Dance and Music Reviews : Political Drama Unfolds in Second Ailey Program

A challenging, uncompromising political dance drama, a plotless but evocative response to a Bartok score and a repeat of the evergreen “Revelations” with a new cast made up the second Ailey program by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater on Thursday at the Wiltern Theatre.

A protest against apartheid, “Masekela Langage” takes place within a shuttered lounge with wicker chairs, a slowly turning ceiling fan and a juke box prominent at the side. Two small, hanging posters inform us that the country is South Africa. To music by trumpeter Hugh Masekela, nine dancers--nine distinct, brilliantly drawn characters--play out a languid, frustrated, insular existence.

A woman may reach out, but pulls back; a man seeks to touch a woman, but she repulses him. Anger, sexual desire, charismatic fervor, assertions of a pecking order flare up and subside. A group dance turns into a grope, stroke and feel clutch.

Into this hothouse of uncommitted figures bursts a mortally wounded demonstrator (the charismatic Desmond Richardson) who momentarily galvanizes the group. But, astonishingly, Ailey refused to take the easy way out by transforming these flawed figures into revolutionaries.

The outsider dies, and, over his dead body, one of the men laughs and the group draws up the chairs to assume the same lazy postures we first saw them in. Nothing has changed and presumably nothing will.

As a magical figure who evokes the creative powers of both the composer and the choreographer, the expansive Dudley Williams presided over the formal, fluid emblematic group patterns of “Landscape” (set to Bartok’sThird Piano Concerto). Elizabeth Roxas and Gary DeLoatch danced the central pas de deux with lyricism and strength.

Among a strong set of new principals in “Revelations” were a devout Debora Chase (“Wading in the Water”) and a virtuoso Andre Tyson (“I Want to Be Ready”).