Choreographers choose music for reasons that are personal as well as artistic. Sometimes they get lucky with timing. For “Difference Between,” Matthew Neenan’s first work for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, he picked tracks by the sui generis theater composer Heather Christian. And then, two months ago, Christian was named a MacArthur Fellow.
That imprimatur brought extra buzz to the premiere of “Difference Between” at New York City Center on Thursday. The first sounds of the work — a snare drum march and harmonized vocals about “valves and atriums,” aggressive like something by Fiona Apple — promised strange beauty and fresh angles. But the dance that followed felt at once familiar and nondescript.
The tracks by Christian and her band, the Arbornauts, come from “Four:Four,” a series of albums and EPs with seasonal themes. The songs are short and highly varied: here, the carillon melody and delicate voice listing monuments it has built in “Machu Picchu”; there, the 1960s psychedelia of “Tomorrow.” The lyrics can be wordy and cryptic or extremely terse; “That’s the Truth” simply repeats the phrase “It is hard” over and over.
Neenan has arranged the songs in his own order, which isn’t much of an order at all. He often sets the seven dancers in relay or domino motion. At points, he interestingly counterbalances a foreground duet with one in the background. A solo for Jacquelin Harris picks up on some of the accompanying song’s desperate determination (“Never never never stop”), as men move her around. But on the whole, the choreography doesn’t find a mode to match the eccentricity of the music.
The evening’s other premiere — “Song of the Anchorite,” by Jamar Roberts, the company’s former resident choreographer — is more successful in its more modest aims. A homage to “Hermit Songs,” a solo about a medieval monk that Ailey made for himself in 1961, it is eight minutes of quiet penitence.
Roberts has exchanged the Samuel Barber score of “Hermit Songs” for well-known music in an unusual form: the slow movement from Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major in a spare arrangement by the jazz trumpeter Avishai Cohen. In “Hermit Songs,” Ailey held branches; here, an image of branches is projected behind the soloist.
That soloist — Donnie Duncan Jr., an excellent addition to the roster this year — flows through a stream of swirling motion flecked with gestures of prayer. The stream is nearly continuous. Near the end, when Duncan dons a robe, the moment has some of the symbolic heft of a costume change in a Martha Graham drama. The homage to Ailey makes “Song of the Anchorite” a psalm to the company saint, but its meditative humility has wider resonance.
The difference between these premieres and Ronald K. Brown’s “Grace,” the final work on the program, is the difference between average and great. The Ailey dancers can make anything look good — even the tired sliding in socks of the program’s opener, Medhi Walerski’s “Blink of an Eye.” But when “Grace” debuted in 1999, it was the rare work that brought something new out of them while staying true to the spiritual core that makes the Ailey company distinct.
Rising to that standard is still rare. As Christian sings, it is hard. That’s the truth.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
Through Jan. 4 at New York City Center; nycitycenter.org.
The post Review: At Ailey, an Ascetic Tribute and a MacArthur Composer appeared first on New York Times.
