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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Evolutions: Four Ailey Classics

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
May 21, 2001; Page C6

Fledgling novelists are often advised to “write about what you know.” The same might be good advice for dance makers. Alvin Ailey made dances about what he knew, and his vivid and affectionate characterizations resonate with audiences around the world, even those who have never been to Harlem, nor sat, choking on Texas dust, under a broiling summer sun.

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater danced four of its founder’s most enduring pieces Friday night at the Kennedy Center Opera House and, despite changes in technique (the movement seems concentrated more in the limbs than the torso now), danced them with the spirit the works demand.

At times, Ailey made dances with specific characters, like “Blues Suite” (1958), with its bickering couple (Renee Robinson and Glenn A. Sims, who luxuriated in their never-ending battle); the girl with rubber ankles determined to prance around in the highest of high heeled shoes; or the “city slicker” who’s got everybody’s number. At others, he created character studies that were as much about his dancers as the subject of the dance.

The most famous of these is “Cry,” made in 1971 for the company’s current director, Judith Jamison. Subtitled “For all Black women everywhere--especially our mothers,” Ailey celebrated African-American history in one electrifying 16-minute solo that seemed spun out of Jamison’s body like silk from a silkworm. Friday, Dwana Adiaha Smallwood, smaller and tauter than Jamison, made the dance seem very much her own, dancing with an indomitable dignity and joy.

Ailey is one of a handful of choreographers who could blend ballet and modern dance in ways that does justice to both. In “The River,” created for American Ballet Theater in 1970) to a Duke Ellington score of the same name, he took metaphors like “Meander” and “Vortex” and turned them into dances. The present company is very strong technically, but this work suffered from being danced to a tape; the musicality was choppy and muddy.

Taped music, too, was a bit of a let down in the company’s signature work, but “Revelations” (1960) could probably survive a direct hit by a tornado. There has been some erosion in the last few years: the men are so controlled in “Sinner Man” that the dance is now more a virtuoso display number than a study in terror, and while the women’s fanning in “The Day is Past and Gone” was always stylized, fans that once sliced the air like wasp’s wings, a metaphor for the women’s speech, are now just violently wielded accessories.

On the plus side, Linda-Denise Evans and Amos J. Machanic, Jr. did as tender and sincere a “Fix Me Jesus” as I’ve ever seen, and in the final “Rocka My Soul” the dancers, as they always do, danced as though they would save us all.