Dance

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

five stars

FROM Exodus to Revelations, the Tuesday evening programme from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) tapped into something that is remarkable and particular to this company: a kind of inner grace that transcends technique. And boy, do these dancers have bravura technique across a potent range of disparate styles.

In Exodus (2015), that style has an urban energy drawn from choreographer Rennie Harris’s own command of hip hop and street moves. America’s streets have recently witnessed the shooting down of black men by police officers, and when gunshots ring out in Exodus, Harris’s work responds not with violence, but with a tremendous surge of affirmative spirituality. That uplift of belief in the face of tribulation sees the dancers – now costumed entirely in white – bring a thrilling sense of community to the slick, quick footwork that had given a hustling edge to the opening sections. Melding all this together is the utterly compelling figure of Jamar Roberts. Tall, lithe, a visceral conduit for shifting rhythms and emotions, and emblematic of the need to find the light of hope in the face of darkness.

In so many ways, Exodus is close kin to Ailey’s own Revelations (1960) which ends the evening on a high of radiant belief. Not just the belief expressed in the spirituals that underpin Ailey’s choreography of troubled, striving souls and redemptive faith, but the focussed, immersive belief that the dancers bring to everything they do. It resonates through every step and groove of Ronald K Brown’s Four Corners, with its African-inflected ebb and flow in search of solace from the lamentations of this world, and – in the partnership of Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Allen Sims – it imbues Christopher Wheeldon’s duet, After the Rain with an intensity of trust, a shared finesse that allies power with grace. The company's new director Robert Battle is surely keeping faith with the spirit of Ailey.