Category: Dance

When Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater opens its annual season at New York City Center on Wednesday, it will be missing an important person: Robert Battle, the company’s jovial artistic director.

Citing health reasons, Battle, 51, abruptly resigned this month, telling The New York Times in an email that he planned on spending more time with his family and focusing on his health. As news of Battle’s sudden departure spread around town, the reaction of confused disbelief went something like, “What!?”

The job of artistic director at a large company is probably less creative than it ought to be. But Battle, who took on the position in 2011, gave the impression that, beyond his public appearances and meetings with donors, he had a long term plan: to modernize the Ailey company — a venerable, predominantly Black ensemble — and to expand its repertory and its place in contemporary dance.

(Matthew Rushing, the company’s associate artistic director, and a distinguished former Ailey dancer, will run the company until a replacement is found for Battle.)

As the search for a new artistic director begins, my fear is this: The board will pass the torch to a dancer with vast experience inside the organization, but less experience watching dance in the larger world. The idea of watching should be obvious, but so many dancers who attain leadership positions seem to commission new choreography based on how the movement might feel on their bodies — not how it looks or the power it conveys. And then the repertory becomes superficial or, worse, sentimental.

Naming Battle as artistic director was a surprise in the first place. He had never been a member of the company; he had never danced Ailey’s over-performed masterpiece “Revelations” (1960). But Battle, who studied at the Juilliard School and was a member of Parsons Dance, had choreographed for Ailey and led his own company, Battleworks, which disbanded when he took over the new job. He had real-world experience and that was a strength.

He updated Ailey’s repertory without hogging the choreographic spotlight for himself. And his taste in choreography was mercifully broad. After years of great dancers’ doing their best to elevate weak dances, this was refreshing. I didn’t love everything he chose or commissioned, but I sensed it was there for a reason.

All the while, he spoke about Ailey dancers with the kind of penetrating insight that celebrated their individuality as movers and as people. In an interview with The Times when he got the job, he said: “I’m interested in new conversations around how we view these dancers and their abilities. I see the opportunity to introduce new choreographers that are not necessarily ‘new,’ but will show the dancers new ways.”

He did that. Dancers showed their abilities in many memorable ways, from performing in Ohad Naharin’s entrancing “Minus 16” — where the choreographer’s movement language, Gaga, is front and center — to more contemporary ballet works, like Jiri Kylian’s “Petite Mort” and Wayne McGregor’s “Chroma.” Ailey was claiming dances, good and bad, from the European canon as its own. And he cultivated talent: Jamar Roberts became the company’s first resident choreographer under Battle’s watch, creating engrossing works like “Members Don’t Get Weary” and “Ode.”

The company’s first two-act work, the moving and momentous “Lazarus,” by the hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris, came under Battle’s leadership, too. And there was range, including dances by Twyla Tharp — the sort that even ballet companies struggle with because of their rhythmic complexity and groove. “Roy’s Joys,” set to recordings by Roy Eldridge, is abundant with layers of vernacular dance, ballet and modern — everything to grow a company of dancers, and grow they did under Battle.

That mix of new and the unexpected old was also important in the bigger picture of dance — “Roy’s Joys” (1997) was granted a second, much-needed life at Ailey. Carolyn Adams, a former Paul Taylor dancer, was a crucial mentor for Battle, and one of his first steps was to introduce the Taylor repertoire to the company. Why had no one ever thought of that? Alvin Ailey studied with Martha Graham; Taylor was in her company. This was lineage up there on that stage. I’ll never forget the invigorating sight of Ailey dancers performing Taylor’s “Arden Court,” a bold, crisp example of showing them, as he said, in new ways.

Not everything was lasting or important, of course. There weren’t enough new works by women of substance, as usual. But Battle branched out, and as he dusted off the Ailey company, he led it into the 21st century with a public persona that was as fresh as his artistic agenda. Delivering curtain speeches, he was unpretentious and loose; his words were true invitations to the dance — they swung.

The announcement of Battle’s resignation was made less than two weeks before the company’s annual City Center engagement, a blockbuster event that draws rapturous crowds to the theater for their holiday fix of “Revelations.” Again, the timing, and the suddenness of it, are strange.

