Alvin Ailey documentary divines the choreographer’s ‘blood memories’

It’s a little embarrassing, as a dance critic, to realise how little you know about the life of one of the biggest names in American choreography. Yet in the case of Alvin Ailey, there are reasons for that. His company Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater became, and remains, a worldwide phenomenon, ensuring that his artistic legacy lives on, yet obscuring the struggles and burdens of the man behind the work.

A new documentary directed by Jamila Wignot, simply titled Ailey, highlights that paradox from the get-go. It opens in 1988 with a triumphant Ailey receiving his country’s highest artistic distinction, a Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime contribution to American culture, with Ronald and Nancy Reagan leading the ovation. A life-affirming scene from 1960’s Revelations, one of the landmark dance works of the 20th century, follows. Yet in private Ailey was already ailing, and less than a year later he died of Aids-related illness at 58.

The cause of his death wasn’t disclosed at the time, with obituaries referring only to “a rare blood disease”. In Ailey, Wignot lovingly goes back and forth between the man and the choreography, the loneliness of being a black figurehead in modern dance and the external demands of success.

The film has a compelling narrator: Ailey himself, speaking in interviews he recorded in the last year of his life, when he was working on an autobiography with A Peter Bailey. (The result, Revelations, was published posthumously in 1995.) The tapes are often remarkably candid, covering topics including Ailey’s homosexuality, which he never made public during his life.

Other talking heads fill in the gaps, with close collaborators including his early stage partner Carmen de Lavallade, and Judith Jamison, who went on to direct the company after Ailey’s death. There is archive footage of his choreography, too, from Revelations to a handful of lesser-known works, such as 1969’s Masekela Langage.

Wignot, an award-winning director whose previous work includes the documentary series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross and the Emmy-nominated Makers: Women in Business, says she was approached by the production company Insignia Films to work on Ailey. While she had followed his company since first seeing them in college, she admits she knew little about the choreographer. “It’s a film that found me,” she says.

By coincidence, when Wignot approached Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater about making a documentary, the ensemble was about to create a new work inspired by the life of Ailey for its 60th anniversary. Footage from rehearsals of Rennie Harris’s two-act Lazarus, which had its premiere in 2018, is peppered throughout the film, as a contemporary echo of Ailey’s story.

“What was so great was to spend time working with dance material, and seeing how far we could push the visual language to communicate something in a film,” Wignot says. “Sometimes in documentary there is an expectation on the part of the audience that they’ll be told everything. We rejected that from the start.”

Ailey, a child of the Great Depression era, was born in Texas in 1931. In the voiceover he recalls his beloved mother working in the fields, and his memories of picking cotton as a child. But, visually, Wignot had to get creative to represent his early life. “He’s not a person who had a trove of home movie footage,” she says wryly.

She and her team turned to footage shot by pioneering anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as well as video clips of ordinary black life in mid-century America — material that wasn’t readily available until recently. “In the last 10 years, there’s been an incredible effort to preserve those materials and to make them accessible,” Wignot says, referencing archives at Duke University and in Texas. “I don’t know that this film could have been made a decade ago.”

Here the documentary expands on what Ailey calls “blood memories — the memories of my parents, uncles and aunts, the blues and the gospel songs that I knew from Texas”. They shaped his choreography, bringing a distinct expression of black culture to the modern dance stage, which was then a mostly white art form. (Exceptions include Katherine Dunham, whose dancing Ailey recalls in the film with still-fresh wonder.) His first hit, 1958’s Blues Suite, was inspired by the social dances he witnessed at black honky-tonks in the South.

As his company has increasingly staged pieces by a long list of new choreographers since its founder’s death, the list of Ailey works still actively performed has narrowed. The uplifting Revelations, with its gospel and blues vignettes inspired by Ailey’s childhood, may have obscured other strands of the choreographer’s work: it is fascinating to see in Ailey the punchy original ending of Masekela Langage, which was inspired by the assassination of Black Panther activist Fred Hampton.

In a scene that was later cut, a dead character lies in the arms of the other dancers, and a recorded voice repeats over and over: “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.” “It shows that he was paying close attention to the more radical wings of black politics in the country,” Wignot says.

Yet at the same time, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater found international success due to tours set up by the US state department, which regularly sent the company overseas as part of cultural diplomacy efforts. That put Ailey in a complex position as a black man whose success others were keen to appropriate; the film also shows that the company’s growth often left him exhausted and isolated by the pressure to keep up the stream of new works. His mental health took a turn for the worse in 1980, when he was affected by what is understood today as bipolar disorder.

The testimonies of those who knew Ailey in his final years are especially raw. Two days after his death, the company was back on stage — ending, of course, with Revelations. Ailey is the film we needed to understand how it came to be, and remember a man who sacrificed “everything”, as he put it, in the name of dance.

In UK cinemas from January 4, including a Q&A with the director hosted by Bonnie Greer

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