Rennie Harris’s Lazarus is part of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater season at Lincoln Center (photo by Paul Kolnik)
David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center
20 Lincoln Center Plaza
June 12-16, $29-$159
212-496-0600
www.alvinailey.org
www.davidhkochtheater.com
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s annual Lincoln Center season might be short but it’s packed with highlights. From June 12 to 16, AAADT will feature three programs (that all conclude with Revelations), in addition to the gala, at the David H. Koch Theater, as part of the troupe’s sixtieth anniversary celebration. On June 12 at 7:30 and June 14 at 2:00, “Bold Visions” includes the world premiere of Darrell Grand Moultrie’s Ounce of Faith; Ronald K. Brown’s The Call, “a love letter to Mr. Ailey” set to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Mary Lou Williams, and Asase Yaa Entertainment Group; and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter, with music by Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn and Victor See Yuen and poetry by Hattie Gossett and Laurie Carlos. (The Saturday Family Matinee will be followed by a Q&A with some of the dancers.) On June 13 at 7:00, the Ailey Spirit Gala Performance features works by several choreographers in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Ailey School, in addition to a one-night-only presentation of a new ballet choreographed by Ailey II artistic director Troy Powell featuring former AileyCampers, current students from the Ailey School, and members of Ailey II and AAADT.
On June 14 and 15 at 8:00, “Trailblazers” is highlighted by Rennie Harris’s two-act, sixty-minute Lazarus (inspired by the life and career of Alvin Ailey), with music by Darrin Ross, Nina Simone, Terrence Trent D’Arby, Michael Kiwanuka, and Odetta and the voice of Ailey. On June 16 at 3:00, “Timeless Ailey” is a potpourri of excerpts from Blues Suite, Streams, Mary Lou’s Mass, The Lark Ascending, Hidden Rites, Night Creature, Cry, Phases, Opus McShann, Pas de Duke, For “Bird” – With Love,” Love Songs, and Memoria. The season comes to a big finish on June 16 at 7:30 with “An Evening Honoring Carmen de Lavallade,” a tribute to the exquisite dancer with excerpts from pieces she performed in (John Butler’s Portrait of Billie, Lester Horton’s Sarong Paramaribo, and her own Sweet Bitter Love), followed by The Call, Ounce of Faith, and Revelations. The engagement also welcomes five new dancers: Renaldo Maurice, Yazzmeen Laidler, Corrin Rachelle Mitchell, Jessica Amber Pinkett, and Patrick Coker.
Nitehawk is celebrating Pride Month with a trio of films honoring the LGBTQ experience, beginning June 6 with a screening of 2004’s Saving Face, followed by a Q&A with writer-director Alice Wu. While much of this independent first feature is entertaining enough, the last scenes are so much fun, so heartbreaking, and so charming that the film leaps to the next level, so stay with it. The captivating Michelle Krusiec (One World, Knife Fight) stars as Wilhelmina, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor trying to balance her career with her family in Flushing. Every Friday night she goes to the community dance, where her mother (Joan Chen) and the other Chinese yentas try to fix her up with a guy. Little do they know that she’s gay and strongly attracted to the boss’s daughter, Vivian (Lynn Chen), a ballerina dabbling in modern dance. Things get a little wacky when it turns out that Wil’s mother is pregnant and won’t tell anyone who the father is, leading to her banishment from her parents’ home and her friends’ inner circle. Suddenly Wil finds herself struggling to take care of her mother while also exploring a blossoming relationship that she hides from nearly everyone except her best friend, Jay (Ato Essandoh).
Filmmaker Karen Kramer spent seven years on Renegade Dreamers, including four years following a group of young contemporary spoken word artists and protest singers. She could have done something better with her time. A longtime downtown New Yorker who made The Ballad of Greenwich Village in 2005, Kramer initially set out to make a documentary about the coffeehouse scene around MacDougal and Bleecker Streets in the 1950s and ’60s, and the sections of Renegade Dreamers about the post–World War II Beat poets and folk singers, including Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Len Chandler, and others, as well as Woody Guthrie, are terrific, with rarely seen archival footage that is stirring and exciting. She speaks with such key figures as Wavy Gravy, Hettie Jones, Eric Andersen, Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers, Maria Muldaur, David Amram, Izzy Young, Tom Paxton, and Richie Havens (some interview footage was completed for her previous film), who share intimate stories about their struggle against McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, anti-unionism, consumerism, and conformity. “They considered progressive thinking to be anti-American,” Peter Yarrow says of 1960s mainstream America, something that is true again today.
