Whispers, rattles, drums — that’s what we hear at the start of “The Holy Blues,” Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s new work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Then the curtain rises on what looks like a tree trunk with a door that opens to disgorge dancers, one by one. They run and stumble as if they’ve been ejected, spat out. As this happens, we hear another sound, among the most sweetly soulful ever: the voice of Sam Cooke.
This is Cooke back when he was the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, a gospel group, and before he helped created secular soul music. This is Cooke when he lent his heavenly voice to spiritual songs like the one we hear, “One More River.” But the later Cooke of “Having a Party” and “A Change Is Gonna Come” was no less spiritual. And that continuity — between church on Sunday and twistin’ the night away — is the subject of “The Holy Blues.”
The work — conceived and directed by Zollar in collaboration with Samantha Figgins and Chalvar Monteiro, both company members — reaches back even further. The door (scenic design by Joseph Anthony Gaito) represents the Door of No Return, the symbolic aperture through which enslaved Africans were forced from their home. “The Holy Blues,” which premiered during the company’s run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week, is a story of Africans in America.
The running, stumbling dancers are strangers in a strange land. They cling to one another and drift. Collapsing and rising, they find solace and strength in Christianity, but it is a Christianity they make their own, remembering African circle dances in the “ring shout,” circumambulating a tree with bottles on its branches. This is danced religion. The dancers shake and swoon, slain in the spirit. They catch those who fall or dip them backward, as in baptism.
They also dance the blues. To the Delta blues turned Chicago electric of Howlin’ Wolf, they behave as if in a juke joint, doing the slow drag in couples and clumps. The return of the ring shout in this context makes the point about continuity, the joy-from-anguish in Cooke’s voice. Then the dancers strip down to their underwear as if exposing their souls, dip one another some more to a gospel choir singing “Peace Be Still,” a gospel hymn recorded in response to the Birmingham church bombing of 1963, and lift one of their members to walk on the air and into the light.
This isn’t exactly new territory for the Ailey troupe. Thematically, “The Holy Blues,” which takes its title from a remark by Ailey, is a mash-up of “Revelations,” the 1960 Ailey masterpiece that closes most programs by the company, including this one, and “Blues Suite,” the memories-of-juke-joints ballet with which he started his company in 1958. (Or, from another angle, it’s the hit movie “Sinners,” without the vampires.)
But compared with those works — or with Ronald K. Brown’s spiritually transcendent and irresistibly groovy “Grace,” also on the program — “The Holy Blues” is a little thin on kinetic expressivity, diffuse in construction and effect. While the dancers yell fervently and slap the floor, all that seems more like acting than the communication through motion that makes the other works affecting time after time.
This is Zollar’s first piece for the company in her new position as artist in residence. It shows the skill and knowledge you would expect from a choreographer of her stature. She has said that, having stepped away from Urban Bush Women, the company she founded 40 years ago, she intends to do things outside of what people think of her. “The Holy Blues” isn’t that, but maybe her next work for Ailey will be.
The Holy Blues
Through June 8 at Brooklyn Academy of Music; www.bam.org.
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