This program features excerpts from many of Alvin Ailey’s most popular and beloved ballets, including Blues Suite, The Lark Ascending, Hidden Rites, Isba, and Escapades.

With the rumble of a train and the toll of distant bells, a cast of vividly-drawn characters from the barrelhouses and fields of Alvin Ailey’s southern childhood are summoned to dance and revel through one long, sultry night. Ailey’s first masterpiece poignantly evokes the sorrow, humor and humanity of the blues, those heartfelt songs that he called “hymns to the secular regions of the soul.”

In 1984, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Artistic Director Emerita Judith Jamison created Divining, on a major company for the first time at the request of her mentor, Alvin Ailey. Jamison wrote in her autobiography, Dancing Spirit, "Divining is mysterious, its title suggesting a search or quest." The ritualized ballet is set to a score that incorporates North African, Central African and Latin rhythms.

The echoes of memories cascade into the distant past while pervading our awareness of the present. 

Christopher Huggins, a former Ailey company member, is now a choreographer greatly admired for his distinctively theatrical works. Essence is a tour-de-force for a female soloist, who explores a spectrum of emotions in this deeply moving portrait of self-discovery.

Love Lost, Love Found
A bittersweet journey of a young girl struggling with her mind and heart when dealing with past relationships, both positive and negative. Set to P.J. Harvey's "Is That All There Is?" and the driving sounds of Matmos.

Ailey II Associate Artistic Director Troy Powell's latest piece, Hope (The Final Rise), is a stimulating ballet, exploring the possibility of hope and change within a group of individuals. What can we expect for the future, how can we create lasting change and how can we ensure the changes are powerful, positive statements? In his unique way, Powell focuses on individuals rising up together and alone, utilizing a dynamic musical composition by Grammy-nominee David Chesky to highlight his energetic, potent choreography.

Inspired by Bach’s suites for cello, Intimate Voices blends simplicity and intricacy into a homogeneous set of short dances—each abstractly expressing... a different feeling or state of mind.

Journey is a solo dance originally choreographed in 1958 and later incorporated into a revised version of a larger work by Trisler called Theater Piece (1960). Journey is set to The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives (1874-1954), composed some time before 1909 -- a short, intensely evocative orchestral mood-poem comprising a steady, soft background of muted strings, a persistently repeated "question" by a solo trumpet and an unsuccessful hunt for the "answer" undertaken with increasing urgency by the flutes.

This emotional solo portrays spiritual struggle through muscular interplay between a male dancer and a bench. The work was inspired by Howard Fast’s novel Southern Landscape, and refers to the tragic influence of the Ku Klux Klan on a mixed-race community in the rural South after the Civil War. The soloist asserts himself within and against the themes of oppression and transcendence in the highly stylized, gestural vocabulary of the piece. The dancer, “sitting on the mourner’s bench,” reflects upon the end of his community and the horror of its slaughter.

A provocative piece about the ever-changing twists and turns of power relations between a husband and wife. This poignant pas de deux features music by Powell's long time collaborator composer Michael Wimberly.

Prayer in Discord is a work of spiritual transformation and psychological drama. Each dancer’s movement is an expression of and a reaction to a human dilemma, such as the need for identity, reason for existence and questioning final destination through prayer. The absence of harmony reflects an emotional yearning which the ballet resolves through myth, ritual, symbolism and direct experience.

Quintet is in its way a small masterwork and one that differed significantly from other Ailey signature works before it. Like Reflections in D, the piece was an imaginative and sensitive reading of its score, and it offered yet more proof of Alvin's distinctive gift for blending serious choreography and themes with affectionate teasing of his characters. In the new piece, however, Alvin explored for the first time the private being behind a highly public face, a subject he would return to repeatedly."
- Jennifer Dunning, Alvin Ailey: A Life In Dance

Using African-American spirituals, song-sermons, gospel songs and holy blues--this suite fervently explores the places of deepest grief and holiest joy in the soul.

Set to music by Mio Morales, Byrd expertly combines passion and formality in this ballet, creating the perfect vehicle for the stunning Ailey II dancers.

The complex, tightly woven rhythms of Indian Kathak dance are deconstructed and abstracted in this percussive, fast-paced work.

A modern work that follows the journey of a young man who attempts to show a group of individuals that he does not need them and is sufficient on his own.

To Vaughan Williams, with an intense love of the English countryside that he knew in his youth, the lark represented the heart’s rapture and the soul’s aspiration. A miniature violin concerto in all but name, the composer called "The Lark Ascending" a "romance" when he completed it in 1920, though he commenced the composition before war broke out in 1914.

This ballet is performed in excerpt in Ailey Highlights.
 

Continuing the long tradition of collaborations between Ailey choreographers and legendary jazz musicians, Ailey II resident choreographer Troy Powell joins renowned pianist McCoy Tyner in a passionate exchange of movement and music. Originally commissioned for the Verizon Music Festival, The Tyner Project features lighthearted ensemble sections, a sensual pas de deux and an energetic full-company finale all developed in close collaboration with the McCoy Tyner Band.