THE IMPRESARIO

Alvin Ailey’ crusade to build a home for himself and other Black dancers.

-  HILTON ALS

In 1960, the twenty-nine-year-old Alvin Ailey premièred his landmark work, "Revelations," with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, the company he'd founded to showcase Black culture through dance. This marked the end of his apprenticeship as a young choreographer who'd grown up revering Katherine Dunham, Lester Horton, Martha Graham, and Jack Cole American masters with an international perspective. It also launched him into critical purgatory.

From the start, the thirty-six-minute piece, which depicts Black resilience and Christian faith, and is set to various spirituals, was a hit with audiences, both because of Ailey's preternatural talent for constructing graphic stage pictures and because it took us to church without our having to go to church. You do not need to have been raised in the South, as Ailey was, or to have attended Baptist services, as he did with his mother, in order to understand what he is doing here, particularly in the final section of the piece, set to the triumphant "Wade in the Water." The dancers, clad in light colors, step high, their backs straight and heads held high, as they walk across baptismal waters toward their own glory. (Stretches of fluttering fabric simulate the water, an effect that Ailey, a magpie by nature, no doubt borrowed from Jerome Robbins, who did something similar to create a river in "The King and I," in 1951.) But what you are watching is not just a parade of "vertical saints," as James Baldwin described his churchgoing brethren, but the work of a choreographer who aims to show us how the metaphysical moves.