A Dancer’s Destiny

When Matthew Rushing was in junior high school in Inglewood a decade ago, he was considering a future in the advertising business, because he “loved the creativity of thinking up logos.” Today, the 23-year-old is one of the hottest dancers in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, making use of his creativity to fuel a pronounced flair for the dramatic in dance.

Rushing and the rest of the 31-member Ailey company arrived last week in the Southland for a two-week, 13-performance mini-season, starting at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts (final performance this afternoon) and moving to the Wiltern Theatre on Tuesday.

Sporting thin, steel-rimmed glasses and a tiny mustache, his dancer’s body ensconced in a heavy pullover, Rushing looks as if he had walked in from a college class as he sits in a hotel lobby in Berkeley, the stop before Los Angeles on Ailey’s current nationwide tour. The young dancer, whom San Francisco choreographer Brenda Way has called “totally nice,” speaks with quiet assurance and enthusiasm about his work and the Ailey heritage he now feels in his bones.

As it turns out, his future turned topsy-turvy when he was 13 and saw his first Ailey performance. His mother, an ordained minister, had already enrolled him in a neighborhood recreation program that offered dance classes (“to keep me off the streets”).

“When she realized how much I liked dancing,” Rushing says, “she took me to an Ailey performance so that I could see what I was in for.”

From then, he set his sights not just on dance but on the Ailey company.

With his two older brothers, mom and dad urging him “to go for it,” Rushing auditioned for the Los Angeles County High School for the Performing Arts. Once accepted, he took two or three dance classes a day “after the academics.” The high school offered ballet, jazz, modern and ethnic dance; Rushing studied it all, occasionally supplementing the courses with time at the Stanley Holden Dance Center and with Lula Washington’s Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theater. His goal was to continue his studies, on scholarship, at the Alvin Ailey school in New York after he graduated.

He met that goal and then some.

When he couldn’t afford a trip to New York to audition for an Ailey school scholarship, he made his way to a company audition in Berkeley. What he was offered was a summer at the Ailey school, and a job with the organization’s farm team, the Alvin Ailey Repertory Company. In just one year, instead of the customary two or three, he moved up to the main company. It was 1992 and he was 19.

Rushing is still somewhat in awe of his own fast rise.

“I had a dream and I had a goal and I went after it,” he says succinctly, but then adds, “The way things happened, so naturally and on cue, it could only be God. He has a plan for me.”

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With almost as much speed as he moved into the company, Rushing won some important featured roles. Choreographer Way, whose “Scissors, Paper, Stone” was commissioned by the Ailey company in 1994, chose Rushing for the male lead in that piece. It was his intelligence and his enthusiasm that appealed to her.

“He is courageous,” she says. “He is up for anything, and in rehearsals he only gives you encouraging energy back. Besides being technically excellent, he also has a good eye for nuances and details and quickly picks up differences in style.”

For Rushing, preparing for a role is a task both meticulous and expansive, and he speaks almost reverentially of the elders of the Ailey company, men like Dudley Williams, who has been dancing with the company for 33 years, and Masazumi Chaya, the Ailey associate artistic director. Williams and Chaya now coach Rushing in the roles they originated.

“They want to make sure that the choreography is passed on correctly but they leave you a lot of room for self-exploration,” he says.

When Rushing was up for the important role of jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in “For ‘Bird’--With Love”--a dance drama tribute to Charlie Parker--he read biographies of Parker and Gillespie and watched them on film. He noticed that Gillespie held the horn in his left hand, tilted his beret to the right and always wore black-rimmed glasses. So does Rushing.

But the young dancer took the process beyond externals. At one point, the Dizzy character, at the back of the stage, reaches toward a slumped down Billie Holiday, then throws up his hands and walks away. It’s a minor detail, added by Rushing, but one that he thinks helps tell the tale.

“I had read that Gillespie, unlike Parker and the other musicians, stayed clean. At that point [in the dance], Billie Holiday is stoned, so I knew I had to separate myself.”

Pre-performance preparations get similarly thoughtful attention. In Donald McKayle’s “Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulders” (revived for the current tour), Rushing performs as a member of a chain gang and as The Boy in a sequence portraying a prisoner’s sweet memory of his childhood. During the hours before a performance of the physically and emotionally grueling “Rainbow,” Rushing says he tries not to talk to anybody. It’s a way to calm his nerves, to focus his attention. “And then when I come on stage, it all comes out,” he says.

Last year, Judith Jamison, longtime Ailey dancer and now artistic director of the company, threw Rushing what might be the biggest plum of his career. She told Rushing she wanted him to work “on certain facial expressions and to expand on his role-playing,” he recalls, and she created a character called Snake in the Grass for him, in a new work, “Sweet Release,” which sets a Maya Angelou love poem to a Wynton Marsalis jazz score. (“Sweet Release” will have its Southern California premiere Thursday at the Wiltern).

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As the malevolent character who tries to disrupt the lovers in the work, it’s Rushing’s job to be as shimmering and insidious an intruder as you might ever encounter: part devil, part pouting child, part defiant teenager, part strutting man about town--Rushing’s opposite by all accounts.

This time, according to Rushing, his preparation was less a matter of research than sympathy. He took his cue, he says, from Jamison, who told him that Snake was human like the rest of us.

“The reason he makes trouble,” Rushing explains, “is that he doesn’t have anyone who loves him or whom he can love. Everyone else has a partner. Only he is all alone.”

The performance he delivered neatly underlined the story of Rushing’s career so far: Once in a while, nice guys (even playing bad guys) finish first.

“Rarely has evil been so attractive,” said Newsday when the work was unveiled in New York last summer. Jennifer Dunning, in the New York Times offered: “Just the right touch of tantalizing evil.”

And then there was Elizabeth Zimmer, writing in the Village Voice:

“Keep your eye on Mr. Rushing. He’s going to be a big star.”

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ALVIN AILEY DANCE THEATER, Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. Date: today, 2 p.m. Prices: $25-$45. Phone: (310) 916-8500. Also at the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd. Tuesday to Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2 p.m. $13-$40. (310) 825-2101.