Few dance companies carry the worldwide name recognition of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. And even fewer dance works boast the influential artistic legacy of Ailey's Revelations, which the New York TImes hailed as "modern dance's unquestionable greatest hit."
At 1:45 P.M. at Bea Fuller Rogers Middle School in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood, high-pitched laughter, chatter, and screams reverberate through the hallways. But inside a small dance studio on the second floor, the atmosphere is different. Two dozen seventh-graders stand silently in a wedge formation, an inverted triangle with one student at the point.
"We could hear you, a little bit, upstairs," Michelle Obama said, one day last month, to the eighty children pulling down their leotard elastics over their small rear ends in the East Room of the White House. When she walked onstage, what looked like eighty children took pictures of her with their cell phones.
In the end, it was a wonder the three massive chandeliers gracing the White House East Room remained intact, given the high-voltage expenditure of human engery taking place beneath them.
The work of Alvin Ailey — the legendary dancer and choreographer — lives on through his ground-breaking dance troupe, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.