Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture

DeFrantz.00 FM 10/20/03 2:50 PM Page ii Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture 1 2004 DeFrantz.00 FM 10/20/03 2:50 PM Page iii DANCING REVELATIONS THOMAS F. DEFRANTZ DeFrantz.00 FM 10/20/03 2:50 PM Page iv 1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeFrantz, Thomas Dancing revelations : Alvin Ailey’s embodiment of African American culture / Thomas F. DeFrantz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-515419-3 1.Ailey, Alivn. 2. Dancers—United States—Biography. 3.Choreographers— United States—Biography. 4.Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. 5.African American dance. I. Title. GV1785.A38 D44 2003 792.8'028'092—dc21 2002156670 Credits: Photographs: frontispiece and pages 5, 8, 19, 47, 63, 95, 101 courtesy and copyright by Jack Mitchell; cover illustration and pages 11, 12,courtesy and copyright by J. Peter Happel; page 43 courtesy Harvard Theater Collection, The Houghton Library, copyright by Alix Jeffry; page 55 courtesy and copyright by Howard Morehead; pages 123, 145, 149, 175,courtesy Time-Life, copyright by Martha Swope; pages 126, 129, 183 courtesy and copyright by Rosemary Winckley; pages 139, 207 courtesy of the Dance Collection, New York Public Library; page 158 courtesy and copyright by Judy Cameron; pages 165, 167, 194, 215, 224 courtesy and copyright by Johan Elbers; page 186 courtesy and copyright by Fred Fehl; page 210 courtesy and copyright by Jack Vartoogian; page 237 courtesy and copyright by Josef Astor. All other photographs author’s collection and courtesy of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater archives. Lyrics: “He Ain’t Heavy,” copyright 1969,renewed 1997,Harrison Music Corp. and Jenny Music, all rights reserved, used by permission; “A Song For You,” copyright 1970,Irving Music, Inc., all rights reserved, used by permission. 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper DeFrantz.00 FM 10/20/03 2:50 PM Page v To Alvin Ailey, who speaks to us all, still. This page intentionally left blank DeFrantz.00 FM 10/20/03 2:50 PM Page vii A friend asked me if I liked Ailey’s work; I blanched at the question. I could not have spent years thinking through Ailey’s achievement, hunkered over newspa- per clippings and programs in an airless room at the Alvin Ailey Dance Foun- dation offices, viewing this work repeatedly on videotape and, thankfully, in live performances, without an enormous admiration and respect for his accom- plishment. This study is a testament to that respect. This study also provides a stabilizing narrative of Ailey’s creative work, one that places him at the center of a consideration of concert dance practice in the United States. Since he showed his first choreography in the 1950s, professional dance critics have consistently found fault with Ailey’s process and product. My project does not involve rehearsing the “problems” in Ailey’s work as a chore- ographer, nor am I looking for chinks in the armor of a widely celebrated Afri- can American cultural institution. Rather, following art historian Richard J. Powell’s summation, I hope to provide an interpretation of Ailey’s work that ac- knowledges its particular aesthetics and cultural processes in formation “from an a priori position of cultural wholeness, conscious historicity, and an inherent and unapologetic humanity.”1 This study follows a lead set by Ailey himself in its variety of approaches and propositions about the place of concert dance in contemporary African American life. Above all, Ailey was aware of his position and potential as an African Amer- ican man born in working-class, segregated,Depression-era Texas. To under- PREFACE stand Ailey’s achievement, we must look to the world he inherited and the de- grees to which he transformed that world through his work. I do not compare Ailey’s work to that of Martha Graham, George Balanchine, or Merce Cun- ningham as if Ailey, like them, had been born into an educated, middle-class white milieu. If Ailey made dances that were important to him, we must be will- ing to look to the particular cultural processes and social realities that inspired him. Ailey’s dances may speak to a wide, global audience, but they speak from an African American ethos that remains insubstantially documented. Ailey choreographed more than seventy-five works, most of which exist in the repertories of one or more dance companies or have been videotaped and archived at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center. I consider underly- ing compositional structures in relation to the overall dance event. To better un- derstand the role of interaction between Ailey and his dancers, I have paid close attention to published interviews, oral histories, and televised accounts given by dancers who have both worked with Ailey and danced his choreographies. In addition, I conducted several interviews with former Ailey company dancers. The study is organized according to the parallel development of Ailey’s choreographic themes and his company. Theoretical concerns are developed in reference to particular dance works or performances. Of special significance to this study are modifications Ailey effected to his own choreography. For exam- ple, Revelations, his signature work, has endured three distinct guises in its nearly forty-year history. An analysis of changes in its appearance points to changes in Ailey’s conception of his company and its purpose as a bearer of African American culture. DeFrantz.00 FM 10/20/03 2:50 PM Page viii Preface I take the time to describe several of Ailey’s works so that the reader might sense what I see as I appreciate these compositions. The limits of movement de- scription may become readily apparent, but I find this technique useful, especially to discussions of work long gone or not easily accessible to a general audience. The descriptions also intend to give the impression of how these dances “feel” to a dance researcher at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I rely on critical accounts contemporary to the premieres of Ailey’s choreography for at least two reasons: to provide the reader with a sense of what writers present at performances chose to document of their immediate opinions of Ailey’s work, and to offer a sense of the strangely consistent degradation Ailey suffered at the pens of some of those critics. This study does not concern itself primarily with the divide between the largely white New York dance critics co- hort and Ailey’s largely African American company and aesthetic interest. But that divide surely did exist, and according to Ailey’s allies, the virulent attacks writers routinely launched against his enterprise troubled him deeply. Certainly, negative critical opinions of Ailey’s choreography or company are not intentionally racist simply because they come from white writers; at times, negative opinions from any quarter are helpful to the process of improving performance. But, as the several examples of negative criticism in the manuscript that follow bear out, many of Ailey’s (white) critics engaged a purposefully dismissive and derisive tone that deserves more explication than this text allows. In addition to historical analysis, the manuscript includes a series of short, self-contained essays that constitute a counternarrative to the main body of writing. I intend for these breaks to resonate with black musical practice, in which an insistent beat is interrupted by a flash of contradictory rhythmic ideas. For me, the break is the most significant gesture of African American performance, as it contains both the tie to a ubiquitous rhythmic flow and the potential for complete anarchy and disruption. The break creates a liminoid space that allows listeners a place to enter the musical dance. I hope that the manuscript’s literary breaks will function similarly to periodically revive the interests of read- ers who become bored with the cataloguing of Ailey’s life work. This manuscript veers toward academic language at times, but attempts to resist staying there for long. Following Ailey’s lead, my effort questions the na- ture of the political and aesthetic in dance performance, but in language that might be widely understood. My hope is that this manuscript might reach any- one who has enjoyed a performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and inspire that reader to think more deeply about the ways that performance has grown from a rich and fertile African American ground. viii DeFrantz.00 FM 10/20/03 2:50 PM Page ix This manuscript has benefited from numerable influences, direct and indirect. I thank everyone who offered encouragement and criticism along the way. I thank the faculty of the Department of Performance Studies at New York Uni- versity, especially Professor James N. Amankulor, who constantly reminded me to write within the African American grain and to honor all the deities—plus one more. Marcia B. Siegel shared of herself again and again to push me toward thinking critically and carefully about dance and its affect.

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