Dancers moving from being scorned to rocking their souls in the bosom of Abraham — this is the narrative arc of Alvin Ailey’s masterpiece, “Revelations.” And that redemptive passage into the light is the template that many choreographers for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater try to replicate.
Very rarely does such a work escape the shadow of “Revelations” and the gravity of cliché. Ronald K. Brown did it in 1999 with “Grace,” and during the Ailey company’s current season at New York City Center, a 25th anniversary revival of that unfailingly spirit-lifting dance is successfully replacing “Revelations” in the closing spot of several programs. But “Grace” is an exception, whereas Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free” and Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels,” the two works that debuted last week, are not.
With “Finding Free,” Boykin, a beloved former member of the company, is at least attempting a slightly different approach with an Afrofuturist take. She and Jon Taylor have costumed the cast in long, sleeveless coats with giant lapels and upturned collars that frame their faces and make them look like something between sci-fi courtiers and private eyes. By the end, they have swapped the coats for diaphanous shifts that, like Al Crawford’s cathedral lighting, signify spiritual transformation.
That transformation is aided by an original score, courtesy of the jazz pianist Matthew Whitaker, who plays it live in a quintet behind a scrim at the rear of the stage. (Boykin’s last work for the Ailey troupe, her “re-Evolution, Dream” also commendably used a commissioned score by a living jazz musician, Ali Jackson.) In the final section, Whitaker’s organ brings us to church with some funky gospel and “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.”
But the path to get there is awfully murky. The dancers mainly travel in a pack — shuffling, skittering, pivoting, jogging, lining up. One member after another leaves the flock, only to return. When they spin, the tails of their coats fly up, and they spin a lot. They walk portentously into the light. They also collapse, open their mouths in silent screams, crawl as if crossing a desert and writhe in anguish.
In her recent works, Boykin has been eager to show struggle, the effort required to find freedom. The struggle in “Finding Free,” though, is without context merely histrionic. What is everyone so upset about? We can only guess.
The rambling work finds some focus in the character played by Ashley Kaylynn Green, who is the most upset. In one solo, she is bound by ropes that extend into the wings, then suddenly free. Green is an extraordinary, give-it-all dancer — in this she resembles Boykin — but the choreography doesn’t focus that energy meaningfully.
Until the end, Whitaker’s fragmented music (a Thelonious Monk run here, some jazz-fusion electric guitar there) doesn’t help Boykin much with structure or momentum. When he does supply a groove or break it down, especially in the final scene, Boykin responds with some delicious footwork, yet even these sections are often too busy. Like a dancer at the end of “Grace,” Green breaks off from the congregation and resists. Finally, she looks up into the light, nods in acceptance and joins the line walking into heaven.
Heaven: That’s where Lubovitch’s “Many Angels” starts, and where it stays. Against a backdrop of clouds and empyrean light, five dancers waft to familiarly serene and swelling sounds of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. It’s very pretty.
Lubovitch, who has been choreographing for 60 years, has let the Ailey company perform his works before, but “Many Angels” is the first piece he has made for the troupe. His fluency is intact, but other than palate-cleansing prettiness, the purpose of the new work is unclear. And the contrast with “Solitude,” the harrowing, unbearably meaningful wartime ballet that Alexei Ratmansky made to the same music for the New York City Ballet this year, is stark.
The dancers clump handsomely, swirl around, then strike another group pose. The conventionally balletic vocabulary is distinguished only by a curious propensity for the legs raised from upended bodies to be bent, scorpionlike. Samantha Figgins and James Gilmore get a brief duet, during which she earns applause by clamping onto him acrobatically.
They and the rest of the cast are truly angelic. Vernard J. Gilmore, who joined the company in 1997, is dancing especially beautifully this season. On Saturday, Christopher R. Wilson followed his performance in “Many Angels” with one of the best and most full-bodied recent renditions of the “I Wanna Be Ready” solo in “Revelations.” These angels, though, are underused by Lubovitch. If struggle without context is baffling, heaven without struggle isn’t very interesting.
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