Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has officially kicked off its holiday season at New York City Center. Choreographer Hope Boykin, who was a principal dancer for the company, is premiering her new work.
She is transcendent and glowing: a mysterious woman in white. Standing center stage in a bandeau top with a strip of transparent fabric hanging down her front, and wide, loose pants, she remains still and rooted. This dancer, the mother god of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace, anchors the stage with a quiet strength as the sound of Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” builds, calling her body — and with it her costume, its fabric swelling and dipping like waves — to action.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performs on The Kelly Clarkson Show, celebrating 25 years of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace.
The sun sets, the moon rises and New York City is reborn. The night was a source of fascination for the choreographer Alvin Ailey. He understood its power, how bodies could soften in its shadows. It’s a time when some people “become their real selves,” he wrote in his notebooks in reference to his dance Night Creature. It’s no accident that Ailey, the subject of Edges of Ailey, a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, choreographed a performance to open Studio 54 in 1977.
HELL'S KITCHEN, Manhattan (WABC) -- Eyewitness News got a behind-the-scenes look at rehearsals for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's upcoming holiday season. The company is preparing for several productions including the world premiere of, Sacred Songs. It will feature spirituals from the original 19-60 premiere of Alvin Ailey's influential work, Revelations.
If a hot girl summer was a dance, it might look something like choreographer Kyle Abraham’s Are You in Your Feelings? It’s vibrant and beautiful, fleeting and flirtatious, curious, casual and messy — in a good way.
On this episode of AOS, choreographer Amy Hall Garner and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's Matthew Rushing talk about CENTURY, one of the ballets that will be performed Saturday, May 11 at NJPAC. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will have three shows on Mother's Day weekend at NJPAC (May 10-12).
Zellerbach Hall was packed and spirits were high for opening night of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s 56th visit to Berkeley.
Acclaimed choreographer Alvin Ailey infused his life story and Black cultural roots into his modern dance works, which have been enjoyed by millions since he first founded Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958 in New York City. Early dances such as Revelations remain favorites in the company repertory today, but many people don’t know the background of the artist, who died in 1989.
Houston-born dancer and arts educator Isabel Wallace-Green vividly recalls seeing a performance of Alvin Ailey’s landmark 1960 dance work Revelations as a child, peering over a high balcony in Jones Hall. “The dancers were pretty small!” laughs Wallace-Green, who nevertheless was captivated, especially by a section in Revelations titled “Wade in the Water,” where translucent white, cobalt, and aquamarine cloths are stretched across the stage to evoke baptismal waters and — for African American slaves — the riverbed as a pathway to freedom. “I’d never seen anything like that.”