From a high, narrow portal at the back of the stage, Renee Robinson strolls toward the audience in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and dances the opening solo of Ronald K. Brown's "Grace," a solo set to Duke Ellington's ballad "Come Sunday."
Robinson is a senior member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ellington was the composer Ailey chose most frequently for his choreographies (14 dances), and Brown's solo updates Ailey's characteristic blend of jazz, modern, balletic and African idioms with devastating sharpness and complexity.
If any suspicion lingered Wednesday that the multicultural Ailey aesthetic had run its course, Robinson's spectacular shifts from smooth, linear classical extensions to galvanic, angular African torso- and arm-pumping immediately put it to rest and kept it at bay with every startling juxtaposition in Brown's arsenal.
On this opening night of a six-performance Ailey company engagement, the style that Ailey forged out of the popular, classical and contemporary theater-dance forms of his time gained renewed vigor not only from Brown's incorporation of hip-hop rhythms and other post-Ailey influences, but the daring experiments in ballet partnering and balance issues found in Alonzo King's "Following the Subtle Current Upstream."
Also seen Wednesday, Ailey's 1960 "Revelations" carried the seeds of many Brown and King innovations on view, so their flowering, more than a decade after his death, provided the strongest possible affirmation of his vision.
A cyclical suite that tells no story but traces a transition from red costumes to white for the 12-member cast, "Grace" (1999) keeps its array of movement choices tightly anchored, with much of the dancing performed in place or in a very limited radius.
Each dancer thus becomes a kind of force field, and Brown is careful to control the audience's tendency to applaud every feat through sequencing ploys (overlaps, for instance) and lineups that face upstage or into the wings instead of straight front. No in-your-teeth bravura here, but rather a sophisticated layering of techniques and musical sources (mostly '90s rock and jazz) that gently subsides at the end in another "Come Sunday" prayer.
A chain of disarmingly intimate and supremely fluid dances for five men and eight women, "Following the Subtle Current Upstream" (2000) evolves from lyrical ballet style to more propulsive modern dance even as the taped accompaniment incorporates drumming from India, vocals from Africa, and the thunder claps and mechanical whine of contemporary urban sound painting.
