Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture

Thomas F. DeFrantz9780195154191, 0195154193

In the early 1960s, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a small, multi-racial company of dancers that performed the works of its founding choreographer and other emerging artists. By the late 1960s, the company had become a well-known African American artistic group closely tied to the Civil Rights struggle. In Dancing Revelations, Thomas DeFrantz chronicles the troupe’s journey from a small modern dance company to one of the premier institutions of African American culture. He not only charts this rise to national and international renown, but also contextualizes this progress within the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights struggles of the late 20th century. DeFrantz examines the most celebrated Ailey dances, including Revelations, drawing on video recordings of Ailey’s dances, published interviews, oral histories, and his own interviews with former Ailey company dancers. Through vivid descriptions and beautiful illustrations, DeFrantz reveals the relationship between Ailey’s works and African American culture as a whole. He illuminates the dual achievement of Ailey as an artist and as an arts activist committed to developing an African American presence in dance. He also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey’s dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution. Throughout Dancing Revelations, DeFrantz illustrates how Ailey combined elements of African dance with motifs adapted from blues, jazz, and Broadway to choreograph his dances. By re-interpreting these tropes of black culture in his original and well-received dances, DeFrantz argues that Ailey played a significant role in defining the African American cultural canon in the twentieth century. As the first book to examine the cultural sources and cultural impact of Ailey’s work, Dancing Revelations is an important contribution to modern dance history and criticism as well as African-American studies.

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Table of contents :
DANCING
REVELATIONS……Page 2
Copyright……Page 6
PREFACE……Page 9
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……Page 11
CNTENTS……Page 13
Introduction……Page 15
1.Revelations 1962……Page 23
Why Revelations Worked……Page 34
BREAK Black Modernism……Page 39
Situating Revelations in African American Cultural Life……Page 43
2.Early Dances……Page 46
Ailey¡¯s Childhood: Race Matters……Page 47
BREAK Unquenchable Racial Desire……Page 55
Blues Suite……Page 58
Ailey¡¯s Early Dances……Page 64
Hermit Songs……Page 66
3.Early Company……Page 71
Early Years in New York……Page 74
Early Residencies……Page 77
Southeast Asia Tour……Page 80
BREAK .° Official.± African American Culture……Page 89
Riedaiglia……Page 93
4.Revelations II: 1969……Page 95
BREAK Versioning……Page 102
Multiracial Concert Dance……Page 105
Revelations 1975……Page 109
5.Touring, Touring, Touring……Page 113
Quintet……Page 114
Swelling Popularity……Page 119
BREAK Jazz Dance……Page 121
Flowers……Page 124
The Popular Audience……Page 128
BREAK No Exit from Racism……Page 132
6.Reflecting a Spectrum of Experience……Page 135
Masekela Langage……Page 137
The Lark Ascending……Page 147
Hidden Rites……Page 150
7.Other Dances……Page 156
Feast of Ashes……Page 157
BREAK Black Dancer, White Dance……Page 165
The River……Page 168
8.Ailey Celebrates Ellington……Page 180
The Ellington Connection……Page 181
BREAK Heroes……Page 187
Ailey Celebrates Ellington……Page 191
Pas de “Duke”……Page 194
Ellingtonia……Page 197
9.Gender and Spectatorship……Page 200
Cry……Page 202
Love Songs……Page 205
Masked Spectatorship: Ailey¡¯s Representation of Sexuality……Page 208
BREAK Sex……Page 209
Streams……Page 212
BREAK Black Atlantic Dance……Page 217
10.Later Dances……Page 220
Memoria……Page 225
Au Bord du Precipice……Page 233
Survivors……Page 243
BREAK Alvin Ailey, Public and Private……Page 249
11.Concluding Moves……Page 252
The Ailey after Ailey……Page 255
Revelations 2003……Page 256
APPENDIX Choreography by Alvin Ailey……Page 261
Notes……Page 277
Bibliography……Page 295
Index……Page 309