How Judith Jamison Shaped Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre

Brian Seibert
Seibert has covered dance for Goings On since 2002.

New York dance in December is all about “The Nutcracker,” the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and the joy they both bring. But the Ailey company’s encampment at City Center this year (through Jan. 5) is tinged with sadness, because Judith Jamison died in November.

In the nineteen-seventies, Jamison was the company’s star: statuesque and superhuman, yet warm and witty. After Ailey’s death, in 1989, she became the group’s savior, taking over as artistic director and leading it into financial stability and unparalleled popularity. Under Jamison’s direction, the Ailey dancers grew more and more godlike in technique without losing earthly looseness and soul. Joan Acocella described the quality in The New Yorker, in 1999: “Someone has given them to themselves, and that person has to be Jamison.”

Judith Jamison in 1973. Photograph by M. McKeown / Express / Hulton Archive / Getty

The works that Jamison brought into the company repertory, before she stepped down, in 2011, were generally not as amazing. But in 1999 she commissioned a piece from a young choreographer named Ronald K. Brown. This was “Grace,” and it was miraculous: a piece about a mother god who guides the wayward into the light, set to Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” some house tracks, and Fela Kuti Afrobeat, and embodied in an extraordinarily supple blend of West African and modern dance. “Grace,” which is beautifully revived this season, remains one of very few dances, other than Ailey’s “Revelations,” that never fail to summon the spirit.

None of this season’s premières are on that level. Jamar Roberts’s “Al-Andalus Blues,” set in part to Miles Davis’s version of “Concierto de Aranjuez,” shows flashes of Roberts’s fresh musicality but is mired in a murky concept. So is Hope Boykin’s “Finding Free,” despite gospel-tinged live music by the jazz pianist Matthew Whitaker. Lar Lubovitch’s “Many Angels,” set to the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth, is merely pretty.

Not every season produces a masterpiece like “Grace.” But the company is full of hope. Alicia Graf Mack, one of its brightest and most beloved stars of the two-thousands, takes over as the company’s artistic director next year.

This year, at St. John the Divine’s annual “New Year’s Eve Concert for Peace,” one work may have the best chance to inspire a glimmer of hope: Beethoven’s megalithic Symphony No. 9. The symphony premièred two hundred years ago in Vienna, when Beethoven’s deafness, which began in his late twenties, had become severe. At the end of “Ode to Joy,” the last movement, one of the singers turned Beethoven around to face the audience, so that he could bear witness to the rousing applause that he couldn’t hear. This year, the St. John cathedral choirs and orchestra perform with the soprano Kathryn Lewek, the mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis, the tenor Paul Appleby, and the bass William Guanbo Su. Peace feels impossible at the moment, but at least we have music like this.—Jane Bua (Dec. 31.)

What do you do after witnessing the mind-altering, improvisational Phish concert at Madison Square Garden (Dec. 28-31)? For two nights, the answer is to go up a few blocks and further down the improv well with John Medeski, Billy Martin, Scott Metzger, and Nels Cline. The occasional supergroup has made a tradition of playing Phish after-parties—Medeski and Martin (the keyboardist and the drummer of the jazz-fusion band Medeski Martin & Wood), who have been linked with the jam band since 1995, channel the same psychedelic release in their own playing. Fronted by the guitarists Metzger (Joe Russo's Almost Dead) and Cline (Wilco), they ramble on into the wee hours. The show has become its own little ritual, an intuitive, free-flowing journey that seems consciousness-expanding for everyone involved.—Sheldon Pearce (Sony Hall; Dec. 29-30.)

Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet in “A Complete Unknown.” Photograph courtesy Searchlight Pictures

If Bob Dylan didn’t exist, “A Complete Unknown” would be an absorbing if conventional drama about a fictional folk singer with that name who, in the nineteen-sixties, shows up in New York and turns himself into a rock star at a time when the concept was novel. But, given the complex ubiquity of Dylan’s music and life story, the movie’s synthetic simplicity is bewildering. The director, James Mangold (who wrote the script with Jay Cocks), emphasizes the protagonist’s own sense of self-invention, and offers a bland and smooth official portrait—which nonetheless remains fascinating. Timothée Chalamet stars, delivering an impressive yet emotionally muffled impersonation of Dylan; the rest of the cast—principally, Edward Norton, as Pete Seeger; Monica Barbaro, as Joan Baez; and Elle Fanning, as the pseudonymous Sylvie Russo—push vigorously against the narrow limits of their roles.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

In many ways, “The Nutcracker” is about the nostalgia we feel for childhood and the rituals that come back, year after year. People return to New York City Ballet’s “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” because they know exactly what to expect: the tree will grow extravagantly, Marie will vanquish the Mouse King with her slipper, and the ballerina performing Dewdrop will dazzle with her windswept jumps and spins. The combination of Tchaikovsky’s music and Balanchine’s choreography—and the presence of dozens of kids onstage—elicits an almost Pavlovian response: we feel delight, warmth, and a craving for wintry things.—Marina Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; through Jan. 4.)

Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz in “Eureka Day.” Photograph by Jeremy Daniel

Much of the humor in Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day,” directed by Anna D. Shapiro for Manhattan Theatre Club, needles a progressive school board, whose right-thinking efforts at consensus fail in the face of a mumps outbreak. Whatever your appetite for laughing at self-righteous lefties—trying to be mindful, what dweebs!—Spector’s acid pen is impressively precise: in one virtuoso scene, the board parents, including newcomer Carina (Amber Gray) and queen bee Suzanne (Jessica Hecht), attempt a Zoom conference while a hilarious online chat, projected onto the wall behind them, drowns them out. Spector is interested in liberal bubbles, and he’s perceptive about the physics that governs them. It’s not his fault that the play, first performed in 2018, shows its age—some such bubbles have burst . . . or caught on fire.—Helen Shaw (Samuel J. Friedman; through Feb. 2.)

Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller “Babygirl” is a nineties throwback that’s utterly contemporary in the buttons it schematically pushes. Romy (Nicole Kidman), the C.E.O. of a New York robotics firm, is sexually unsatisfied in her marriage to Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a brash new intern who’s less polished than his peers, aggressively flirts with her. Romy enters into an affair with him, in which he is dominant and she is submissive. But rumors leak out, endangering her career, and she raises the stakes with bold coverups. The portrayal of a boss who relinquishes control in bed remains facile, because Romy’s character is hardly defined elsewhere, but the movie’s psychology is secondary to its moral one-liner: Reijn dares viewers to judge Romy’s pursuit of sexual pleasure as a lesser value than business as usual.—R.B. (In wide release.)

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