In normal times, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater would now be encamped at New York City Center for the month, inspiring awe and bringing joy. This year, everything is virtual: a mix of archival and newly filmed video, supplemented with conversations, available free on the company’s website, YouTube channel and Facebook page.
Every December, the dancers of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre fill the City Center stage, night after night, with their joy, very, and technical prowess. Traditionally, most of those performances end with "Revelations," Ailey's signature work from 1960. Ailey's virtual season kicks off, on Dec. 2, with an online gala, featuring excerpts from "Revelations," filmed outdoors at Wave Hill, in the Bronx.
For Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's first ever virtual season, a dancer and choreographer with a shared experience of partial deafness find a new way to make their artistry even more inclusive. While helping to choreograph a new work, Yusha-Marie Sorzano wondered about including American Sign Language. She found an ally and soloist in Ailey dancer Samantha Figgins.
For 17 years, New York City Center’s annual Fall for Dance festival has relied on a winning formula. Naturally, this year is somewhat different. Still, it was the new pieces that dazzled. Jamar Roberts, the resident choreographer of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, presented a solo, “Morani/Mungu (Black Warrior/Black God).” A big, beautiful dancer, Mr. Roberts has no trouble impersonating a god, powerful enough for battle yet benevolent. But the dance also reveals his rarer gifts of subtlety and singular musicality.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is the latest company to move ahead with new work while performing arts spaces remain almost completely shut down in New York. The troupe's monthlong December season will include a world premiere from Jamar Roberts, Ailey's choreographer in residence, and the debut of a collaborative response to Alvin Ailey's "Revelations" by Matthew Rushing, Clifton Brown and Yusha-Marie Sorzano.
A celebration of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and its educational mission, featuring dancer Solomon Dumas.
Thousands of creative artists are fighting for their survival as the entertainment industry remains mostly shut down, but new ways of working are starting to pop up, along with a stronger push for federal relief. A New York City rooftop becomes a stage. No curtain rises, but the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns for a season that debuts new works and reinvents classics like “Pas de Duke,” as in Duke Ellington, by putting them online. The videos were filmed atop landmarks, like the Woolworth Building.
Today, Zoey Anderson, Corey John Snide, and I are all professional dancers thriving in the industry. But we were once anxious, excited young college students in NYC, hoping to make it big. The three of us graced the September 2013 Dance Spirit Higher Ed Issue cover together. Anderson graduated from Marymount Manhattan College in 2015, the same year Snide graduated from The Juilliard School; I completed the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program in 2016. Recently, we reconnected to talk about how we've grown over the years.
Artistic director Robert Battle discusses the dance company's pandemic pivot and debuts the company's new film, "Wade In the Water."
Every year, in theaters and concert halls around the globe, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater takes audiences to church. Not just any house of worship, but the working-class, Black, Southern temples of rural Texas. The gospel they see and feel is Revelations, the company’s signature dance, which has been staged more often than the troupe’s other celebrated works, for some 25 million fans. This year Revelations turns 60, and it has lost none of its incantatory power.