TV Reviews : Elegiac Program by Ailey Dancers

Two complex, elegiac pieces choreographed by the late Alvin Ailey are danced by his company in a new, hourlong episode of the “Texaco Performing Arts Showcase” on Bravo cable today at 4 p.m. and midnight.

Each explores coping with grief and each manages to fuse a vast array of movement resources in the distinctly African-American style identified with Ailey.

In “Witness” (1986), Ailey uses a Jessye Norman recording of the spiritual “My Soul Is a Witness” to accompany a turbulent solo in which a woman’s violent anguish develops into fierce self-reliance.

Ailey created the work for Mette Hoenningen of the Royal Danish Ballet, but Ailey company member Marilyn Banks dances it with superb authority, shaping a celebration of sheer endurance out of its explosive jumps, sudden twists and intense gestural expression.

Usually danced in a chamber version (especially on tour), “Memoria” (1975) appears here in a large-scale form in which the star, soloists and demi-soloists of the work are sometimes literally encircled by a corps de ballet.

Unfortunately, Danish TV director Thomas Grimm virtually destroys Ailey’s structural/spatial hierarchy and sense of juxtaposition by random, incoherent cutting between cameras.

Grimm even crops the lower half of dancer April Berry’s torso out of frame during some of her solos.

At once glamorous and vulnerable, Berry’s portrayal embodies all of Ailey’s affection for his late colleague, dancer-choreographer Joyce Trisler. Against a richly textured, mercurial score by Keith Jarrett, the Trisler figure interacts with others, vanishes for a time and then returns in a lyric apotheosis honoring her spirit.

The ending is so sweet, so humane, so masterly in its patterning that you wish someone would do a dance-memorial of this quality for Ailey. Until then, this TV tribute (studio taped in 1990, a year after he died) will help remind us of both his sophistication and his sensitivity.