It’s Technicolor

She shuffles on her knees in a dress as white as death. She has been told to scrub, march, twirl, smooth, shake, pound, kick, grasp a hard knot just below the navel and bend, bend. A length of fabric is her rag, her crown, her votive. She moves like athletes do after training under harsher conditions so that their elegance still bears the trace of some great resistance. When she lays her burden down—when this cloth that could swaddle or hang lies limply on the ground—the force of all that coiled tension erupts. She is no less elegant, only now her kicks are for the pleasure of extending her leg, of lifting her ruffled hemline to draw fluttering waves through the air. But this happy ending hardly erases the memory of the pain that came before.

Beauty, in Alvin Ailey’s Cry (1971), is a grave matter. The solo, first danced by the late Judith Jamison, was a gift to his mother and dedicated to “black women everywhere.” He has a few more famous pieces, and more elaborate ones, but Cry is the one that catches, that generates grace through friction. It is a taxing performance. Twenty-five years ago Dwana Adiaha Smallwood recalled that if she didn’t tuck the skirt beneath her, she would finish the performance with bloody knees. In any given program the dancer’s solitude is made starker because her company members have only recently slipped out of view. Jamison said that the work demanded a dancer who could “fill the stage.” It is just her and the recording of Cecil McBee plucking at his bass while Alice Coltrane summons her late husband on the piano.

That the choreography can stand up to the music should, perhaps, be unsurprising. Ailey, who died in 1989, is one of those artists, like Picasso or Faulkner, whom one knows even without knowing the work—the name is shorthand for a whole field. He is, just a few years shy of what would be his centenary, an institution unto himself. “Edges of Ailey,” now on at the Whitney Museum in New York, puts that fame to productive use.

The show, curated by Adrienne Edwards, occupies the museum’s cavernous fifth floor, with performances taking place on the third. Dance, particularly Ailey’s kind, can have a hard time in galleries, without a front to face. Rather than exclusively exhibiting recorded performances or objects from the archive, the curators on the fifth floor try to weave with Ailey’s thread, situating him within a recognizable black canon. As I stepped out of the elevators, I realized that this was the first show I’ve attended—at least of those that were not so billed—where I immediately knew I would see a Basquiat.

Ailey is less the subject of this show than the cog that sets the machine in motion. He always seems just off center stage: the notebooks are on the side, the documentary about his life in a corner. There are personal artifacts, but Ailey—his name, his fame—has given the curators an opportunity to subtly stake out the parameters of a black canon in the visual arts. A list of just a few of the names is dizzying: Jennifer Packer, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Lorna Simpson, Kerry James Marshall, Jacob Lawrence, Beauford Delaney, Roy DeCarava, Kara Walker, Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden.

Some of the work fits cleanly, such as Yiadom-Boakye’s dancers or Lawrence’s Tombstones (1942), which might as well be the reference palette for many of the Ailey company’s lighting cues. Elsewhere, as with the nineteenth-to-twentieth-century drums from the Fon people in Benin, or Ringgold’s 1971 painting United States of Attica, the implicit claims of relevance feel a bit too broad. All the same, it is to the curatorial team’s credit that such a dense show does not appear excessive. (The Gagosian Gallery’s 2013 Basquiat show, in contrast, was so packed that little was left of the painter beyond a pop culture signifier floating atop an undifferentiated morass of capital.) In essence, “Edges of Ailey” demonstrates that the last hundred-odd years of black visual arts might merit a quattrocento-like shorthand. The works on view span great distances and varied lineages, and Ailey—like Fra Angelico or Botticelli before him—is as useful a North Star as one could hope for.

Ailey was a child of Texas in the century of the color line and so, like many millions before and after him, left—or fled—the terror and poverty of the South. Born in 1931 near the end of the Great Migration’s first wave, at eleven he joined his mother in Los Angeles during the beginning of the second. His childhood was marked by an array of brutalities, with his only refuge in the church. His father left the family, his mother was repeatedly raped by white men, and Ailey cycled between family members as she became an itinerant domestic worker. In 1949 his friend and future collaborator Carmen de Lavallade brought him to the choreographer Lester Horton’s studio in West Hollywood, where he started training seriously.

