No company in the world has so intimate a relationship with a single work as Alvin Ailey does with Revelations. With its deep, juicy core of Martha Graham-based dance, its heart-stopping gospel score and ebullient mix of sincerity and showmanship, Ailey’s 1960 classic has become the company’s bread and butter and its pride. They perform it at the close of almost every show and, as the company returned to the UK for their six-week tour, I thought I might have already seen it one too many times.
How wrong I was. The current Ailey dancers inhabit Revelations as if it were freshly made and perform it with irresistible elan. From the self-immolating speeds of Sinner Man to the gregarious flutter and wit of You May Run, the company grace the material with rhythmic finesse and articulate power; but also with a sense of the present moment breathing through every pore.
This is dance history made current. But if the Ailey company honour their past, artistic director Robert Battle is leading them into interesting new terrain, too. Opening the first programme is Rennie Harris’s Exodus, which is almost a 21st-century version of Revelations, a spiritual journey of suffering and redemption reinvented for the hip-hop generation. At its centre is the magnificent Jamar Roberts, statuesque but rawly responsive: he is the group’s emotional lightning conductor. Sounds of gunfire and shouts of agony drive images of violence and of a community both inflicting and suffering pain. Familiar hip-hop styles – contorted body poses and robotic rhythms – are slowed down to become yearning expressions of grief. But as the pace quickens, the footwork rocks and swivels and tightly choreographed patterns form around Roberts: the community physically knits together to form a tentative sense of continuity and hope.
Exodus is as superbly, as confidently danced as Revelations, but the evening dips disappointingly with Ronald K Brown’s Four Corners. A safe choreographic mash-up of modern and African dance, it noodles energetically through a series of random numbers without committing to a discernible structure or theme.
But with Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain Pas de Deux, we’re shown how bold Battle’s choices can be. The duet was created for New York City Ballet dancers Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto, and its long, suspended lifts, floating on the infinite melodic line of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, might seem to lie far outside the Ailey company’s natural zone.
But the partnership of Akua Noni Parker and Jamar Roberts is entirely splendid on its own terms. Parker matches Roberts in the force and scale of her dancing, and together they recalibrate the material’s classicism to their own raptly sensuous style. The chemistry between the two dancers is hypnotic not least because the duet becomes one of equals. And their performance beautifully endorses Battle’s vision for the company, that in his embrace of new and surprising repertory, he can make the dancers look even more triumphantly themselves.
• At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 17 September. Box office: 020-7863 8000. Then at Theatre Royal, Plymouth, 20-21 September (01752 267222), and touring until 19 October.
