In 1960, the twenty-nine-year-old Alvin Ailey premièred his landmark work, “Revelations,” with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, the company he’d founded to showcase Black culture through dance. This marked the end of his apprenticeship as a young choreographer who’d grown up revering Katherine Dunham, Lester Horton, Martha Graham, and Jack Cole—American masters with an international perspective. It also launched him into critical purgatory.
From the start, the thirty-six-minute piece, which depicts Black resilience and Christian faith, and is set to various spirituals, was a hit with audiences, both because of Ailey’s preternatural talent for constructing graphic stage pictures and because it took us to church without our having to go to church. You do not need to have been raised in the South, as Ailey was, or to have attended Baptist services, as he did with his mother, in order to understand what he is doing here, particularly in the final section of the piece, set to the triumphant “Wade in the Water.” The dancers, clad in light colors, step high, their backs straight and heads held high, as they walk across baptismal waters toward their own glory. (Stretches of fluttering fabric simulate the water, an effect that Ailey, a magpie by nature, no doubt borrowed from Jerome Robbins, who did something similar to create a river in “The King and I,” in 1951.) But what you are watching is not just a parade of “vertical saints,” as James Baldwin described his churchgoing brethren, but the work of a choreographer who aims to show us how the metaphysical moves.
In “Revelations,” Ailey turns away from Martha Graham’s anxious world of men and women and myth, from George Balanchine’s plotless ballets, and from Merce Cunningham’s brilliant abstract explorations of the body. Here and in his subsequent work, Ailey tells a different story, one in which the music, the Black dancers’ inner lives, and the choreographer’s memories are the narrative. This shift was especially potent—vital—at a time when the Civil Rights Act was still four years away and activists and protesters were being beaten and burned to death. Without pandering to white tastes or shutting white people out, “Revelations” is resolute in its insistence on portraying Black life and community. The only stage performance from that time that is remotely analogous to “Revelations” is Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959)—the story of a Black family that doesn’t give up, a story for all families.
After “Revelations,” Ailey continued working for almost three decades—until his death, in 1989—choreographing more than seventy dances. You can see some of them live or in archival footage or photographs, and in dialogue with art that Adrienne Edwards, the protean senior curator and director of curatorial programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has gathered, in “Edges of Ailey,” the largest and most comprehensive examination of Ailey’s life, work, influences, and inspirations ever assembled. On the museum’s eighteen-thousand-square-foot fifth floor are works by eighty-two artists, including Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Lorna Simpson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, and Alma Thomas, which illustrate and intersect with Ailey’s themes. There are videos of historic performances, and live stagings by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and Ailey II in the third-floor theatre. It took Edwards six and a half years to put the show together, but, as she told me this summer, it was a lifetime in the making.
Every curator is a storyteller. And the story that Edwards aims to tell in “Edges of Ailey” is that of Ailey’s many permutations and trajectories—his desire to keep moving forward as a dancer, a choreographer, a teacher, a writer. In the process, she reveals him to have been more culturally important than he is generally given credit for being. Edwards relied greatly on Ailey’s voluminous notebooks and diaries to chart his story, which could not be recounted in a linear way. “What I could do,” she told me, “was relate to things that I found to be illuminating about him, trying to get into a headspace of what it would be like to be a gay man in the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties, especially during this moment in his life where you’re founding this thing and coming of age.” Edwards sees Ailey’s literary, theatrical, and intellectual loves as a form of company. In his notebooks, we see him planning and imagining possible projects: a ballet inspired by the life and work of Hart Crane, say, or an exploration of the genius of Federico García Lorca, or of Tennessee Williams—all queer artists who don’t directly appear in Ailey’s dances but who formed a kind of brotherhood in his mind. A lifelong autodidact, he had a deep admiration for writers who were able to speak of their queerness, at least through metaphor. The ultimate metaphor for Ailey was the body, and his work was the language with which to articulate it.
