DANCE REVIEW : Ailey Troupe Pays Moving Tribute to Founder’s Legacy

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater paid tribute to its founder as choreographer Tuesday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

Three of the four works on the program were by Ailey, and the fourth was by a younger choreographer in the process of finding his own voice by mining the rich mother lode Ailey and other black choreographers of his generation opened up as a lasting American legacy.

By placing Donald Byrd’s “Shards”--choreographed for the company in 1988--right before Ailey’s seminal 1960 “Revelations” (reviewed after a performance last week at UCLA), the connections between the two works flowed retrospectively as well as forward.

“Shards” opens with the familiar “Revelations” arrowhead phalanx of dancers. Their arms float up in the same way, they gesture toward the horizon in the same way, they break apart the pattern and reform it, as in the original.

Balleticisms begin appearing, however, and the choreographic quotations begin showing up in unexpected places, in unexpected ways, as glosses on the new abstract movement designs that alternate between underwater slowness and bursts of activity.

But at the end, the company seamlessly reforms the opening pattern, and you can almost feel the primal tug of that fabulous Ailey image of shared suffering drawing them back together.

Byrd repays his debt by sheer movement invention and by making the company look so unself-assertively virtuosic that the difficulties tend to melt into an uninterrupted dance design, rather than prompting applause.

It is the ultimate compliment of making the dancers look as good and serious as they are.

Hard won is the sublime communal solidarity of “Revelations.” (Even the three sinner men reappear among the congregation in the final “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.” It’s as if Ailey can’t bear to consign them to hell after all.) Some of the pressures against it can be seen in Ailey’s “Blues Suite” (1958).

Set to traditional music, this company work opens and closes with tense confrontations between the sexes (“Good Morning Blues”).

It is unclear whether they are prompted by social or personal forces, but certainly three women are trying to escape their bitter social fate in “House of the Rising Sun,” and comfort each other when they fail.

On the other hand, the central duet (“Backwater Blues”) stays personal, pitting a fluent Renee Robinson in cool control over Andre Tyson, until, through sweet patience, he wins her in the end.

All is not grim, though. A dance club segment admits lots of sexy games and includes an odd man and woman out (Aubrey Lynch II and Karine Plantadit), who finally solve their problems by getting together.

Still, them old blues come back to drive everybody apart.

Ailey created “Cry” in 1971 as a solo for the great Judith Jamison, now the artistic director of the company. For those who saw her in this work, other dancers must inevitably suffer by comparison.

Nasha Thomas, dancing it on this occasion, had the right lean, expressive physique. But her tendency to round out the movement and smooth the abrupt transitions gave “Cry” a soft, lyric quality that lessened the explosive emotional possibilities.