The Ailey organization presents itself as running on joy and community, and yet it’s also a brand. That brand is stronger than any individual — including Battle and Jamar Roberts who, seemingly, one day just stopped being the company’s resident choreographer. The Ailey organization will continue without Battle, but I will miss the sense of history and heart he brought to it all.

Before it begins, they are already on the move — a cluster of women, walking in a circle. And for nearly the entire 75 minutes of “Adaku, Part 1: The Road Opens” they continue walking, to a drumbeat that almost never ceases. The road they are on isn’t ordinary. It’s metaphorical, the one the connects the past to the future.

The production they are in is also not ordinary. Created by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, it is the first part of a speculative mythology about a precolonial African village at a moment of crisis. It’s a novel hybrid: a work of ritual dance theater that bursts into song and becomes something like a play. And at its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fishman Space on Tuesday, it seemed to be still finding its shape.

Born’s set is elegantly spare: circles outlined on the floor, an oval sculpture, a backing wall covered in what looks like crumpled aluminum foil. The lyrics of Okpokwasili’s songs, which at first she sings in harmony with the other circling women, set up the poetic idea of the road and a connection to those who have come before.

After a while, the dancer AJ Wilmore breaks free of the others, bouncing happily. Soon, she is joined by Audrey Hailes in an enigmatic duet that becomes magical as the lights dim and the dancers windmill their arms with firefly lights in their hands. The streaks of illumination outline the shape of the sculpture, but only in fleeting afterimages.

It turns out that they are making something — a sculpture or carving — and also that they are characters in a story. Okpokwasili is the first to speak. In call-and-response questions and answers with the other walkers, she introduces herself as Ezinwanyi, an exceptional woman who has left an abusive husband and will now take on a wife herself. Before the wedding, she has commissioned a carving from Uzoma, Hailes’s character.

But instead of helping her connect with her ancestors, the carving, Okpokwasili complains, has given her a nightmare: one in which children bleat like goats as they race toward their doom, and she, like an African Holden Caulfield, cannot catch them.

At this point, the show becomes a little like an acted-out Yelp review, with Okpokwasili and Hailes trading arguments and rebuttals about who is responsible for the nightmares and the faulty product. Wilmore intervenes — she is Adaku, the daughter of Ezinwanyi — with the diplomatic suggestion that the carving be destroyed.

The stakes of this dispute are unclear, though it emerges that they are extraordinarily high. The nightmare is real. Children have been disappearing. Ezinwanyi’s nightmare will prove personal, prompting her most affecting song, a cry of “why?” Here, the drum poignantly stops.

All this action and drama, though, feels crammed into the end, capped with a coup de théâtre involving the foil. The story succeeds in sketching political implications: Okpokwasili uses her commanding presence to make Ezinwanyi something of a demagogue, and the village’s grief and loss turn the blame game circular.

Yet all the spoken sections have an amateur quality that may not be intentional. There are a few moments of humor, as when Okpokwasili chides the other endlessly walking women for looking tired, and there are moments of pleasure, as they ease on down the road. But “Adaku” feels unfinished, not just part of a larger project but also like a draft that isn’t quite final.

“Adaku, Part 1: The Road Opens”

Continues through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org.

Toward the end of Pina Bausch’s “Rite of Spring,” a woman in a wispy white shift walks up to a man and hands him a red dress, a look of terror in her eye. The woman has elected her destiny: To be the “chosen one,” the sacrificial victim who ensures the survival of the collective. But that doesn’t make the outcome any less brutal.

For the next five minutes, she convulses, flings her arms violently, pounds at her legs, and runs in circles, until, with the last note of Stravinsky’s score, she falls, like a stone. It’s harrowing to watch — and to dance.

“You can’t think of anything at that moment,” the dancer Anique Ayiboe said in a video interview in French from Lomé, Togo, where she lives. “You’re dancing against death. I think that Pina wanted to show the fragility of the human body. To show the body in its savage state.”

