“I relish the feeling of doubt. I can’t imagine living anywhere other than on the edge – that place where you’re understood and misunderstood with the same amount of passion.” Robert Battle, current artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, is a man of large enthusiasms; he laughs loudly and often, and frequently has to tell himself off for being indiscreet. So I believe him when he says that he’s welcomed most of the criticisms directed at him over the last five years, as he’s tried to bring a fresh new look to the Ailey repertory. Old-school fans might wonder why the company should be performing a work by Royal Ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor, but the 43-year-old Battle registers their disapproval as confirmation that he’s doing something lively and valid.
The courage that it’s taken Battle to ruffle the feathers of the Ailey brand is proportionate to the place the company holds in America’s heart. It was founded in 1958, at a time when the civil rights movement was gaining its first political victories for African Americans, and Ailey saw it not only as a way of getting black performers and black stories on to the mainstream dance stage, but of instigating social change. Over the decades AAADT has expanded to become, in Ailey’s phrase, a “rainbow company” , embracing dance artists from a wider diversity of backgrounds and including classical ballet as well as modern and African dance in its training. Yet a sense of black cultural heritage – of blues, spirituals and jazz – has remained key to its identity; its signature work continues to be Ailey’s own 1960 creation, Revelations, an inspirational suite of religious and celebratory dances whose theatrical power evokes not only the struggle of the individual spirit, but of black nations.
When the company tours the UK this autumn, it will certainly be dancing Revelations. Yet the impact of Battle’s innovations will be sharply evident in new acquisitions that range from Rennie Harris’s hip-hop fusion Exodus to Christopher Wheeldon’s neoclassical duet After the Rain. In November, a group of Ailey dancers will be performing at the Royal Opera House in Wayne McGregor’s ballet Chroma and Battle has relished the eyebrows that have been raised: “I really love it when people use that special tone of voice – when they say: ‘Oh, Ailey are doing Chroma, that’s interesting.’”
Yet, while Battle might be perceived as a challenge to the company’s historic identity, he says his experiments were implicitly sanctioned by his predecessor, Judith Jamison – a former doyenne among Ailey dancers and very much a keeper of the flame. “She felt that it was time for a change in the company, and that I would be the right person to do what was necessary,” says Battle. And in terms of his own life story, he seems perfectly placed for the job, his own career in dance having owed so much to the original Ailey vision.
Battle was a shy, bowlegged little boy, who grew up in one of the poorer black areas of Miami, raised by his cousin Dessie, who became his surrogate mother. He started local dance classes when he was 13, but it was only when he saw a performance of Revelations that he came to believe in a professional dance future for himself. Over the years, he worked his way up to the prestigious Juilliard School in New York, to a performing career with Parsons Dance Company, to the founding of his own ensemble, Battleworks, and eventually to the Ailey company.
But Battle also says he has come to his job in the proud knowledge of being a maverick. He was always, he says, “a peculiar child for the neighbourhood” – encouraged by Dessie to sing with the church choir, learn classical piano and know his Shakespeare. “You can imagine the names I was called; I got picked on by all the bigger boys.” Despite the bullying, Battle relished the fact that he didn’t fit in. “I knew I had something the other kids didn’t have.” And even when he decided it was time to “kick back” and learn karate, he took his interest in the martial arts to typically eccentric extremes: “I was outrageous. I used to walk around the neighbourhood all the time in my kung-fu suit; I used to eat spaghetti with chopsticks. I was so into it, the kids stopped bothering me.”
It was the fact that he’d experienced the benefits of his own “stubborn imagination” that made Battle determined to instil a greater sense of curiosity into his dancers. The Ailey performers have historically been renowned for their radiant athleticism, their gregarious energy, and especially their versatility, but Battle believed the dancers could do much more. “I sensed it would be possible to hit different chords with them, and I was so excited the day that Wayne McGregor came into the studio to audition for Chroma. You know, when Wayne starts moving it’s a whole other trip, and I knew he was going to get the dancers to go outside what made them comfortable.”
While Battle has been challenging his company with McGregor’s speedy, scribbling, hyper-extended moves, he’s also been testing them with the improvisatory style of Ohad Nahrarin’s Minus 16, and with the tight, chugging, visceral choreography of Hofesh Shechter’s Uprising. The latter, a work of bleak, brutal urban power, has possibly been the most controversial of all his additions, although Battle attributes the criticism to the timing of the work’s New York premiere in December 2014. By pure coincidence, it was on the same night that crowds were taking to the streets to protest the death of Eric Garner in police custody, and many who saw Uprising could not help observing parallels. Many complained that Battle had gone “too far” and that the work was too harshly realistic a portrait of the current zeitgeist.
But Battle says those parallels couldn’t have been predicted: “I don’t have a crystal ball.” And he is adamant that every innovation he brings to the repertory is carefully considered – that he would never do anything to undermine the inspirational element of the Ailey “brand”. He, like everyone else in the organisation, is hugely proud of the intensive programme of youth classes that are held in the company’s spacious New York building, and of the annual summer camps that encourage underprivileged teenagers to dance, act, sing and create art. The 27-year-old Solomon Dumas is the first Ailey camper to have graduated into the company as a full-time dancer – and he says that, while he’d grown up regarding dance as something entirely alien, it was becoming involved in these summer programmes, and watching the company perform, that changed everything. “There were real men on stage, like Jamar Roberts. To see this big, strong man being able to move with such soft, graceful power – that was inspiring to me. I thought Jamar looked like a god. I wanted to look like him.”
Because Battle remains mindful of the company’s motivational power, he is very careful to maintain the more familiar Ailey repertory – especially Revelations, which they still perform at the end of almost every show. There’s surely no other dance company in the world with so strong an attachment to an individual work, and Battle smiles when I ask why the tradition continues. “People come expecting it – particularly parents who see it as a rite of passage for their children,” he says. “Young people today may not all go to church or know spirituals, but there is such a distillation of mood and message in Revelations that it cuts through age, colour, economics, all that stuff. The kids see it and something happens. There is something vital in this work, and as long as audiences still need it, we’ll do it.”
- Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s UK tour opens at Sadler’s Wells, London, on 6 September.
