DANCE REVIEW : LOCAL PREMIERE OF AILEY’S ‘SURVIVORS’

In making a one-act dance-drama about two celebrated South African activists, choreographers Alvin Ailey and Mary Barnett (associate artistic director of Ailey’s company) have focused on essentials: the ideas and events manageable in dance terms. As a result, their “Survivors” is lean and pointed, full of feeling yet informed with qualities of integrity and restraint missing from some of Ailey’s other recent work.

Introduced locally at the Wiltern Theatre on Thursday, “Survivors” leaves the oppressors unseen, the plight of South Africa merely suggested and the outcome of the story unresolved. Apartheid isn’t the subject here but, rather, the crisis of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and the passing on of resistance leadership to Winnie Mandela.

The choreographers use a well-known Grahamism--the outreaching hand “speaking” from the mouth--to suggest the Mandelas’ power to exhort and inspire, and they expand this concept by transferring the Mandelas’ movement motifs to the corps in surging canons of empathy that are resolved in indomitable unisons.

They also deftly integrate intense recorded music: Max Roach’s ominous drumming in the more explicitly documentary sections, Abbey Lincoln Aminata Moseka’s powerful vocalise in intimate, domestic passages.

In marked contrast to Ailey’s “Caverna Magica” (also on the Thursday program), “Survivors” is no Technicolor spectacle. The cast is small, the staging simple, the opportunities for cheap thrills resolutely resisted. Indeed, merely by choosing senior company member Dudley Williams for the role of Nelson Mandela, Ailey and Barnett keep “Survivors” from becoming a showpiece--and Nelson from seeming some sort of superman.

Williams brings great nobility to the role but is no longer a virtuoso. As Winnie, Sharell Mesh has twice his energy but only half his soul. In itself, the casting of these dancers makes a statement about the Mandelas’ relationship, for what one partner gives the other goes deeper than mere characterization. Together they do achieve something greater than either could accomplish alone.

The Thursday program also included Jennifer Muller’s “Speeds,” a playful 13-year-old compendium of slowdowns, speedups, bracing stillnesses and dizzying juxtapositions of actions performed at different rates.

Muller’s attempt to shape a formal showpiece from durational discontinuities is initially intriguing but soon emerges as unworkable: Manipulating time just isn’t the same thing as jerking dancers around like puppets.

It would take videotaped dancing to match accurately the temporal ingenuity of Burt Alcantara’s recorded accompaniment: Live bodies just can’t do endless freeze-frames in mid-phrase without quivering, or hurtle through a sequence as if they’re on fast-forward without losing sharpness of articulation.

Some of the Ailey cast members cope admirably--especially Elizabeth Roxas in several superbly controlled solos--but the game goes on far too long. And anyway, isn’t the very notion of postmodern bravura a contradiction in terms?