderful, was bound by thick ropes coming from the four corners of the stage during one intense solo. But this piece was ominous from the get-go: the lights were still up in the house when the droning of Matthew Whitaker’s commissioned score began. The curtain rose on the cast emerging shiftily from the darkness, like zombies. They were clad in sleeveless trench coats (some of their lapels partially obscured their faces) with fabric belts in African motifs. Al Crawford designed the lighting, Boykin and Jon Taylor designed the costumes. The dancers shed layers of clothing as the piece progressed, but the germ of a militaristic idea was firmly planted. This was an oppressive milieu, though the occasional shaft of light streaming in from a corner hinted at the work’s optimistic resolution, in which Whitaker’s score moved into a gospel register and the dancers walked together into a band of light, with Green taking her place in the lineup in the closing moments.

But before that hopeful ending, dancers silently screamed, sometimes to the strains of an electric guitar—cleverly making for multiple forms of wailing. Another recurrent step had the dancers boldly throwing themselves forward and then freezing in penché, visibly straining to arrest their momentum. This step demonstrated that they were hanging on an emotional precipice. Boykin, a former AADT dancer, was a longtime interpreter of “Revelations,” and she clearly learned from Ailey’s potent storytelling through movement as well as his inventive prop work. She brilliantly addressed the messy, unshakeable legacy of slavery in Green’s rope solo. When the ropes around Green eventually slackened, she was ostensibly freed. But she was left tangled up in her loose bindings and struggling to contend with their weight.

Also impressive was how Boykin employed her excellent cast of ten dancers as a united block at times, then as soloists on their own transformative journeys at other moments, just as Ailey does so seamlessly in “Revelations.” In addition to Green, Jacquelin Harris and Patrick Coker were standouts in “Finding Free.”

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Hope Boykin's “Finding Free.” Photograph by Steven Pisano

Happily, the “Revelations” casting on the night of December 15th was sensational as well. Leonardo Brito, Coral Dolphin, and Corrin Rachelle Mitchell did excellent work in “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” as did Alisha Rena Peek, Renaldo Maurice, and Constance Stamatiou in “Wade in the Water.” The “Sinner Man” section, always exciting, was also polished in the hands of Isaiah Day, Jesse Obremski, and Coker (he had a great night). Best of all, however, was Chalvar Monteiro in the “I Wanna Be Ready” solo. He was in complete control in his promenades and he smoothly segued into massive à la seconde tilts. He’s a dancer with great emotional presence, and he went from somberly deferential in this solo to impishly cheery in the big finale numbers. During “You May Run On,” he seemed to acknowledge every single person in the crowd like he’d just found where his mom was sitting, hilarious.

The way that Ailey moved so convincingly, and effortlessly, in “Revelations” from the heavy and reverential “I Been Buked” opening to the celebratory “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham” finale always amazes me. And Boykin was similarly successful in shaping the difficult arc of her protagonist in “Finding Free.” In dance as much as in politics, 2024 was an anxious year. But the responses to that unease were sharply divided. Several choreographers reacted with paranoid, inward turns. I saw too many tweaky, circumscribed dances to mechanical droning sounds with smoky can lighting. (“Finding Free” started in a similar vein, before evolving into something more profound.) It’s fine to want to spazz out or hug your knees in a corner sometimes, but I’m tired of watching talented dancers be stifled by undeveloped, nebulous angst. I hope that’s one trend we can leave behind as we enter 2025.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in Ailey's “Revelations.” Photograph by Dario Calmese

However, Boykin and some other choreographers took the opposite approach, following a path cut by Ailey, which used dance to forge human connection and assert the dignity in every body, even in times of fear and intense suffering. In “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful” at the Park Avenue Armory this winter, Kyle Abraham met his concerns about ageing, dementia, and climate change with gorgeous group dances set in a floral dreamscape. Though Abraham futilely ran in circles and flailed at times, these eruptions were countered by the grace of his ensemble and their mutual quest for beauty. Bill T. Jones’s devastating “Still/Here,” revived this fall at BAM, demonstrated the cathartic generosity of bodies in motion, even bodies contemplating imminent demise. And Ratmanksy used ballet to think about stages far bigger than dance theaters in “Solitude.” In so doing, he created one of the best dances of the year—and of his career.

Funny enough, Lubovitch said of his own heavenly vignette: “Occasionally, something may exist in the world just for the sake of itself. For example, a dance.” This can certainly be true, but it was not exactly true of “Many Angels.” The work resembled a Renaissance ceiling fresco come to life—except for the important detail that the angels were non-White. Placed between two works that addressed slavery and salvation head on, this diverse vision of utopia was something far more moving than he perhaps intended. But Lubovitch is right: dance need not address personal, historical, or current events and traumas. However, it can, and I am grateful to all the choreographers, dancers, and curators who effectively tapped that power in 2024. That’s one trend I hope will stick around.

Faye Arthurs

Faye Arthurs is a former ballet dancer with New York City Ballet. She chronicled her time as a professional dancer in her blog Thoughts from the Paint. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English from Fordham University. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their sons.

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