Ayiboe is one of three women dancing the role of the Chosen One in an ensemble drawn from 14 countries across Africa that has been touring with “The Rite of Spring” since fall 2021. The production finally comes New York, Nov. 29-Dec. 14, performed at the Park Avenue Armory, a suitably epic space for this grand, apocalyptic work.

As elsewhere on the worldwide tour “Rite” will be paired with a new duet, “common ground[s],” for Malou Airaudo, a former Bausch dancer; and Germaine Acogny, the Senegalese dancer and choreographer. (The performances are part of the Dance Reflections festival, sponsored by the jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels.)

The production is an extraordinary transnational collaboration among the Pina Bausch Foundation; Sadler’s Wells in Britain; and the École des Sables, a dance school founded by Acogny in Toubab Dialao, a fishing village outside of Dakar, Senegal. It comes out of the foundation’s efforts to keep Bausch’s dances alive and bring them to an expanding circle of companies and audiences. Bausch died in 2009.

“You have to be active to preserve the work,” Salomon Bausch, Pina’s son and the leader of the foundation, said in an interview from Wuppertal, Germany. “You can’t just put it on a shelf like a painting,” adding that “Rite” is “a nice way to enter Pina’s world.”

Searching for partners, he and the foundation were impressed by the accounts of dancers returning from residencies at the École des Sables. Acogny’s stature as an artist and cultural figure have turned the school into a force in the world of African dance. It attracts students from across the continent who are drawn to her and the technique she developed, which distills elements from different African dance styles. Acogny is often referred to as the “mother of African contemporary dance.” At the school, she is known as Maman Germaine.

Before now, “Rite” has been performed by only a few European ballet companies in addition to Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, for which it was created in 1975. Salomon Bausch wondered what “Rite” would look like performed by dancers with a variety of dance backgrounds, assembled specifically for that purpose.

Intrigued by the reputation of the École, he contacted Acogny in 2018. The idea immediately resonated with her. “Stravinsky’s ‘Sacre’ has been on my trail for a long time,” she said in an interview in French from her home in Toubab Dialao.

“I’ve always felt that this was an African dance,” she added. “The rituals are the same. And that music has an extraordinary pagan, terrestrial power. I even wonder whether Stravinsky was possessed when he composed it.” For African dancers to perform it, she said, “felt absolutely right.”

The rehearsals confirmed her belief, she said. “I could see that our traditional dances, the technique that I have developed, and urban dance, combined with patience and love, came together to create something extraordinary,” she said. “Because emotion is in the heart, not in the coup de pied” — that is, a particular spot on the ankle that is the focus of intense scrutiny in ballet technique.

Two hundred dancers auditioned, a group that was eventually whittled down to 38. A surprise was the imbalance of genders among the applicants: There were many more men than women — the opposite of what would usually be true in Europe or the United States. “It’s just a reality of our culture,” Ayiboe said. “It’s easier for men to make the decision to dance professionally. Women are supposed to get married and stay home.”

Rehearsals, led by a small group of current and former dancers from Bausch’s company, were held at the École des Sables in early 2020 before the pandemic. (Covid forced the tour to be postponed for a year and a half, to fall 2021, requiring a second rehearsal period.)

The challenge was to shape a group with different training, many of whom had never seen a work by Bausch, into a unified ensemble. In previous stagings, all the dancers came from the same discipline — ballet. Here, some were trained in traditional dance forms, others in urban dances like hip-hop; some had training in contemporary dance; a few had studied ballet. Several were former students of the École des Sables.

“At first it was a shock for me,” Babacar Mané, from Senegal, who started out in hip-hop, said in an interview in French. “Using certain parts of your body that you’re not used to using; responding to certain sounds in the music. It has taken years. Even now, I’m learning.”

“We had to be very patient with each other, because they were touching for the very first time the vocabulary of Pina,” said Clémentine Deluy, a former Bausch dancer who is a stager from the foundation. “We were starting from scratch, going bit by bit, step by step, adding a little bit more every day.”

The instructors subdivided the dance into short phrases of movement, which they demonstrated, and the dancers imitated. When simple imitation fell short, the stagers went deeper, explaining the principles behind Bausch’s movement style. “You can only copy to a certain point,” said Jorge Puerta Armenta, a stager. “After that, you need to understand where the movement is coming from.”

