The Ailey Style

As a young dancer, Alvin Ailey was lithe, handsome and much sought after. But artistically he felt that he was stepping on his own toes. He wanted to be a choreographer and build a new dance company. That company's mission would be to sum up the dance heritage of Ailey's fellow blacks, to express "the exuberance of [the Negro's] jazz, the ecstasy of his spirituals and the dark rapture of his blues." In 1958, when Ailey was 27, he got the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater off the ground. Yet if Ailey today occupies a special niche in American dance, it is because, having achieved his ethnic goal, he promptly moved beyond it.

Now based at Manhattan's City Center and a regular visitor to the nation's college campuses, the Ailey company is perhaps the most thoroughly integrated ensemble in all the American performing arts--stylistically as well as racially. Its repertory blends or juxtaposes Afro-American quick steps with the elongated en pointe of classical ballet, Ornette Coleman with Benjamin Britten, urban rock with plaintive folk songs from the North Carolina hills. "What we do is celebrate people," says Ailey. "That's all we are about."

The people often celebrate right back. From Russia to North Africa (two of the troupe's more recent tour stops for the State Department), from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, Ailey's young, radiantly sleek troupe packs them in night after night. It is the hottest modern dance company in the U.S. today, and one of the most popular ever.

Last week's visit to the University of Iowa was a case in point. During the day the students donned leotards and crowded round for master classes conducted by Ailey Regulars Estelle Spurlock and Hector Mercado. At night the youngsters and other Iowa City dance devotees, attired in everything from sweatshirts to evening gowns and sneakers to wingtips, poured into Hancher Auditorium to see such Ailey staples as Flowers (a rock piece based on the life and death of Janis Joplin) and Masekela Langage (a militant, African-flavored work about the effect of violence on lives today). If there was a showstopper, it was Ailey's early (1960) Revelations, a scintillating fusion of jazz, folk and gospel, as well as a showcase for the art of Ailey's premiere danseuse Judith Jamison. Elegant of long limb, eloquent of stride and poise, Jamison epitomizes Ailey's ideal of the total dancer. Ailey has created a work that has become for Jamison the kind of showpiece that The Dying Swan was for Pavlova. Cry, set to music by Laura Nyro, Alice Coltrane and others, embodies the pain and pride of black women everywhere.

Born 42 years ago in Rogers, Texas (pop. 1,030), to a laborer and his wife, who soon separated, Ailey remained with his mother and moved with her to Los Angeles when he was eleven. After a brief flirtation with romance languages at San Francisco State College, he began studying with Lester Horton, a pioneering white choreographer whose West Coast school was devoted to the development of black dancers. By 1953 Ailey was dancing in Horton's Bal Caribe revue at Ciro's nightclub.

Though Ailey toyed with Hollywood long enough to get a dancing part in 20th Century-Fox's Carmen Jones (1955), he soon was off to New York to study modern dance with Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, ballet with Karel Shook. Since the rise of his own company, he has continued to freelance extensively as a choreographer. His iconoclastic Feast of Ashes, created for the Joffrey Ballet in 1962, signaled a new fusion of classic ballet and modern dance styles, or the advent of what can only be called the Ailey style. "What I like," he says, "is the line and technical range that classical ballet gives to the body. But I still want to project to the audience the expressiveness that only modern dance offers, especially for the inner kind of things."

Tattered Sweater. Ailey's latest application of this mixture is in the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein Four Saints in Three Acts, which he directed for the opening this week of Opera at the Forum, the Metropolitan Opera's new minicompany devoted to works too special or small to be staged in the 3,800-seat main house.

When Bachelor Ailey is not busy pursuing his favorite pastimes (pastries, girls, diets--he has just shed 50 Ibs.), he can usually be found at his company's Manhattan headquarters, puttering around in a tattered red sweater and rolled-up slacks, dreaming up new jobs for himself. He has, for example, decided to become a curator as well as an innovator in dance. He now regularly revives old works by the likes of Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham and, of course, Lester Horton. That involves the company, says Ailey, "in making one arm of ourselves a museum of classic American works."

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