Fourth consecutive AAADT BAM season features company premiere of Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye (photo by Georgia Modi)
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
June 4–7, $46-$156
www.bam.org
ailey.org
New Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic director Alicia Graf Mack leads the company into its fourth consecutive visit to BAM with an exciting program running June 4–7. A mix of the old and the new concludes Mack’s inaugural season, which included a terrific December/January season at City Center that featured the world premiere of Cuban American theater director and arts educator and activist Maija García’s dazzling, fabulously costumed Jazz Island, a fable celebrating the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, inspired by Geoffrey Holder’s book Black Gods, Green Islands, about Trinidad and Tobago, with original music by jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles; Matthew Neenan’s Ailey debut, Difference Between, set to emotive choral music by MacArthur fellow and two-time Obie winner Heather Christian; Jamar Roberts’s compelling narrative solo Song of the Anchorite, a reimagining of Alvin Ailey’s 1961 solo Hermit Songs, set to jazz trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s interpretation of a Ravel adagio; Fredrick Earl Mosley’s Embrace, which incorporates tunes by Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush, Etta James, Maxwell, Ed Sheeran, Des’ree, and P!nk in exploring the intimacy of human connection as a group of dancers in everyday dress make inventive use of tables; and the company premiere of Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye, set to J. S. Bach’s violin sonatas and partita performed by Itzhak Perlman.
At BAM, AAADT will present a new production of Judith Jamison’s Emmy-winning Hymn, the 1993 thirty-seven-minute tribute to Ailey set to music by Robert Ruggieri and text by Anna Deavere Smith that uses the words of Ailey dancers and Ailey himself; the fifteen-minute Blink of an Eye; and the thirty-six-minute 1960 classic Revelations, a cultural touchstone inspired by Ailey’s childhood.
“I definitely can say to the audience to be present as much as our dancers because it will be over in the blink of an eye,” stager Valentina Scaglia says about Walerski’s piece in the above video. “I think it’s important to just be there and just breathe it in and see what it does. I think the music and the dancers together will bring it over in the most wonderful way.”
On June 4 at 6:00, there will be a free roundtable discussion with the original cast of Hymn in the Adam Space; you can RSVP here.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]