AILEY INTEGRATES ART, ANGER IN ‘SURVIVORS’

In a time gone by, when modern dancers eagerly submerged their dances in the chaos of their times, Kurt Jooss mourned the irrationality of war, Isadora Duncan paid homage to the Soviet revolution and Charles Weidman exchanged his normal whimsy for a sober look at the lynchings of young blacks in the Deep South.

Today, of course, many creators of “theater dance”--that shaky anomaly existing somewhere between Broadway and the ballet--are loath to focus their energies on the messy ambiguities of the news.

On the other hand, there is Alvin Ailey, whose latest dance-drama, “Survivors”--a tribute to the struggles of black South African resistance leaders Nelson and Winnie Mandela--will have its Los Angeles premiere March 26 at the Wiltern Theatre.

A collaboration with the renowned jazz drummer Max Roach and his former wife, actress and vocalist Abbey Lincoln Aminata Moseka, “Survivors” seems to leap straight from the front page of daily newspapers into the hearts and minds of Middle America.

Like the early “theater dance” artists, Ailey is motivated less by political activism than by a desire to share with audiences his own response to injustice. Thus, although “Survivors” depicts the detention and separation of Nelson Mandela from his wife Winnie, Ailey maintains that the ballet is neither agitprop nor biography but rather a depiction of his own wrath about South Africa.

“There wasn’t any single incident which really grabbed my attention,” the burly choreographer says, from behind his cluttered desk at the Ailey company offices on Broadway. “I mean, there’s so much to the history of Winnie and Nelson--the house arrests, the kids being thrown in prison, their own separation, the bannings and detentions.

“This piece is a kind of compendium and abstraction of my rage, an abstraction of that frustration, that anger, that pain. It’s about the passing of strength from person to person, the passing on of images or ideas. I was trying to go into the interior of the situation, to the feelings, to say something beyond what we already know about what’s going on there.”

From the very start of his work on “Survivors,” Ailey knew that this dance demanded a scrupulously literal treatment. “To me, it isn’t a post-modern topic, it isn’t a cold topic--it’s a warm topic, a narrative topic, an obvious topic, a realistically dressed topic,” he declares in a sing-song voice.

“It’s real jail bars, not circles of light that are supposed to imprison. Part of the memory, the experience, is its physical headiness, its heat, its texture, its agony, its abstraction, its sound.”

To get that sound, Ailey approached his old friend Roach, whose work with Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins and Miles Davis (among many others) has had a persistent influence on American music for more than 30 years. “I like to go right to it, right to the obvious image, especially if the piece is as obvious as this,” Ailey says, explaining why he went to Roach. “I chose to do it this way--not white tights with electronic music, but with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln screaming.”

Roach’s combination of frantic drumming, dissonant string quartets and the miasmic wailing of Moseka--actually two separate pieces, “Triptych,” composed in 1957, and last year’s “Survivors”--seems to Ailey the exact emotional equivalent of his feelings about the plight of the Mandelas.

“A lot of people think the piece is very sad,” says Ailey, noting that, for him, “Survivors” is more about anger than resignation. “When we were first putting it together, the girls who would watch the rehearsals would cry and, although I know it’s a very emotional piece, I would say, ‘What are you crying about, stop crying,’ and they couldn’t explain, they just said that the whole idea of the Mandelas’ separation gave them very personal feelings about it.”

For Ailey, those feelings have their roots in a Texan childhood where the young Alvin was forced to submit to America’s version of apartheid: black-only movie theaters, schools, drinking fountains.

“All that kind of disdainment that gets put upon one in childhood has come through all of my work from dancing about Southern blues and spirituals to ‘Masekela Langage’ to ‘Survivors.’ It’s all a cry against racism, against the injustice of that particular time. That’s the thread that goes through my pieces.”

As for politics, Ailey seems to believe that the main significance of his work in political terms lies simply in the fact that he runs a black company which happens to perform work by black choreographers.

“I don’t really have any history with politics and dancing,” Ailey says with a grin. “I still am trying to reach the general public and I keep that as one of my goals, trying to reach ordinary people, not just the dance aficionados.”

“I’m still trying to reach those people in Texas who don’t know anything about theater, or the man in the street who thinks that theater is anathema, or certain black folks who think they’re not welcome in the concert hall--that it’s too expensive or beyond them culturally. Trying to do that.

“It’s all in the childhood, I think,” he says with a sudden pause, “trying to make things right, trying to make the great assimilation, trying to make people understand what it means to be pained, frustrated, angry.”

And with that, this grand populist of American “theater dance” takes his visitor on a tour of the Ailey studios overlooking Shubert Alley and the Great White Way.