What's ailing Alvin Ailey's company? The ensemble performing Night Creature at Sadler's Wells. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
When Alvin Ailey's dance company completes its Sadler's Wells season and embarks on a UK tour, the dancers will be performing a "Best of Ailey" programme. This programme includes only one work created for the company itself: Ailey's signature piece Revelations. The other two pieces, Maurice Béjart's Firebird and Twyla Tharp's The Golden Section, were both originally choreographed for dancers from very different backgrounds, and have only recently been brought in by the company.
Judging from the disappointing standard of repertory on show this year, it's not surprising that these two "outsider" pieces have been given such pride of place. Neither Firebird nor The Golden Section are new works (Firebird is more than 40 years old) yet both have a personality, a substance that makes them appear far more contemporary than some of the pieces in the company's jazz programme at Sadler's Wells. The jazz lineup includes Billy Wilson's trite Winter in Lisbon, which is just 15 years old, and Camille Brown's grinning, ingratiatingly "streetwise" The Groove to Nobody's Business - which even at its world premiere last week looked embarrassingly dated.
It's not just that Firebird and The Golden Section are choreographed to a higher standard than much of the other Ailey rep. What makes them stand out is that they have blessedly nothing to do with the heritage issue that is still at the heart of the Ailey mission. In theory, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is a mixed-race, multicultural dance company. In practice, much of its core repertory trades in a style of black and Latin stereotypes that are old-fashioned and restrictive.
Of course the company must continue to dance the core works on which its reputation and identity were built. Revelations, in its tribute to African-American dance music and history, is a theatrical one-off. The first 10 minutes of Talley Beatty's The Road of the Phoebe Snow is a primer for classic jazz dance, performed with an energy and sense of style that are unique to Ailey. But artistic director Judith Jamison must now cultivate new choreographers who can think outside the traditional box.
It's liberating to see these dancers in The Golden Section and Firebird because the prime issues that concern them are music and steps. This is not a plea for the company to devote itself to abstract modern dance, but a plea for Jamison to get work made for her dancers that doesn't bring with it the cultural baggage of the past.
