Dear editors,
Have you ever seen a body slice itself through air? Turn like a top, and mimic the planetary? Become liquid, bind itself to music of ancestral anguish and celebration, and make it impossible to differentiate movement from prophecy or prayer?
In the leaps of “Sinner Man,” the sashays of “Wade in the Water,” and the contortions of “I Wanna Be Ready,” dancers in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater conserve and revitalize African American tradition by bringing it into the language of modern dance and endowing audiences with an older holiness. These dances comprise Alvin Ailey’s signature work, Revelations, and they convey a history of black America that would be lost to a historical account. Ailey’s choreography was a new kind of conservation: the embodiment of legacy.
I recently bore witness to Revelations, the piece that delighted my grandmother, changed my mother, and enchanted me. It features several dances that draw on the struggles and triumphs of African Americans. Revelations was choreographed by Ailey when he was only 29 and it is performed at nearly every Ailey show. The choreography is not the only part of the piece which puts traditional forms in a contemporary framework; the musical score, too, is a collage of spirituals, hymns, and Southern gospel music that ranges from joyous to mournful. In the first dance, set to “I Been ‘Buked,” dancers reach their arms out and form a figure reminiscent to that of an acacia tree before breaking off in twirls. The festivity of the dance set to “Wade in the Water” finds dancers in white, the color many African cultures wear to both celebrations and funerals, and includes streamers, a parasol, and fluid arm movements. The final dance, where dancers perform in a jubilant yellow, is a big group number where it takes everything in the audience to not jump up and join the dancers in their clapping and sways.
But beyond pure delight, Revelations teaches the world that the suppressed stories of the enslaved can be shared through movement and intention. The dancers are agents in the act of conservation by embodying and taking control of the historical narrative.
The language of Revelations is not merely passive preservation or exposure. The conservative instinct that makes Revelations so successful is synthetic; Ailey made something that drew on all his cultural experiences and also the era’s emerging modern dance styles. In new generations of the company, this effect persists, and brings not only an astonishingly good performance to uninitiated audience members, but also a history lesson into the traditions of black culture, enlivened in dance and music.
Just as a matriarch bequeaths prized heirlooms, it is the matriarch who passes down cultural experiences. Because my grandmother and mother passed down the experience of watching the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, I have assumed the responsibility of passing it onto others in my life. Every audience member who witnesses Revelations should also pass the testament to their own loved ones.
The impact of art compounds when it is shared intergenerationally. The traditions behind Revelations started in Africa, made their way through the enslaved dance histories of the South, and mingled with French ballet, before becoming something American and modern when Ailey gave them form. That choreography found my grandmother and mother and myself. Pass on what brings you wonder, and don’t forget that what is venerated today is only here because our forebearers believed in conservation.
Enchantedly,
Madison Pegram
Image: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Acrobatic Dance, woodcut printed in black, 1911 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).