In Ailey’s career, “Revelations” was both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it kept audiences coming back, and a curse because his subsequent attempts to push against the perimeters of dance—or, more specifically, Black dance—were often measured against that masterpiece and found wanting. Arlene Croce, in her review, in this magazine, of Ailey’s winter 1974 season at City Center—which included “Revelations” and “Masekela Langage” (1969), a work set to the music of the South African composer Hugh Masekela which addresses apartheid—expresses her frustration with Ailey, with his tendency, as she writes, to be “remarkably consistent in trying to capitalize on ‘Revelations’ as if it were a formula success.” She goes on:
Joan Acocella, also writing here, nearly forty years later, observed:
In both reviews, it’s the “they” that concerns me; there’s a whole lot of othering going on, like when white people ask why Black people talk to the screen so much during a movie. There’s also the assumption that a work this popular must be easy. Judith Jamison, Ailey’s great star, made this mistake, too. When she first saw the company rehearsing “Revelations,” in 1963, she said, “Oh, I can do that!” Later, as she writes in her autobiography, “Dancing Spirit,” she changed her tune: “Guess what? You try it sometime. The dancers made the movement look easy. It’s not. It takes unbelievable coordination. It takes passion, commitment, dedication, and love to know that every step you do should be infused with 100 percent of yourself.”
The dance world has always been a segregated place, divided as much by class as by European cultural history. Ailey was an uneven choreographer, for sure, but what he wanted to promote with his company was the idea that Black audiences—general Black audiences, like the folks Acocella probably saw applauding “Revelations”—should connect not only with their “ ’buked” and “scorned” selves onstage but with the feeling that performance can be a kind of balm, an embrace.
“Revelations” grew in part out of memories—of the people who made up Ailey’s community, and thus of Ailey himself. He was born in 1931. His birthplace: a little Texas town called Rogers, between Austin and Waco. This is the territory you’ll find in a Katherine Anne Porter story—“He” (1927), say, or “Noon Wine” (1937)—a world that consists of hard earth and mean poverty, a world where Jim Crow is a defining factor. And so is Jesus. Ailey’s parents, Alvin, Sr., and the beautiful and theatrical Lula, met in church and married when Lula was fourteen. Four years later, their only child was born, but the marriage wasn’t working. When Alvin was three months old, his father took off. Then he returned. He was feckless. “He just didn’t have the education to take care of a family,” Lula says in Jennifer Dunning’s rich biography “Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance” (1996). When Lula expressed her discontent to her father, he told her to stay married; nevertheless, Lula used her sharecropper’s wages to buy train tickets that got her and her son about a hundred and fifty miles away, to Wharton, where Lula picked cotton for a time, accompanied, on occasion, by Alvin. These were years of closeness, of Lula sharing stories from books that she bought on the cheap, and Alvin showing her a house that he dreamed of living in. There was also violence. As Ailey recounts in his autobiography, “Revelations,” which was published posthumously, in 1995:
Violence can beget violence. The rage that was burned into Lula’s skin—the rage of poverty and abuse—was sometimes turned on Alvin. He recalls in his book that when Lula drank she’d beat him. Alvin’s tears when that happened were evidence not only of physical hurt but of longing: a longing to express how it feels to be wounded, to be loveless. Lula did love him, though, and it showed in all the menial jobs and the small and big humiliations that she endured to support him.
In 1936, she saw a newspaper ad for a job preparing meals for a highway crew eighty miles away, in Navasota. While the five-year-old Alvin stayed with a relative in Wharton, she secured the job, and also found romance with Amos Alexander, a churchgoing Black businessman who was well respected by both Black and white townspeople. Eventually, Lula and Alvin went to live in Alexander’s house.
When Ailey writes, in his autobiography, about his gratitude for the stability of that home and his love for Alexander, who became like a father to him, he seems to rest in a kind of languid joy—the same emotion that one sees and feels at times when watching “Revelations,” which is presented partly from a child’s perspective, particularly in the last section, set on the Sabbath. A big Texas sun shines down on a congregation. Church ladies, sitting on stools in their Sunday best, wave their fans and nod in acknowledgment. These “correct” ladies are joined by their Christian brothers, gentlemen in smart vests, who are a willing, proud audience to the women as they get the spirit and cast off the trials and tribulations of the week. In “Revelations,” Ailey glorifies not only the female body, which most choreographers do, but also the male body, and, more specifically, the Black male dancer, who moves differently onstage than, say, a dancer like Baryshnikov (an Ailey admirer, who appeared in his 1976 piece “Pas de Duke” with Judith Jamison). You can feel that the spotlight is often on the men in Ailey’s work, and his early queer experiences clearly play a part in his artistic story.
In his book, Ailey talks about a twelve-year-old named Chauncey, his best friend when he was eight, and how, one summer afternoon, he and Chauncey were playing by a water tank behind Alexander’s house. It “must have been twenty feet deep,” Ailey writes, “and very slick at the edges.”