Ailey was only a few years into his study when Horton died from a heart attack at just forty-seven, but he was already ambitious enough to offer himself up as the studio’s new artistic director. Although Ailey and de Lavallade decamped for New York City the following year, the experience remained evident in his work. In Horton’s To José Clemente Orozco, which the two dancers performed for a memorial program in 1963, there are some of the same broad, forceful gestures and crawls that punctuate Ailey’s dances, implying the weight of an oppression, expressed through enormous tensile strength.

Relating the milestones of Ailey’s life, one is tempted to check again and again whether he was in fact born in 1931. The line of ascent is too sharp; he achieves too much too soon. His early death from AIDS-related complications at fifty-eight truncated an astonishing career. He was barely twenty-seven at the time of his company’s debut at the 92nd Street Y in 1958. It featured Blues Suite, which would become a fixture of the Ailey repertory.

Over the course of the half-hour ballet, Ailey resurrects Depression-era Texas, the Texas of his childhood. But it is neither the abjection of mass impoverishment nor apartheid’s cruelty that he puts on display. Instead it is the exultation of a long hothouse night. Workers and clientele boogie, gamble, and drink to the B-side of the spirituals: scratchy, secular, glistening pain that the singers evoke and are not quite ready to give up, misdeeds for which they are not prepared to seek absolution. Brother John Sellers’s plaintive rasp guides them, moaning about “how sweet the woman used to be.” They may call the Lord’s name, but usually in vain. All the while the performers slide in and out of social dances and channel the spasmodic ecstasy of the black Pentecostals into the juddering arms of sinners getting a taste of the good life.

Revelations premiered two years later, on a cold winter afternoon, a day before four young men sat down at a Greensboro lunch counter and refused to leave. The program of the original dance, which ran nearly twice as long as the version the company performs today, stated that the performance “explores the motivations and emotions of Negro religious music” and indicated its elements: “sustained melodies, ring-shouts, song-sermons, gospel songs, and holy blues—songs of trouble, of Love of deliverance.” Were it not for the word “motivations” it would seem almost a musicological exercise. The suite passes through elemental stages: earthen ochre skirts and mesh shirts give way to starched white pants and dresses against a pale blue backdrop, which is finally superseded by the Easter yellows of the dancers’ Sunday finest and the blood red of a setting sun. As with many of Ailey’s works, the richly hued sets and costumes call to mind three-strip Technicolor; they are like life, only more vivid, more urgent.

Revelations is an ode to black American history—its joys and depredations—as expressed through its religious and cultural forms at the exact moment of the church’s greatest political influence. More than just toggling between pleasure and pain, it mines the exhilaration of sorrow, beginning in slavery and ending with a dozen or more dancers rejoicing in the driving rhythms of a gospel choir. The solo “I Wanna Be Ready” depicts a man who is preparing for death but not yet at peace. Even when he is low to the ground, nearing relief, the piece requires the soloist to repeatedly, and demandingly, balance on his tailbone, his body curled and held aloft until he unfurls, before returning to this indeterminate position somewhere between the grave and the heavens.

The solo hovers in this zone, where death is at the threshold. But the popularity of Revelations is no doubt due in part to the fact that it does not stay with this desolation. The work, particularly in its finale, holds fast to an irrepressible hope. During the moment when black political action had begun to provoke a national crisis, Revelations seemed already to be speaking from the mountaintop.

The company was, and is, extraordinarily successful. Numerous world tours made Ailey the face of black dance in his lifetime. Death did not diminish his reputation. Now the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation comprises two companies and a school; it is, according to its own copy, “legacy in motion.” Revelations has been performed for at least five presidents (twice at inaugurations), honored by the Senate, mounted in dozens of countries—including in the Soviet Union, at the behest of the State Department—and broadcast on television. That is to say, it has become Americana.

