A Night With Ailey The 40-year-old dance company comes to town. by Ashley Fantz If you haven’t seen Alvin Ailey, you haven’t seen dance. One of the oldest dance troupes in the country, it is the stuff of legends. The performances are intensely lyrical, sensually jazzy, sparsely modern, and unabashedly pop, and it’s not trite to say watching them borders on the spiritual. From Ailey’s notoriously tribal-like Revelations to the quietly powerful Reflections, the dancers — led by recent Kennedy Center honoree Judith Jamison — consistently attract both celebrity audiences and amateur dance lovers to the theater. In other words, leave the snobbery at home. Ailey’s dancers make dance theater what it should be: fun and freeing. “Ailey has such a wide appeal,” says six-year company member Salonge Sandy Groves. “You have to be strong in all techniques.” During the company’s 40th anniversary American tour, Groves dances in Grace, one of four numbers, including Reflections, Revelations, and Divining, to be performed this weekend at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre. Grace is a plotless mix of modern and stylized West African movement described as company member Ronald K. Brown’s masterful metaphoric rendering of the birth/death life cycle. With a strong background in ballet and African dance, Salonge auditioned for the Ailey company after four grueling years at Juilliard. “I suppose I didn’t think about how competitive it was going to be,” says the Trinidadian, who, when she was 16, packed her dancing shoes and moved to the States alone. She ended up in Rockaway, Queens. “I had this fantasy about going to Juilliard,” she says of the famous performing arts college in New York City. “If I would have paused for a moment to think about it, that could have been disastrous.” Considering that admittance to Juilliard is like winning the lottery for many young artists, it’s surprising Groves didn’t apply to other notable schools such as North Carolina School for the Arts, SUNY-Purchase, or New York University. “Naïveté — total naïveté,” she says. “I didn’t think about it until someone came up to me at auditions and asked me about my other auditions. Nobody could believe it.” That was 12 years ago, two years before Alvin Ailey died and bequeathed his company to his favorite prodigy Jamison. Over the last 10 years, Jamison has earned her place as one of the most influential performing artists in the country. She’s overseen the staging of hundreds of performances and was particularly praised for 1984’s Divining. Although the choreography is the same, Divining’s costuming has been revamped. Originally part of the Jamison Project, a troupe the choreographer organized after successful appearances on Broadway during breaks as a company member from Ailey’s troupe, the number is a cohesive element to the four-song performance. Once danced in white costumes, Divining will feature dancers in skin-colored body suits suggesting that dancers are part of a whole body. Divining is followed by Revelations, a favorite among Ailey fans. The moving piece is based on stories from Ailey’s childhood visits to old-fashioned baptisms. It’s dedicated to his mother, as is the following performance Ascending, featuring one female and three male principals. In previous interpretations of these works, Jamison’s influence is felt. Her dancers regard her as a sort of towering shaman, godmother, and technique auteur. But never a machine for the choreography of Jamison or Ailey alone, the troupe has always invited and celebrated other choreographers’ work. Groves says she has no desire to choreograph, explaining, “Why do people not like chocolate? It just doesn’t suit me.” But she says that unlike other companies, Ailey is always open to the new, the vibrant, and the unheard of. “We stand out because of that,” she says. “You want to be able to oblige the form that made Ailey famous. But we aren’t expected to be puppets. We each have a style, and Judith forces us to find our own voice. Where it carries us is different each time we walk on stage.” You can e-mail Ashley Fantz at ashley@memphisflyer.com.