What made the process particularly exciting, Armenta said, was the dancers’ hunger to master this choreography. Many learned not just one role, as is customary, but several. On any given night, a particular dancer may be performing one of a handful roles.

“I’ve done all the male roles,” Mané said. “It gives you a different way of seeing things, and it really stretches your memory. You have to be ready for the challenge.”

Acogny sees a deeper lesson as well: “They encourage each other. There’s no competition. It’s a great lesson in humanity.”

As the dancers learned “The Rite of Spring,” Acogny and Malou Airaudo were creating their duet, “common ground[s],” in another studio. Their partnership was born out of a desire that the collaboration between the École and the Bausch Foundation not be one-sided. “It couldn’t be just the Europeans bringing something to us,” Acogny said. “There had to be an exchange.”

Airaudo, who joined Bausch’s company in 1973 and who has danced the role of the “Chosen One” many times, met Acogny in 2018 in Paris, then again in Wuppertal. Acogny is 79, Airaudo, 75; both have long histories in dance. Their conversations eventually led to a dance, created at École des Sables — in a studio without walls. Sometimes they would pause and sit, side by side, looking out into nature. “We sat there, with our back to the others, looking out at the baobab trees, the sky, the birds,” Airaudo said in a phone interview from Berlin. This image is how the piece begins.

On a walk together around the grounds of the École, both women fell. To ease their aching legs, Acogny suggested they soak them in a basin full of water infused with eucalyptus leaves. That, too, is in the piece. Over the course of the work the two women embrace, console each other and walk together, as if embarking on a long journey. “When I walked toward her I had the feeling of going toward a far-off place, as if I were traversing the world,” Airaudo said.

“Common ground[s],” a leisurely and tender piece that is a complete contrast to Bausch’s “Rite of Spring,” comes first on the program. “I think it is a good preparation for the arrival of ‘Rite,’” said Acogny, “because it’s like the passing of something from one generation to the next. And then the stage erupts like a pressure cooker.”

During the pause in between, the stage is covered in a thick layer of peat. In “The Rite of Spring,” the dancers’ feet move through it, and as the dance progresses, it begins to cling to their clothes and their skin.

This earthy substance makes Bausch’s “Rite” feel less like a dance and more like a lived experience, visceral and raw.

But for these dancers, the sensation of dancing on earth has other connotations as well. “In Africa, we often dance on sand,” said Malé. “So when I step on it, it brings be back to something I know.”

It is also part of the ritual built into the dance itself. “When I feel that fresh earth on my feet,” Ayiboe said, “I know it has begun.”

The dance started — or seemed to start — with people walking onto the stage before finding a spot and lying down. The bright, blisteringly white lights made the view murky, yet through the haze random bodies were stretched out on backs and sides, utterly limp. Above them was a suspended zeppelin: Imagine a giant balloon of a baked potato floating over 34th Street in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

But, really, the scene was somber. Eventually, others — dancers, recognizable by their bare feet — helped those on the floor, who turned out to be volunteers from the audience, rise to cross the stage. And some time later, they escorted them off the stage and back to their seats. In “takemehome,” by the French choreographer Dimitri Chamblas in collaboration with the musician Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, there is always a sense that something important is about to happen.

The problem with this presentation by Dance Reflections — the festival produced by Van Cleef & Arpels — and NYU Skirball, where it was performed on Friday evening, is that it stays firmly planted in a nebulous, largely unenergetic middle ground.

What seems moody soon becomes drearily drawn out in this dance, of which the premise is promising: nine dancers, five electric guitars and five amplifiers — and Kim Gordon! (She and Chamblas have worked together since 2018.) I was excited for some noise, but earplugs weren’t needed for “takemehome,” which was dominated by prolonged silence or near silence; at times, Gordon’s voice, vocalizing sounds or a whispering, anguished “take me home,” cut through the air with an imploring urgency.

