The struggle, the hopeless fury and the joy of life, all captured by Alvin Ailey Dance
WACD Professor Kyle Abraham's "Untitled America" performance triumphs
"Even if you didn’t know that the work dealt with imprisonment — not only the lives of the prisoners but also those waiting for them on the outside — the sense of isolation, oppression, struggle and hopeless fury remained palpable."
"Endurance, survival, getting through troubled times: The program that the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater presented at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Wednesday focused on crucial life lessons — some of them grim.Other programs in the six-performance engagement ending Sunday will explore different moods and experiences. But on this opening-night bill, the sole concession to joyous diversion came in a five-minute dance duet set to Ella Fitzgerald’s virtuoso scat-singing.
Choreographed by company Artistic Director Robert Battle, “Ella” sent Jacquelin Harris and Megan Jakel on a mad race to match the uncanny velocity, rhythmic surety and sense of play in the recorded vocals. Of course Fitzgerald’s spectacular range extremes and sudden inclusions of fragments from pop songs left them scrambling, but otherwise the dancers delivered this high-energy tribute splendidly."— Lewis Segal, Mar. 9, 2017
Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times website.