Ailey Troupe Lights a Torch

SALT LAKE CITY--No announcement or program note on Saturday linked the name of 1980s Olympic track champion Florence Griffith Joyner to Judith Jamison’s new plotless one-act jazz suite “HERE ... NOW.” for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. But this modern dance tribute to selfless athleticism in general and female heroism in particular borrowed so much from Joyner’s unique achievements and persona that its local premiere at the Capitol Theatre launched the performance component of the city’s 2002 Cultural Olympiad in a blaze of reflected glory.

The work was commissioned by the Salt Lake City Winter Games as part of the Olympics’ traditional component of an accompanying arts festival. The work used a varied but invariably forceful jazz score by Wynton Marsalis to propel six dancers through sequences titled “Speed,” “Strength,” “Style,” “Pain” and “Heaven.” A neon-edged ramp designed by Al Crawford (with a neon-edged moon above) created a fantasy track on which Jamison’s running poses and other adaptations of sports moves projected strongly.

She has described the work as honoring Joyner, who died in 1998, but, says Jamison, it is “not about her life.” All three women in the Saturday cast shared the spotlight in episodes depicting the stress, isolation and moments of triumphant affirmation in an athlete’s career.

However, ponytailed Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell emerged as the closest to a Joyner surrogate, opening and closing the work with a stately walk across the stage, later observing the others as if remembering her past and always wearing the signature one-legged outfits that Joyner once called an “athletic negligee.”

Glints of Joyner’s lifelong quest for absolute parity with men surfaced in a double trio in which the women repeatedly matched the power and bravado of their male counterparts. And since Joyner’s husband was also her coach, the intimate yet often oppressively manipulative “Pain” duet for Bahiyah Sayyed-Gaines and Glenn A. Sims made a potent statement about personal relationships that force professional growth.

The playful “Style” duet by Dwana Adiaha Smallwood and Clifton Brown portrayed a happier, easier intimacy, and the final “Heaven” duet for Fisher-Harrell and Matthew Rushing showed athletes as secular angels, with Emilio Sosa’s costumes layering golden Olympic rings over bare flesh.

Flawless in serene self-sufficiency, the dancing here evoked stanzas in “Glory,” the poem by U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky (also commissioned by the 2002 Olympics) that celebrates athletes striving:

To animate the air with dancing

feet raising

A golden pollen of dust: a pervasive

blur

Of seedlets in the sunlight,

whirling--beyond mere

Victory or applause or

performance,

As victory is beyond defeat.

A darker vision of prowess fueled “Following the Subtle Current Upstream,” the first creation for the Ailey company by Bay Area ballet choreographer and LINES company director Alonzo King.

Against recordings by Zakir Hussain, Miguel Frasconi and Miriam Makeba that generated a disarming mix of idioms and textures, the dancing evolved from a taut men’s trio (highly compressed in ideas, especially in the brief, overlapping solos) to fast, expansive fireworks for the full 13-member cast. The smoky darkness of the stage, however, drained any sense of celebration from the dancing and left it instead a cascade of beauty, energy, and limitless skill in a threatening void.

Although his title refers to spinal flow in yoga, King’s movement language increasingly emphasized classical steps and positions--particularly in solos for Sayyed-Gaines (to bell tones) and Fisher-Harrell (to vocal music).

Africanisms and twisty modern-dance torso action sometimes seasoned the vocabulary, and nobody reveled in the changes of context more than Clifton Brown, exemplary throughout the Saturday program but released by King’s eclecticism to an incandescent versatility upstream.

Rushing also danced impressively all evening long, sharing a moonstruck balletic duet here with Linda Celeste Sims, but also developing an exciting personal chemistry with Fisher-Harrell in “HERE ... NOW.” Their hottest moment, early on, came when they crouched, Olympic style, as if waiting for the signal to run--right at each other, hungrily. Along with Brown and a host of Ailey colleagues, both of them made memorable contributions to the evening’s finale: the inescapable, undimmable “Revelations.”

Rushing brought great dignity and technical control to the “Wade in the Water” baptism scene opposite Smallwood, while Fisher-Harrell displayed radically extreme backbends in the elegiac “Fix Me Jesus” duet, partnered by Amos J. Machanic Jr. Jeffrey Gerodias’ muscular pulses in the contemplative “I Wanna Be Ready” solo also defined a new level of Ailey company sharpness, and the audience, as usual, went berserk. Salt Lake City knows champions first hand, and these needed no medals to prove themselves world class.

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Olympic Arts Festival performances continue throughout the Games and into March; art exhibitions associated with the festival extend into September. The Ailey company dances again on Tuesday and Wednesday at the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Center for the Performing Arts. Information: (801) 355-2787.