The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music from June 5–8, with a program that celebrates both innovation and heritage.
The season features the world premiere of The Holy Blues, a collaborative work by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, an Ailey 2025 Artist in Residence and founder of Urban Bush Women, a Brooklyn-based dance company, and dancers Samantha Figgins and Chalvar Monteiro.
Also featured is the 25th anniversary production of Ronald K. Brown’s Grace, a modern classic set to pulsing Afropop house beats; Elisa Monte’s Treading, a duet set to music by Steve Reich; and Alvin Ailey’s eternal classic Revelations.
The Holy Blues takes its title from remarks in Alvin Ailey’s journal in which he wrote, “My roots are also in the Gospel church, the Gospel churches of the south where I grew up...holy blues—paeans to joy, anthems to the human spirit.”
This genre encompasses gospel music and the blues, the sacred and the secular. Both walk with us in times of trouble and strife, serving as passages to the divine.
The Holy Blues is a collaboration of ideas, experiences and research. It marks the first partnership for Zollar with dancers Figgins and Monteiro and the choreography came from "this idea of how the sacred and the secular are always an important part of the human existence for African Americans, that time is the continuum of ancestral future and present," said Zollar, who stepped down as the artistic director of Urban Bush Women in 2019.
BK Reader was invited to a sneak preview at the Joan Weill Center for Dance in Midtown Manhattan recently, and the beauty, physicality and spiritual energy pulsating from the dress rehearsal portends to an amazing experience when staged live at BAM.
Marking its 25th anniversary, Ronald K. Brown’s Grace is a fervent tour- de-force depicting individuals on a journey to the promised land. This spiritually-charged work was created for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1999, set to Duke Ellington's classic Come Sunday, Roy Davis' hit Gabriel, and the powerful rhythms of Fela Kuti's Afropop beats.
Brown, who was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, founded his dance company EVIDENCE in 1985 in Brooklyn, focusing on integrating traditional African dance with contemporary choreography and spoken word that depict human struggles, tragedies and triumphs. Brown has worked with Alvin Ailey on other ballets, including Serving Nia and Four Corners.
For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.
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