by Leigh Witchel
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s annual City Center season added a few new works to repertory. For their offerings, Jamar Roberts went retro, and Kyle Abraham went contempo. Both of them were hinting at narrative, and though Abraham backed it up with surer craft, the distance between them was how they delivered their message.
Roberts’ “In a Sentimental Mood” had its premiere last June at the company’s Lincoln Center season. It could almost have been a Pina Bausch duet if Roberts weren’t so sincere. The work used some of her favorite things: old recordings, elegant fashions, a miserable couple, but Roberts took all those clichés so seriously.
The work opened on a dark stage, with a path of light across the front and a scrim immediately behind that. Ghrai DeVore-Stokes, elegant in a full-cut white coat and a white hat, accented with red gloves and a headscarf, paced back and forth as if unsure of her destination. “There’s Something About an Old Love” played. The lights revealed Chalvar Monteiro seated; DeVore-Stokes joined him in a room with two high-backed chairs and a thick red carpet.
The two reached, bent and contracted, but finally met. The loud and fuzzy recording gave the best clue as to the relationship onstage; Roberts’ choreography was less specific. The scrim rose to a distorted version of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” DeVore-Stokes flailed while Monteiro stood there, which illustrated another conundrum. These folks didn’t want to dance together, so except for some lifts, “In a Sentimental Mood” wasn’t all that dancey. Monteiro took off his shoes. Why he got to take off his shoes while she had to keep hers on was not addressed. It seemed unfair as she was the one wearing high heels.
The music pounded as she unbuttoned his shirt, then he whirled and flailed. She walked to the back where there was a vase, grabbed the roses in it and tossed them to the carpet. Rule #1 about props: don’t put them onstage to wait for a pivotal moment as if they were some sort of sacrificial object. Incorporate them early.
DeVore-Stokes’ reaction to Monteiro collapsing after his solo was to put her coat on him and sit down. Another song. She tidied up, and picked up the roses while he hugged himself in the shadows outside the carpet. They danced together; she retrieved her coat and got ready to leave. The most sure-footed moment in the piece was the very end, when he offered her a rose, and she did not accept it.
You had to respect both DeVore-Stokes and Monteiro for their elegance while trying to spin gold from straw, but “In a Sentimental Mood” wasn’t much of a story and it didn’t seem to want to be a dance. If you’re not going to serve us a plot, or choreography, take a tip from Bausch and push the fabulous or insane. Have Monteiro spray paint DeVore-Stokes hot pink or DeVore-Stokes try to skin Monteiro like a goat. Go nuts, but make theater.
Kyle Abraham’s premiere, “Are You In Your Feelings?” was neatly in his home turf, modern, imperfect relationships in a Black context. There was no set, just a fluorescent tube arcing downwards into more haze and darkness. Monteiro and Ashley Kaylynn Green did isolations and extended before other couples whirled in.
Abraham built his work differently than Roberts, but choreography came first. He had the dancers talk briefly for comic effect, but even with jokes or drama, he was constructing a dance of stronger materials: trios and quartets with tight patterns.
When Abraham started to hint around his messages, he did it by looks and touches, but also vocabulary. Renaldo Maurice launched into a duckwalk famous from runways in drag balls. James Gilmer and DeVore-Stokes did a loose, free-flowing duet, but then Gilmer danced with Michael Jackson Jr. The works’ sexuality wasn’t cut and dried. Abraham mixed in Jazmine Sullivan’s “A Breaux’s Tale,” a man’s monologue about finally falling hard for a girl who doesn’t want to be faithful: “She pulled a me on me.”
All the women wound up on stage with only Maurice left of the men. They all looked at him. Whoops, awkward. He put his hands up defensively and was out of there to laughter. The women ate up a unison dance built from arms ticking, with shoulder and head attitude.
Abraham is deft at using stereotypes, and also subverting them. DeVore-Stokes and Caroline T. Dartey danced to Shirley Brown’s 1974 soul number “Woman to Woman” about fighting over a man, but halfway into it the women started to do a slow adagio together. Gilmer and Jackson moved to each other as the lights lowered, a hint of the extra burden of being gay and black. Again, once he set out his main idea, Abraham varied it by placing a female solo in front to change the texture.
Green only got into the company last year; Abraham gave her a great solo, tightly stitched to Summer Walker’s “Session 32,” before the cast assembled into a triangle. Just off the front, Deirdre Rogan attacked the tough-talk shapes idiomatically but with twice as much punch. She had been in Ailey II, went to Parsons Dance for six years, and got into Ailey’s main company this year. It’s enlightening to watch a white dancer in the minority act like a Black dancer in the minority, or a woman in the minority, or really anyone not in the dominant group: as if they have to be twice as good because they have twice as much to prove. Monteiro and Green did a final duet, dapped and walked off arm in arm for an upbeat ending.
Abraham did what he often does, a jukebox dance to contemporary Black music, and did it well. It was interesting that structure wasn’t a priority for him. His dance-making looks so smooth that it’s clear he could do a more structurally integrated work. He just doesn’t seem to want to.
Besides craft, the place where Roberts and Abraham part ways is, for lack of a better word, sophistication. That’s not glamour. Roberts’ duet was more glamorous, it’s how you state the things we all know: that sex and love are awkward and difficult. And there’s a divide between wanting to hear it said in the most familiar way, or wanting someone to come up with something a bit more acidic.
As it often does, the evening ended with “Revelations,” danced to a recording. Jackson was a crane in “Fix me, Jesus,” keeping Corrin Rachelle Mitchell safe, but she still wasn’t feeling secure. There was even more fidgeting and adjusting of her skirt to get to her final pose.
As the spiritual leader holding an enormous white umbrella, Khalia Campbell used her shoulders as well as a piercing gaze to show the urgency in “Wade in the Water.” Samantha Figgins and Maurice met her intensity by the end; Figgins spasmed in Maurice’s arms in transport as they exited.
“I Wanna Be Ready” is both an anguished soliloquy and a demonstration of strength and coordination. Jermaine Terry did the contractions and hinges either with his stomach muscles or his thighs.
If you’re not overwrought in “Sinner Man,” you’re not doing it right. Gilmer was allotted the second solo, he’s lean and tall with beautiful line, which looked impressive in all the jetés en tournant and when he dove and his leg pitched up to 180°:
“Revelations” may be unique in choreography today, because it goes beyond craft, structure, theater or narrative. It’s a brand. “The Nutcracker” may be as identified with ballet in general, but in so many versions. Is there, besides “Revelations,” a single piece of choreography that is more indelibly identified with a company? And if it isn’t the quintessence of wearing its heart on its sleeve, nothing is.
copyright ©2022 by Leigh Witchel
“In a Sentimental Mood,” “Are You in Your Feelings,” “Revelations” – Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
New York City Center, New York, NY
December 3, 2022
Cover: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in “Are You in Your Feelings?” Photo credit © Paul Kolnik.
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