Live review | Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Judging by Maeghan Madges’s other live tweets of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s opening night May 18 at the Auditorium Theatre, “Revelations about the burden of life #Ailey” wasn’t intended to be a statement both about the company’s signature piece, Revelations, and the company itself.

But that doesn’t make it any less true, when the Ailey company is at its best. It can present lite works—it does a little more often than it should—but over the 20 years I’ve watched the troupe, its lasting impressions on me have been made in moments when life experience seems encapsulated in one exchange, a single gesture, a telling choice.

Alvin Ailey’s Revelations endures because it’s full of these moments, as all great choreographies are. Whether because of the fact that it’s its 50th anniversary (a brief documentary currently introduces the work) or not, we saw more of these moments than on previous visits. Middle section “Processional/Honor, Honor” flowed seamlessly into “Wade in the Water,” the pair united by an aquatic, casual ease isolating it within the work. It carried the significance of a once-in-a-lifetime event, say, a baptism.

Just before, in “Fix Me, Jesus,” Ailey stars Linda Celeste Sims and Amos J. Machanic, Jr. took glorious time with the duet, embodying its physical challenges so we, too, could relish in their triumphs over them. And I’ve never seen the opening dance, “I Been ’Buked,” handled more delicately or more patiently. There is trouble all over this world, say its plaintive lyrics. Ain’t that the truth.

Recently announced plans for Robert Battle’s first season as artistic director are strong evidence of his taste, and dedication to ensuring that a dance company nearly without want for exposure, funding or talent advocates for choreography worthy of those assets. His 2001 mens’ sextet, The Hunt, is strong evidence of his dance-making skill (no secret to Chicago dancegoers).

To percussion by his beloved Les Tambours du Bronx, Battle drove the cast—I saw Kirven James Boyd, Clifton Brown, Antonio Douthit, Yannick Lebrun, Jamar Roberts and Glenn Allen Sims—to a place where exhaustion distills movements to their essences, per his specialty. As many have noted, it was a rite, a ritual, a microcosm, although what good dance isn’t?

The blood-red linings of long skirts (by Mia McSwain) glinted like schemers’ eyes as the dancers leapt, and tumbled onto and off of the floor, never arbitrarily. Battle gave us long-enough looks at relationships, without changing them fundamentally, to realize how complexly layered their signals were. (Why has doing this fallen so far out of style?) He contrasted stillness, subtlety and lack of travel with ravenous consumption of space; some men crossed the vast Auditorium stage in ten strides or fewer. He gave the mind stage pictures to chew on during the commute home and longer.

One gets the sense that Ailey’s next era could be very exciting indeed.

Opening the opening-night program was a recent work, Anointed, about the company’s prior shift in leadership, from its namesake to outgoing artistic director Judith Jamison. Choreographed by Christopher L. Huggins to a stack of broken records by Moby and Sean Clements, it featured peerless dancing, naturally, but failed to make much of a case for its existence.

Between it and The Hunt was 2007’s The Evolution of a Secured Feminine by Camille A. Brown. Soloist Rachael McLaren danced crisply and superbly, wearing short movements in a chain like charms on a bracelet. This chain continued through one song each by Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter and Nancy Wilson as well as through the silences in between. McLaren’s movements were by turns naturalistic, pantomime, abstract, wounded, exuberant, charged, referential, flashy, quiet and curious. A beige fedora hid her eyes from us until the end, and a matching jacket, also a Carolyn Meckha Cherry design, covered only the right side of her body. She seemed to grope for the boundary between herself and another like for a switchplate on the wall in a dark, empty house. Her final gesture, from a chair, expressed something about the burden of life in general. In doing so it also lessened that burden.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s 2011 Chicago engagement continues, with some program variations, though May 22 at the Auditorium Theatre.