Beyond his place in the nation’s repertoire, here in the blacker world Ailey achieved a different kind of ubiquity, becoming one of those icons who are a part of the familial education. Parents gifted their kids Andrea Davis Pinkney’s best-selling children’s book about his life not to instill a love of dance but to make clear he was one of ours.

Such figureheads invariably invite scrutiny. When black artists of any medium achieve a certain level of renown, detractors tend to assert that they have lost touch with their roots. (Consider, for instance, the claims that any given rapper makes against another—and denies about themselves.) Black canons might be necessary—without them, talented artists are often treated as mere sociological curiosities—but frequently they also blunt the work by burdening it with the mandate to speak “authentically” for a people. That speech is in turn simplified and ventriloquized. Countless guilty consciences have spurred writers, upon noticing that their ostensibly universal analyses depend on strikingly uniform examples, to add a hurried ecce negro paragraph deploying James Baldwin or Toni Morrison. In the process they reduce complex thinkers to stock characters, beyond reproach and so beyond dialogue too.

Often this mandate requires a false dichotomy between technique and soul. When black art swings, critics laud it for its explosive expressivity, which obviates technique. When the form is immaculate, frequently they read it as stiff and mannered and therefore out of touch with some truer, sultrier blackness. Barely a decade after Ailey formed his company, a review in New York magazine noted that his style had certain elements of “ghetto” verisimilitude: “The assertive upward thrust of the head, the expressively rotating shoulder, the gliding pelvic step…evoke delighted recognition from blacks in the audience.” But now these movements were “more disciplined, less spontaneous and effervescent.”

The pianist Cecil Taylor, Ailey’s contemporary, faced the same quandary. In a laudatory piece from 1959, a critic in The Jazz Review wrote that Taylor’s percussive notes did not make the audience “feel the burning necessity that what he says had to be said. Especially on the blues, one has the impression that Taylor lets us in on the workings of his mind, but not his soul.” Blackness, and its blues, is a matter of the soul; the mind is elsewhere, in some paler domain. The critic and poet A.B. Spellman wrote that Taylor utterly rejected the idea that his music was “more technical than soulful,” on the grounds that it “was like giving the tractor more credit for the crop than the earth.” He thought of himself, Spellman wrote, as “a blues improviser.”

Taylor was that, and he was playing Bartók too. Ailey wanted his company to be seen as modern first. Speaking at UCLA in the 1980s, he said that he required his dancers to be versed in a number of styles, but “the basis” of his program was ballet. “I don’t have a color policy,” he explained, “I just take dancers. It just happens that it’s primarily black at the moment—I guess it always will be—because I’m very involved, being black myself.” He sidesteps claiming to have a totally colorblind policy, as would soon be in vogue, but also refuses the idea that his is a specifically black company. It is black because he is black and because the material and histories that interest him are black. It is an empirical fact more than anything else.

There is no way out. In spite of the intense political pressure to which it is subject, black art is capacious, more so than either its critics or its champions often allow. By the 1970s it was already noted that the black portion of Ailey’s audience was shrinking, in part due to simple demographic arithmetic: his white audience was growing. Still, decades later, some sense of shared history and shared feeling can be heard and felt at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s yearly performances at City Center. A certain strut, a cock of the head, a few bars of the blues, a gospel vibrato: each and all send one part of the audience into laughter, murmurs of assent, permission to go ’head on, then. Cry still elicits knowing “mhms,” and Blues Suite garners tittering at flirtatious impertinences. If Ailey’s dances come across as pleasurable rather than noxiously pandering to a received idea of blackness, it is not solely because we recognize the motions and situations. It’s Technicolor again. We know the strut, but then, none of us can move quite like that. It is not just the rotation of a shoulder that evokes “delighted recognition” but the precision of its angle and roll.

