Jazz Island isn’t a real place, but if it were, its sunrise would stir the air with warm breezes and the sweet scent of blossoms.
Maija García’s “Jazz Island,” which premiered at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater on Friday, has that kind of mood board going for it too. But as a dance, it’s more of a day trip than a dream destination that invites revisiting. More than its look, its score, by the Trinidadian-born jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles, is its backbone, lending characters and scenes more texture than the storytelling and choreography do. Sometimes Charles’s melodies even hint at dialogue — the notes embody inflection, cadence and shifts in emotional tone, from gentle to forceful.
“Jazz Island” is based on an Afro-Caribbean folk tale Geoffrey Holder recounted in a book, in which Erzulie, the goddess of love (Coral Dolphin), rises from the sea — in this case, carried aloft by dancers hiding under her billowing skirt like a water-loving Mother Ginger.
Erzulie — an imposing presence here, but with a more comically bored air in Holder’s story — comes upon the young Bashiba (Jessica Amber Pinkett) whose striving grandmother (Samantha Figgins) is desperate to marry her off to the wealthy Monsieur Dufresne (Donnie Duncan Jr.). Does she love him? Certainly not. Gliding across the floor like a snake, he’s cartoonishly sinister; it comes as little surprise that he’s also a philanderer.
Selling flowers at the marketplace, Bashiba falls for a traveling man, Claude Jean-Louis, played by Solomon Dumas. Who wouldn’t? Dumas, with his understated yet rapturous dancing, fills the space like a rippling wave. But there is a problem that only Erzulie can solve: Baron Samedi (Leonardo Brito), the flamboyant master of the dead with a top hat and cane, is on the scene to wreak havoc.
The most convincing dancing passages happen with peripheral characters as Afro-Caribbean rhythms melt torsos into undulating silk, and deft feet, buoyed by deep pliés, float across the stage in sinuous curves. As the young lovers, Dumas and Pinkett embrace and part with an ever-quickening pulse, their sweeping crossover steps and supple jumps dashed off with feverish, dewy amplitude.
“Jazz Island,” García’s first work for the company, is thoughtful, but it’s also an overly emulative tribute both to Ailey’s theatrical legacy and to Holder, whose campy, larger-than-life portrayal of the evil Baron Samedi in the James Bond film “Live and Let Die” is an enduring work of performance art. Brito has fun with the part, but there’s little tension in this world, which is dominated by a silent film style of movement acting.
It’s a given that true love will prevail, and such simplicity is a curse and a blessing. The story, which unfolds with a speedy flow, is easy enough to follow, but “Jazz Island” is more of a living diorama than living dance theater. It ends on such an abrupt note that nearly as soon as it is over, it seems like a faded memory. In a way, the immaculately choreographed curtain call is the best part of the dance.
The company opened its annual City Center season on Wednesday with graceful remarks by its new artistic director, Alicia Graf Mack, a former Ailey dancer. Her speech, in which she mentioned the posters that graced her childhood bedroom — of Ailey, Arthur Mitchell, Gregory Hines and Judith Jamison — hushed the crowd as her words filled the theater with that audacious thing: hope.
“We march boldly forward, dancing without fear, dreaming without limits, and conquering every challenge, every tomorrow with revelatory transcendence,” she said. “So let’s dance.”
She made the future sound so rosy! But the dance that followed, Medhi Walerski’s “Blink of an Eye,” came nowhere near transcendence. This is the kind of work that turns Ailey into a generic group of dancers and a dance into a dated formula of socks, Bach and contemporary ballet.
“Blink of an Eye” began as it ended with eight dancers facing the audience in a horizontal line, their arms gradually lifting from their sides, elbows bent like wings. They leaned backward as if they were falling into space.
The work explored familiar territory, with dancers unspooling across the stage in sharp turns and lingering balances as their stockinged feet gave the choreography — rushing and swishy, still and melodramatic — a slippery base. The vibratory sound of a bow pulling across strings spawned a common, irritating move: a mad dash onto the stage followed by a slide.
The Wednesday program included a new production of Judith Jamison’s “A Case of You,” which, while weighing too heavily on the emotional side of corny, at least felt like an Ailey work. Jacquelin Harris and Yannick Lebrun, two of the company’s finest, were transfixing and committed. But the dance was also a reminder of how dissatisfying the Ailey repertoire can be. (There are four more premieres this season.).
At least on Friday there was choreographic alchemy in Alonzo King’s “Following the Subtle Current Upstream” (2000, with a new production in 2023). This is a muscular, musically sensitive contemporary ballet that looks, stringently and poetically, into the relationship between dance and nature, calling on the body, in all its expansive intelligence, as a force for spiritual enlightenment.
King injects complex steps with the spiraling breadth of nature’s wildness. The ballet, with a score by Zakir Hussain, Miguel Frasconi and Miriam Makeba, has an uncanny way of echoing the violence and calm of nature as it bypasses pointless virtuosity for a more sincere expansion of the human spirit through the art of movement. As King proves, dance has so much to say about life’s iridescence and pain. It doesn’t need a story.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Through Jan. 4; nycitycenter.com
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
The post At Alvin Ailey, a Caribbean Folk Tale Inspires a Dance About Love appeared first on New York Times.
