The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater offers an alternative to those who are and aren’t into religious or Class A ecstasy. At Cal Performances on March 13, the company translated the inclusive energy of ritual spaces like the club and the church to Zellerbach Hall in pieces featuring gospel and trance music. Artistic director Robert Battle ushered in three works, “Home,” “Minus 16” and old faithful “Revelations” with a warm address to the crowd.
The most spectacular moment of the night arrived early on, when the audience and dancers were just warming up to “Home,” Rennie Harris’s piece inspired by those living with HIV. A tightly packed body of dancers pulsated at center stage to a hybrid hip-hop trance track. One man broke off from the crowd in a more frenzied move. What unraveled was a flawless re-staging of the slow motion effect fixture of music video club scenes. It was nuances like these which jogged our memories of the vernacular spaces Battle tapped into.
Throughout “Home,” dancers splintered off into solos while pockets of synchronized moves opened up elsewhere on stage. As the dancers echoed specific moves off of each other, there was a focus on lines of the human frame. They returned to a limp Jesus-on-the-cross style move time and again. At other points, they violently thrashed arms and limbs. Some of these moves are homages to the same pose from Ailey’s classic “Revelations,” where men and woman have heads bowed, arms raised like wings.
The whole scene is ecstatic but haunting. With the allegorical theme of HIV-affected individuals in mind, the deep breaths that opened and closed it were more dire, the idea of a banished and welcoming into a circle more resonant.
Of the three works, Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16” relied the most on the punch of spectacle. It’s the kind of piece that people talk about during intermission, but doesn’t linger as strongly in the mind days after. This is partly because of a throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks attitude. Granted, this is Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, so the shit don’t stink.
Ailey’s “Revelations” would have been even more charged if it was backed by a live chorus, as in its classic iteration back in 1958. The piece has aged gracefully, and it possessed a sheen of sincerity not as sharp in the other two pieces. The show’s music did feel a little too distant, though, like it was filtering in from some other stage. Maybe this is because much of the music was gospel, a form that isn’t done justice on recorded tracks, and trance, which isn’t suited for a seated theater.
“Minus 16” began with a sensual voice warning about the “panic behind laughter.” The grand closing involved the plucking of audience members onstage for an interactive dance piece that separated the wheat from Berkeley chaff. Standouts included a not-afraid-to-mambo audience member in red and an older woman who stood on an empty stage to a round of applause and then laughter from the full theater.
The interaction was an organic echo of the lone dancer who opened the show. This time, the audience was laughing at one of its own. There did seem to be some panic behind the laughter after the unease that came with being stared down by dancers striding into the audience. The tension was broken when an audience member in a snazzy blue dress started throwing it down with her professional partner and the crowd could heave a collective sigh of relief. The scene was a declaration that even with a new director, the Alvin Ailey company will always have the audacity to challenge the spectator by at once alienating and welcoming her.
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