Choreographic legacies are tough to handle; there is always the risk of turning a once vibrant dance into a theatrically dead museum piece. The preservation of choreographic milestones is certainly paramount, but so is the need to provide artists with new challenges, especially within those companies that, having formed and thrived around a prominent artistic figure, remain too attached to their long-deceased founders’ aesthetics.
Luckily, renewal is in the air for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, as demonstrated by the 2010 piece The Hunt, choreographed by Robert Battle, who will become the company’s new artistic director in July 2011. The Hunt is a superbly fast-paced and powerfully engaging piece that moves away from the well-established canons of Ailey’s art. Only in the third and final movement can citations of his most distinctive motifs be spotted. And it is difficult to state whether this is good or bad, for while these echoes pay tribute to the company’s performance tradition, they also detract from the intense and radically innovative vibrancy of the two previous movements. Indeed, it is thanks to those subtle echoes that the innovative piece sits comfortably with the more Ailey-esque remainder of the programme, which includes his monumental Revelations (1960), George W. Faison’s dated Suite Otis (1971) and Ronald K.Brown’s 2009 Dancing Spirit — a piece that relies too much on an overstretched reutilisation of Ailey’s canons.
Performance tradition is also central to the performances by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo — better known as the ‘Trocks’. Their unquestionable reverence for the past manifests itself through a series of hysterically funny all-male renditions of dance classics. The indefatigable, muscled and hairy-chested ballerinas are back in London with new and old goodies.
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