{"id":34984,"date":"2016-03-09T11:04:28","date_gmt":"2016-03-09T16:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=34984"},"modified":"2016-03-13T14:07:57","modified_gmt":"2016-03-13T18:07:57","slug":"34984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2016\/03\/09\/34984\/","title":{"rendered":"DANCE | Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre Resonates In Toronto"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The
The Company in Rennie Harris’ Exodus (Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre,\u00a0Exodus <\/em>and\u00a0Open Door\u00a0<\/em><\/em>The Sony Centre For the Performing Arts. March 5.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre<\/a> returned to Toronto presenting three near sold-out shows for their devout following, many of whom came from great distances to see their favourite iconic performers premiere two relatively new choreographies debuted last year, Exodus<\/em>, and Open Door<\/em>.\u00a0 There were two different programmes, the first falling on Friday night which I was able to attend and a second on Saturday afternoon, with the first program repeated Saturday night for a total of three performances,\u00a0 Sadly, I had to miss the matin\u00e9e performance.<\/p>\n

Since 2010, when Artistic director Robert Battle took over the helm of the company, he has done much to answer criticism over the years that the group had fallen into showy repetition of its standard albeit important mainstay greats of the dance repertoire in America, such as their unceasing hit Revelations.<\/p>\n

But versatility ought to be an equally valid descriptor of the group now, especially since Mr. Battle negotiated the premiering of Wayne McGregor’s athletically fluid Chroma<\/em>, originally created for the Royal Ballet, and Hofesh Schechter’s all-male work Uprising<\/em>, both of which have helped considerably, albeit controversially, to grow and re-direct the company’s artistic brand into cutting-edge directions these past few years.\u00a0 The company’s dancers have been pushed in their artistic boundaries, and the results showed many times Friday night in Exodus<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Company in Rennie Harris’ Exodus (Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was excited to see their two new works, albeit disappointed I could not take in Mr. Battle’s Awakenings<\/em>, another new work, due to a conflicting commitment the next day.\u00a0 The new dances did not disappoint, and demonstrated the potential for these works to remain in the repertoire for a very long time.<\/p>\n

Exodus<\/em> (2015) was supremely well done, the obvious substance of Friday night’s line-up.\u00a0 Its multiple stylistic influences were clear, and its sincerity was unmistakeable and always present.\u00a0 Rennie Harris has given another splendid choreography, thought through from beginning to end in smoky hazes of migration vignettes, African-inspired, but applicable in these troubled times to the Syrian crisis.\u00a0 Exodus<\/em> reminds us of how a world community can repeatedly mishandle human tragedies of a large scale, with two symbolically clear, well-timed gunshots felling dancers at key moments.<\/p>\n

Any exodus means sacrifice, a horrid race with time that does not seem to stop, and the choice of house-music textured hip hop rhythms couldn’t have conveyed the message of this dance better or more appropriately.\u00a0 Both music and dance impelled me to search for more inward propulsive meanings too, such as seeing Exodus<\/em> as a voyage cast in dark-to-light imagery using a journey-to-conclusion motif, and especially via a sense of transformation \u2013 an exodus from political ignorance in self-made hinterlands that force us to travel unceasingly into awareness of this kind of deep plight.<\/p>\n

Adding to these bernal realizations was the accented lighting dissolving from hazes to opaque misty colourations, provided by the remarkable designer James Clotfelter.\u00a0 They certainly did the trick, making me believe in a migration happening before my eyes.\u00a0 Sometimes Mr. Clotfelter could use the simplest minimal things to maximal effect, such as the soft blue\/aqua lines projected across the stage like running-track lanes below, to convey a sense of the migrants enduring a long-distance stamina test, while a non-traditional, beautifully sung Swing Low, Sweet Chariot belted above.<\/p>\n

Quick footwork, snapshots in slow motion like stop-time, pained expressions and a collective spiritual suppression ran as resonant currents throughout.\u00a0 Splendid patterning of multiple dancers, duos and solos, flexible ensemble use of space, and above all a narrative group dynamic in continual motion, embracing a broad variety of foot speeds ranging from trudging to panic-ridden flight all made the performance gripping and attention-demanding from first to last. \u00a0A finale in baptismal white showed the way to a potential redemption leading the audience through its own personal exodus on a journey about both the individual and collective spiritual\u00a0 release, in a manner both sensitive and hauntingly beautiful.\u00a0 Here is the kind of creation we know can only come from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre:\u00a0 artistically sophisticated, eloquent, epic.<\/p>\n

Following it up was Ronald K. Brown’s delightful Afro-Cuban meet-up Open Door<\/em>, complete with infectious, Latin-inflected rhythms (music provided by Luis Demetrio, Arturo O’Farill and Tito Puente).\u00a0 Leaving the beautiful dancing aside for a moment, I have to say that I appreciated every note of this as though the composers, Mr. O’Farill in particular, who contributed a great deal to the score, were living inside every beat of music.\u00a0 Additions of fine jazz solos ranging into freestyle were welcome punctuation in this well-rounded score.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Company in Rennie Harris’ Exodus (Photo: Paul Kolnik<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And then there was the considerably strong dancing, or simply put, Open Door<\/em>‘s modest ideas executed with abundant energy representing what we have always come to expect from Ailey performers.\u00a0 Encapsulating that energy, as near as I could make out, was a sophisticated rhythmic scheme of aggregated counts embedded in the phrasing.\u00a0 Mr. Brown’s remarkable dance didn’t choreograph centrally to the beat only, but also to the larger phrase lengths, adding up arm and leg movements to manufacture a kind of fresh symmetry, constructed form only a few ideas.\u00a0 The challenge seemed to be to do something new with the old, not to make an original choreography but to take the Afro-Cuban and make a new series of fun, jazzy dances using a range of archetypal movements.<\/p>\n

The success was palpable for me owing to the subtlety of rhythm and the careful matching of arm jerks, pumps, and African-rooted hip gestures to a variety of Cuban club-inspired thematic ideas comprising larger, additive, musical\/movement period structures.\u00a0 I loved following it, literally every step of the way.\u00a0 The subtlety grew on me gradually, and once I could see and feel what Mr. Brown was doing, he had me convinced definitively that he had indeed opened a door between two cultures.<\/p>\n

Yannick Lebrun’s splendid rendering of the final section of Love Songs<\/em>‘ “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” formed a highlight for the first half, although the show’s curtain riserToccata<\/em>, excerpted from Talley Beatty’s “Come and Get the Beauty of It Hot”, fell a little flat, and was messily executed in its somewhat derivative rhythmic counterpoint.\u00a0 The work certainly could have been a fine opener, but it must be absolutely perfect to succeed as a jazzy aperitif.<\/p>\n

All things considered, nothing could detract from so fine an evening, and the audience went away into the cold night air, considerably warmed up from the love that had exuded so freely from the stage.<\/p>\n

#LUDWIGVAN<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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[starbos id=”Stephan Bonfield”]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre,\u00a0Exodus and\u00a0Open Door\u00a0The Sony Centre For the Performing Arts. March 5. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre returned to Toronto presenting three near sold-out shows for their devout following, many of whom came from great distances to see their favourite iconic performers premiere two relatively new choreographies debuted last year, Exodus, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":34988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5723,20,52],"tags":[5974,5990],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2016\/03\/image3.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s9bakr-34984","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34984"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34984"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35156,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34984\/revisions\/35156"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34984"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=34984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}