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.
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