Now that it’s again safe to venture into downtown Newburyport and find a place to put your car within a minute’s stroll of the local cinema, you may want to catch a piece of recent American history as told in the most unlikely artistic medium:
Dance.
That Ailey begins with the last lines of our national anthem does not orient us to a documentary about the legendary choreographer’s life and work, as introductions do, but re-orients us. Yes, it is about art. But yes, it is also about the “land of the free and the home of the brave” when many were not free and too few were brave enough to do anything about it.
Alvin Ailey wore the dust of Texas where he was raised by a single mom who encouraged his creative bent. That dust and that upbringing are well-represented in the film because he put all of both into his performances. Celebrations of back culture–from its backwater, “let-it-all-hang-out” weekend parties to its migration into northern cities–mesmerized audiences on all six continents from the Sixties through the Eighties.
But Ailey was not blind to the lingering ghost of Jim Crow here at home. As one of his many dancers says of him, Ailey’s “memory was anger.”
Several dances interpret the struggle of surviving racism, but the most vivid is anything but survival as four tall men sway from side to side on tiptoe, their bodies straight, arms motionless at their sides, and their heads slumped to one side, mouth and eyes open.
This bitter reminder of Eartha Kitt’s “Strange Fruit” is followed by a message of rebirth: Men lying upright on a rehearsal floor, arms up and waving “like blades of grass,” as Ailey instructs, while women tiptoe among them, harvesting their souls with sweeping motions of one arm into an imaginary sack held by the other.
In Masekela Langage (1969), a searing piece set to the music of Hugh Masekela and prompted by the controversial death of Black Panther Fred Hampton, Ailey drew parallels between South African apartheid and the race-induced violence of 1960s Chicago. Strange to think of Masekela as a voice of protest, especially after the recent reminder of his biggest American hit, the easy-going “Grazing in the Grass,” in Summer of Soul. But, as critics noted at the time, Ailey set the trumpeter’s jazz to “a commanding choreography [that] speaks of passivity, militancy, despair and defiance anywhere, at any time.”
As Laurie Anderson might say, writing about dance is like dancing about architecture, so let me leave you with these stills of Ailey’s work and hints American history.
Alvin Ailey was claimed by AIDS in 1989, but a fifty-year-old review predicted that his work would be relevant today, and Ailey proves it–mostly with an implied question that is repeated in both dance and film:
Just who is free and what is home?
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Mouth of the River 