Glenn Allen Sims and Linda Celeste Sims did something many couples do: They had a baby. But they're no ordinary couple. As two treasured veterans of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater — Glenn for 23 years, and Linda for 24 — they have long persisted in jobs that have pushed them to their physical limits. With the birth of their son, Ellington James Sims, in April 2019, they faced a new challenge.
Every December, the dancers of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre fill the City Center stage, night after night, with their joy, very, and technical prowess. Traditionally, most of those performances end with "Revelations," Ailey's signature work from 1960. Ailey's virtual season kicks off, on Dec. 2, with an online gala, featuring excerpts from "Revelations," filmed outdoors at Wave Hill, in the Bronx.
As if Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater didn't have enough to deal with while creating a high-profile new work during the pandemic, there was the weather. Rain scuttled much of an outdoor shoot for its new dance film, "Testament," — a contemporary response to the company's signature piece, "Revelations."
For Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's first ever virtual season, a dancer and choreographer with a shared experience of partial deafness find a new way to make their artistry even more inclusive. While helping to choreograph a new work, Yusha-Marie Sorzano wondered about including American Sign Language. She found an ally and soloist in Ailey dancer Samantha Figgins.
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is the latest company to move ahead with new work while performing arts spaces remain almost completely shut down in New York. The troupe's monthlong December season will include a world premiere from Jamar Roberts, Ailey's choreographer in residence, and the debut of a collaborative response to Alvin Ailey's "Revelations" by Matthew Rushing, Clifton Brown and Yusha-Marie Sorzano.
Thousands of creative artists are fighting for their survival as the entertainment industry remains mostly shut down, but new ways of working are starting to pop up, along with a stronger push for federal relief. A New York City rooftop becomes a stage. No curtain rises, but the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns for a season that debuts new works and reinvents classics like “Pas de Duke,” as in Duke Ellington, by putting them online. The videos were filmed atop landmarks, like the Woolworth Building.
Some dances seem timeless; Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter seems perennially timely. Created in 1988 in response to homelessness on the streets of New York, the piece was taken into the repertory of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1992. Zollar adapted it for her company performances in New Orleans, post-Katrina, and the Ailey company revived it again in 2017. Now showing in the online Ailey All Access season, it has become newly urgent during the coronavirus crisis.
Artistic director Robert Battle discusses the dance company's pandemic pivot and debuts the company's new film, "Wade In the Water."
Every year, in theaters and concert halls around the globe, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater takes audiences to church. Not just any house of worship, but the working-class, Black, Southern temples of rural Texas. The gospel they see and feel is Revelations, the company’s signature dance, which has been staged more often than the troupe’s other celebrated works, for some 25 million fans. This year Revelations turns 60, and it has lost none of its incantatory power.
One warm spring day in the late nineties, I walked hand in hand with my father as he led our family— my mom, my three siblings, and me—into Houston’s Jones Hall for an Alvin Ailey performance. At eight years old, I was more excited to be wearing my new theater dress for all of Houston to see than I was for the show itself. But that excitement quickly evolved into wonder. I don’t recall the name of the performance we saw, but I distinctly remember feeling admiration and reverence for what the dancers were doing in front of me. Before that day, I’d never seen such a large group of professional Black dancers on stage. Experiencing this performance in my youth was significant; it told me that my people were everywhere, and capable of doing everything.