Dancers Without Feet

Last night I was on my way to Butler (the iconic library at Columbia for you non-Columbians) when I ran into a group of my friends waiting in the lobby of my dorm.  They were all dressed up so I asked where they were headed and they replied "An Ailey performance!"  I knew Ailey was at City Center this week, celebrating 50 years of Revelations and really wanted to see the performance so I voiced that fact.  Then a friend told me her roommate was supposed to go but couldn't so she had an extra ticket.  I thought it over in my head and weighed the options: a night of searching endlessly for a seat in Butler, procrastinating for a while, then maybe getting around to working on my research paper and calculus homework versus seeing a completely free performance of one of the most well known modern dance companies of all time.  I jumped on the offer and off I headed to City Center with my geeky, red Jansport backpack in tow.
I soon found out that my ticket was for the second row, which I was originally super excited about, considering it was free and I was there completely spontaneously.  I had of course been to City Center before, but had never sat that far front.

City Center: my seat was literally in the bottom right corner

Note to dance-goers, sitting that far front is not a good thing.  The stage was above my eye level, so I had to crane my neck ever so slightly to see the span of the stage.  I was in the pit and it was the pits.  Because of my unfortunate seat, if the dancers were anywhere from about three feet below the very edge of the stage all the way to the very back of the stage, I couldn't see their feet.  If they were far back, I could see from about mid-shin and up.  And if they were laying on the floor at all, they were completely out of sight to me.  I then termed this dance show, "Ailey Without Feet".  I spent a summer dancing at Ailey in their summer intensive, a challenging experience, but one that I would only do once and don't really recommend, and I know that feet were of utmost importance in Horton, Graham and Dunham technique.  I distinctly recall my teachers sternly reminding us to stretch through the feet and plant them firmly on the ground as a solid basis for support in lateral T turns and leg swings.  Then I get to the company's performance and I can't even see their damn feet. Irony.

Despite the absence of these appendages in my line of vision, the dancing itself, was superb.  The show began with Uptown, a look into the Harlem Renaissance choreographed by Matthew Rushing.  It did what dance should do, combine the athleticism, grace, versatility, drama, and poise of a dancer with an incredible story.  Abdur-Rahim Jackson took the audience through parts of the Harlem Renaissance through short monologues about the pieces and outbursts of sassy, jazzy dance moves all while looking very dapper in a tuxedo.  There was swing dancing at a "rent party", divas in feathers, powerful vingettes to the words of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and WEB DuBois, and all around music that made you want to get up and do the Charleston (which I totally did all the way down 55th St after I got out of the theater).
Coolest piece of the piece: the staging of this picture and dancing afterwards:

   

The next piece was called The Prodigal Prince, which emulates "the real and imagined life of Hector Hyppolite, the most notable of primitive painters in Haiti's history."  (Quote from the program).  Wow.  After this piece ended, I as an audience member was exhausted.  I felt like I was watching a tribal ritual, and I probably was.  Through his lifetime, Hyppolite painted Voudou scenes (the dominant Haitian religion at the time) with vivid colors and intense passion.  Both these elements were strongly seen in the piece as the entire ensemble stomped, spun, and leaped in costumes like these:

Ailey dancers are known for their athleticism, raw power, and technique.  This piece wholly defined that.  Hector Hyppolite was danced by Kirven James Boyd, the sudden replacement, and he was incredible.  He was strong and powerful yet perfectly emulated the sensory overload that a young painter would have experienced during scenes such as these.  Then, he strips into only a thong covered in puka shells, and we love him more.

Clifton Brown

It was such a visually stimulating piece that I could have gotten so much more out of if I were farther back in the Orchestra, or even up in the Balcony.  I could tell, from my below the stage view, that the dancers were making interesting patterns and moved in directions that could only be seen from above.  From my worm's eye view, I saw everything at a completely different angle that I think took away from the piece as a whole.  I couldn't see Boyd writhing around on the floor, or anyone's feet.  I was so close, I saw waaaaay to much of Clifton Brown's body whenever he was downstage right....and he was wearing a thigh-high slitted loincloth that went all the way to the floor...he's also really scary looking...and has massive, creepy, alien-like muscles...
What I really loved about this piece was it's complete break from the technique driven, structured movement (lateral T's, hinges, etc) of Horton, a main technique used in much of Ailey's repertoire.  The dancers looked free and released as they bounded across the stage and through the air.

Then the next piece was Ailey's finest, probably the most well known piece in all of modern dance Revelations.  It was of course, fantastic, and it should have been considering it's been around for 50 years.  In my opinion, once you've seen it over three times, it becomes the same.  Though, because it's the last piece and you've just seen the same dancers in the first two pieces, you have picked out your favorites and you begin to compare their roles in each of the ballets to this one and you see how incredibly versatile they are moving from swing dance to Caribbean to classical, iconic Ailey.

Wade in the Water section of Revelations

I was totally happy to have gotten the opportunity to go see this show, for free, being spontaneous (thanks Ellen!) like I love being in New York.  I only wished I could have seen their feet...
-Chelsea (one summer and one summer only Ailey dancer)