Living the dream: how Ailey went from revelation to institution

Dance Magazine, Dec, 2004 by Joseph Carman

If Shining Star provides the perfectly mixed martini, then the season's other commission, Love Stories, sets the table for a hearty main course. Using songs from Stevie Wonder's lifelong career, Love Stories combines three sections by Jamison, Rennie Harris, and Robert Battle into one ballet. "It's about love of dance, love of sheer movement, love of Alvin," says Jamison. It's also about the love of stylistic diversity from three choreographers whose effect couldn't be more different, bound by the connective tissue of the story of Ailey's upward mobility. "My movement is the past, Rennie's is the present, and Robert's is the potential future," says Jamison. The ballet begins on a spare set with a simple solo by the long-limbed, lyrical Clifton Brown to "If It's Magic," followed by riffs on his energy by the other dancers. Evoking images of the early Ailey company, Jamison soups up the choreography with musical counterpoint. "Judy has an ear for rhythm that not everyone else can hear," says 13-year Ailey veteran Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell.

But the section choreographed by hip-hop master Rennie Harris hands the Ailey dancers some of their greatest challenges to date. Not expecting them to slide on their heads, he opts for something smoother--what he calls "a clubhouse style of hip hop," formatted for Ailey to a nearly unrecognizable deejay remix of Wonder's "Another Star." Tired of bad representations of hip hop on television that represent only sexual aggression, he explains the model for this piece. "There is a classical house dancer who is more revered and feared in the club than the dynamic dancer," says Harris in a rap cadence.

Nonetheless, the Ailey dancers spin on one leg, pop, lock, and toss off acrobatics that seem unlikely even on their highly trained bodies. For a number of the dancers, it brings back muscle memories from their youth. "We were the first hip-hop generation," says Fisher-Harrell, who started formal dance training at age 14. "I watched it flourish and grow because I was in it. I came out of that, then was brought to the barre, which pulled me away from it. It's very interesting tapping into that now." Linda Celeste Sims feels that Harris' choreography speaks to her soul. "That's right. Mama's come home to the house," she says with a laugh. And Jamison points out that Harris' vernacular movement is a descendant of the jazzy club steps Ailey used in his Blues Suite. "Rennie's given us back our own vocabulary, because this is a people-of-color's vocabulary," she says.

"Fingertips," recorded by a 12-year-old Stevie Wonder before a raucous audience, lends the backdrop for Battle's finale. In opposition to commonly sterile views of technological futurism, Battle gravitates to humanity. "The dance has a kind of protest feeling on top of the joyous music," he says. Moving aerobically in formal patterns and lines, the upbeat dancers bring to mind Illinois senatorial candidate Barack Obama's pithy phrase from his historic political speech: "the audacity of hope."