Ailey training troupe wins hearts at MCA> Youthful dancers packed with prowess

What’s in a name? When Alvin Ailey died in 1989, Alvin Ailey & Company became the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. It was able to continue in part because Ailey, unlike most modern dance choreographers, had created a repertory company, performing works by many different choreographers as a way of challenging his dancers and attracting audiences.

Given that the audience at the Maine Center for the Arts last Friday night had tickets for The Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble, they might have come expecting the genuine article — the publicity was a bit fuzzy. What they got instead was a vibrant company of young dancers (formerly Ailey II) that was started by Ailey in 1974 as a training ground for his own troupe. He envisioned a touring company that could be a vehicle for an emerging generation of choreographers and provide performing experience to the most talented advanced students of former Ailey dancer Sylvia Waters. Some 30 dancers from this troupe have been invited into the parent company.

The dancers of the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble are beautifully trained, strong, engaging, with energy to spare, but the training mission of the company, which moves dancers through every two or three years, works against the idea of ensemble, which demands time for dancers to grow together and mature in their roles. Despite these shortcomings, the youthful appeal and technical prowess of the company won the hearts of the nearly packed house Friday night.

The program began with Alvin Ailey’s “Escapades” (1983), set to a jazz score by drummer Max Roach. A breezy tale on young love, it was a showcase for the athleticism of the company’s men, the high extensions and rock-solid balances of the women. Bathed in tropical colors, groups of dancers wove around a solitary male, dressed in white, pinned to center stage, whose pent-up energy extended into a men’s quartet that held the threat of a rumble but quickly fizzled for lack of any dramatic connection between the dancers.

Enter Tina Williams, as the woman in black, performing the same Ailey vocabulary — turns with the leg extended high in attitude, long arabesques and fluid, snakelike waves of the torso — we had seen it all before, but Williams danced with emotional as well as physical conviction. With her back to the audience and a simple, generous gesture, opening her uplifted arms outward, she invited the man in white to partner her. Their sultry, balletic pas de deux was followed by brief duets for the rest of the company that were like jazz riffs, alternately tender and quirky.

Donald Byrd’s “Crumble” (1987) was danced by Rosalyn Sanders as a punk Degas ballerina squired by a group of five cavaliers in shiny black unitards. A kind of ballet mecanique to a throbbing rock score, the piece combined jazz isolations that gave the men the disjointed look of marionettes, ballet vocabulary interrupted by loose head rolls and percussive African movements for the ballerina, and an extended classical pas de deux in which she did in one partner after another while the others vied hopelessly for her attention. One wondered why.

The evening ended with “Revelations,” a suite of dances to traditional gospel music that Ailey created in 1960 and that remains his crowning achievement. From the opening chords of “I Been ‘Buked,” with dancers poised birdlike, arms curved and heads bowed, to the fan-waving, elbow-flapping, finger-waving finale of “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham,” “Revelations” always brings down the house.

The choreography is beautiful in its simplicity, but the Ailey company was faulted even in the ’70s for overplaying the piece’s show-biz theatrically at the expense of its emotional core. In Friday’s performance, the company’s inexperience gave us only a sketch of the original. This was particularly true of the middle section, the gorgeous processional and “Wading in the Water,” where these young dancers simply lacked the maturity and power to make the movement flow together and gather momentum.

Yet, it was impossible not to be moved by the waving silk, the dazzling white costumes, and the undulating bodies. And there were some wonderful moments: Tina Williams shone again in “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” the beautiful duet to “Fix Me, Jesus,” ended with Sanders being gently cradled to the ground; and Edmond Giles’ sensuous vulnerability combined with a controlled strength were perfectly suited to the sustained reaches and backward lunges of “I Wanna Be Ready.”

The Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble deserved the audience’s enthusiastic applause. Next time, the Bangor dance audience deserves the A team.

Editor’s Note: Andrea Stark is the former artistic director of Ram Island Dance Co. in Portland.