“Edges of Ailey” works with a similar kind of knowing joy. The multiscreen video piece that runs near the ceiling of the gallery is edited so like a movie trailer that it denies the pleasure of watching dancers dance, though it succeeds at inducing a thrumming ambient energy. In a corner near the front, a small screen shows footage from 1984’s Bearden Plays Bearden of Albert Murray, Romare Bearden, Baldwin, and Ailey chatting and laughing in a living room with drinks and cigarettes near at hand. It is the kind of image, so dense with brilliant personages at ease, that resuscitates the myth of New York even at this late date. The notes Ailey wrote to himself that are included in the show—to do fewer drugs, to make more work, to survive the mental and emotional pressure he was under, to call a number for sex—testify to the actual experience of the city even for the most gifted among us.

The word “celebration” is inescapable. But mourning also insinuates itself in black art, derived from the condition that has hung over black culture and life. There are, of course, works on display here that are not subject to this atmosphere. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s new painting A Knave Made Manifest (2024) depicts a quartet of dancers in rehearsal. They are more of her signature slender characters, but as often in her work the background is most captivating. Here various shades of taupe suggest light and shadow, and so very nearly suggest some legible space, before receding back into a mass of color. But elsewhere in the exhibition, death abounds: Ailey’s section of the AIDS quilt; a Jacob Lawrence figure study whose squared angles and antithetically oriented arms might be those of a dancer in fourth position or Christ descending from the cross; a painting from Kerry James Marshall’s “Souvenir” series, with its roll call of twentieth-century musicians; Maren Hassinger’s installation River perched on a platform the color of arterial blood.

Somehow, River is the most arresting object in the show. On that platform, down near the floor, an intertwined mass of rope and chains curls just like the Mississippi does right before it bursts into the gulf. The materials are mundane, but here their undulating beauty is shot through with menace. It is bondage, it is lynching, it is coiling at your feet. Whenever I was in sight of it, I found it difficult to look away.

But mourning is not melancholy. A mournful culture is not mired in depression; it is active, conducting what Gillian Rose called “that intense work of the soul, that gradual rearrangement of its boundaries.” “Edges of Ailey” does not impose grief upon you but transforms and elevates the feeling where it might set in. Marshall’s Souvenir IV works this way. In the first two paintings in the series, the lost are Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy, that trinity whose deaths signified, for some, a foreclosed path for the country. But by the third painting in the series Marshall inscribes the names of artists and writers, and here in the fourth he does so with Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Elmore James, Otis Redding, Dinah Washington, Booker Little. Their deaths were not like King’s, but Marshall makes it plain: these, too, are ours.

I first learned about Alvin Ailey from that children’s book. He was presented to me as one of several figures about whom I, or we, should feel a certain pride. “I’m a choreographer,” Ailey said in an interview. “I’m a black man whose roots are in the sun and dirt of the South.” It was his refusal to separate the two, his refusal to disavow what amounts to a homeland, that earned such pride. His shows sold out from the beginning, but he, and so the work, did not give in to fame’s forgetfulness. In 1986 he told an interviewer, “Texas, blues and spirituals and gospel music, ragtime music…all of this is part of my blood memory.”

Ailey cannot be separated from his generation, which was born into apartheid, came to adulthood during the civil rights years, and died as the racist cries once shouted through bullhorns were—at least for a time—hushed into whistles. He was a modern artist, not a historian. It is not quite history coursing through this dancer’s veins but memory, ever inchoate, cracking under the stress of interpretation and communication. Ailey wrote to the actor and choreographer Herbert Ross, “My ideal has always been to have a ballet company—in style, essence and intention.” In its origins, its development, and its use as a cudgel against whatever may be considered lower-class or “ethnic,” ballet has long conjured Europe. But Cecil Taylor absorbed Bartók and came out the other side still playing jazz. Ailey did the same in dance. Maybe that’s why you keep memory secreted away in the blood, until the body opens up and then there it is, spilling, blackening the earth.