From Sundance: ‘Ailey’ Centers the Poetry in Alvin Ailey’s Choreography

Easily one of the most recognizable names in dance history, the late Alvin Ailey spent his decades-long career breaking the mold of modern dance. Through his famous Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ailey infused the genre he helped create with Black influence, innovation, strength, and beauty. Throughout his life, the legendary dancer faced racism and homophobia, as well as addiction and mental illness. These experiences — “blood memories” as Ailey called them — found cathartic expression in Ailey’s signature ballet and revolutionary ode to the Black cultural experience, “Revelations.” First performed in 1960, “Revelations” was both an ode to Black liberation and a genre-defining template for modern dance’s ability to be a language for the oppressed.

On January 30, just one day before the 61st anniversary of Ailey’s iconic masterpiece, award-winning filmmaker Jamila Wignot premiered her latest film “Ailey” at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Through a blend of archival footage, never-before-seen audio interviews, and interviews with Ailey’s friends and collaborators, the film paints a compelling portrait of the modern dance pioneer, interlacing Ailey’s past with the company’s present and the lead-up to a performance dedicated to his life.

The film showcases dozens of Ailey’s performances and choreography, from his groundbreaking “evening-long saga of the Black experience, “Revelations,” to the last piece he ever choreographed.

“Sometimes your name becomes bigger than yourself,” choreographer and dancer Carmen de Lavallade says in the film. “Alvin Ailey. Do you really know who that is or what that is?”

The goal of “Ailey” is to answer that very question — to uncover the artist behind the art — and it does so with poetic prowess. Using interviews with Ailey and his contemporaries as a driving force for the film, “Ailey” allows the choreographer and his loved ones to tell his personal story, and complements that story with a collage of archival footage, footage of Ailey’s choreography, and a focus on Ailey’s legacy through the AAADT. Wignot amplifies and uplifts the beauty of Ailey’s movement, immortalizing it in a new medium.

By focusing, too, on hip-hop choreographer Rennie Harris’s dance interpretation of Ailey’s life in the present day, “Ailey” allows viewers to discover Ailey as the company’s dancers do. Cutting seamlessly between the 2018 choreographing process, footage of Ailey’s career, and footage of his childhood, the film drives home the idea of the dancer as a “historian,” as Harris says.

Indeed, Wignot drives home that very point for Ailey himself, presenting him as someone who used dance as a language to tell stories of the past and future. After the murder of Black Panther Chicago Chairman Fred Hampton, for example, Ailey used dance and movement as protest, creating the piece “Masekela Langage” as a way to draw parallels between apartheid South Africa and the race-fueled violence of 1960s Chicago.

Perhaps more than anything, though, “Ailey” is a necessary look at the artist behind the worldwide acclaim, and the ways that fame affected him behind the scenes. “Dance, it’s an enormous sacrifice,” Ailey says in one of the film’s many interviews with him. “You have to be possessed to do dance.”

By showing the struggles Ailey went through throughout his career — from being used as a puppet by the media due to his being a Black artist to having to suffer through AIDS alone without a gay community to support him — Wignot personifies Ailey in a way that feels both intimate and larger-than-life.

The film opens with the iconic actress and model Cicely Tyson presenting Alvin Ailey with honors from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1988. “His is a choreography of the heart, bringing a whole new public to modern dance,” she says. “Alvin Ailey is Black. And he is universal…. And that’s his genius.”

Wignot’s genius comes from putting Ailey front and center. With its stunning collages of footage and sound, “Ailey” makes viewers feel both relieved that all these records of Ailey exist, and grateful that Jamila Wignot took the fragments and turned them into poetry.

—Staff writer Sofia Andrade can be reached at sofia.andrade@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @SofiaAndrade__.