As the dancers shifted from states of action to stillness, they continually retreated to winding, improvisatory-seeming solos, which pegged them as loners or, as a program note compared them to, shadows: “The forgotten ones of the great metropolises: prisoners, elders, unproductive ghosts, the neglected, the indecisive.”

Certainly Chamblas — who created a contemporary dance program at a maximum-security prison in California — has an understanding of the despair and sorrow that isolation brings. Even some of the work’s inertia makes sense. The ghosts of “takemehome” are embodied by his dancers, dressed in streetwear separates, as they dip in and out of manic states, sometimes clawing at the air as their audible breath echoes across the gloomy stage.

When the dancers in “takemehome” do get going, their energetic shifts lead to quick sprints, rapid fire jumps, far-flung limbs, but there is also much slow motion, in which bodies lean back and drag forward as if suspended by strings. Lately it seems that European contemporary dance, at least from France, has a thing for slow motion. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a subconscious way of willing those in the world to take a much-needed pause. Choreographically, however, it’s getting stale.

With lighting by Yves Godin in collaboration with Virginie Mira, the tone of the stage is largely cool as the zeppelin glows in white and pale blues. When five of the performers, some standing on the amps, pick up guitars and start to strum — they do so vigorously, their arms moving up and down to create a sheet of sound — the zeppelin turns an angry red. For a moment, the stage, full of crimson shadows, heats up.

But soon the scene ends and, once again, time, in an airless way, drags on; when the zeppelin deflates it’s unintentionally comical. Dancers unhook it and remove it from the stage, paving the way for the final moment when the powerful dancer Salia Sanou is left alone, whipping his arms and hurling his agile body into the air. Leaning back, he freezes his fingertips reaching for something unseen, out of reach. The lights dim. He fades into the darkness.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater announced on Thursday that Robert Battle, its artistic director since 2011, is resigning from the position, citing health concerns.

Battle’s sudden departure comes on the cusp of the company’s annual holiday season at New York City Center, which begins Nov. 29. Matthew Rushing, Ailey’s associate artistic director, will lead the company until the board of trustees completes a search for a new director. Battle’s resignation is effective immediately, though he will remain available to the board of trustees through the end of the year.

“Robert Battle has served the Ailey organization with talent, verve and distinction over the past dozen years,” Daria Wallach, chair of the Ailey board of trustees, wrote in a statement. “We offer him our warmest gratitude.”

Battle, 51, declined a phone interview but answered questions over email. He wrote that the decision was “incredibly difficult” and noted recent deaths in his family and an awareness of his mother’s aging. “I am going to spend more time with my family, and I am going to focus on my health,” he wrote, but he did not specify those health concerns or give further reasons for the suddenness of his departure. “The Ailey company is in a great place artistically and the bond with our audience is stronger than ever. That’s why I feel this is the moment when I can take the step I need to take.”

Battle was just the third artistic director in the history of the Ailey company, which was founded in 1958. During his tenure, Battle maintained Ailey classics, keeping Ailey’s signature masterpiece, “Revelations” (1960), on the majority of programs. But he also transformed the repertory, commissioning pieces by Kyle Abraham, the hip-hop master Rennie Harris and Ronald K. Brown, allowing them to take on difficult subjects like gun violence and mass incarceration.

Along with supplying a few dances of his own, Battle also brought in works by unexpected choreographers, including Paul Taylor, Ohad Naharin and Wayne McGregor. And in 2019, he chose Jamar Roberts, a dancer in the company, as its first resident choreographer, discovering and nurturing one of today’s most acclaimed voices.

Battle grew up in Miami, where he attended the New World School of the Arts. After graduating from Juilliard, he performed with Parsons Dance from 1994 to 2001 and began choreographing for that company. From 2002 until taking the position with Ailey, he led his own troupe, Battleworks Dance Company.

In an interview in 2021, while assessing his first 10 years at Ailey, Battle said that he felt ready to lead another 10 years.

In his recent email, Battle wrote that he remained proud of expanding the repertory and encouraging emerging choreographers. “Of course I’m proud of the work I did with the dancers,” he added, “but it would be more accurate to say that I’m proud of the dancers. I’m just awe-struck thinking of what they do, every one of them.”