Review: Ailey Wants for the Passion that Coursed Through Alvin Ailey’s Work

Jamila Wignot’s documentary Ailey opens with footage of legendary modern dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey being saluted at the 1988 Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, just a year before his death from AIDS. Beginning at the end, so to speak, the film introduces Ailey as a major American cultural figure before flashing back to trace the dancer’s life from his hard childhood in Depression-era Texas to his rise to creative power. Perhaps as a result, Wignot’s documentary never feels like it’s making a revelatory new case for the artist, instead reaffirming his status as one of the most widely respected innovators in his field.

The film’s most informative segments use archival audio of interviews with Ailey to outline the early course of his life, from working in Southern cotton fields to moving to Los Angeles with his mother. Ailey’s work, based on a concept of “blood memories” that posits that African-American persistence from slavery to freedom runs through black people’s veins, and Wignot invites us to look at Ailey’s life through a similar prism. Clips of Ailey discussing the escapism he felt going to community dances as a child explain some of the passion in the choreography of his 1958 breakthrough Blues Suite, while his masterpiece, 1960’s Revelations, is a kind of song-and-dance summarizing of African-American spiritual experience.

Yet that prism is ultimately limiting, resulting in moments of disconnect in which Ailey’s aversion to being defined by his race is discussed in the same breath as the importance of his breakthroughs as a black artist. Ailey maintained a closeted persona regarding his sexuality, and the film references his struggles as a black, gay man in a repressed and segregated time. But it wants for more charged conclusions about the way his race and relationships were exploited, from the F.B.I. hounding him on a state-sponsored international tour to the cruel irony of a man dying of AIDS receiving the Kennedy Center Honor from a president whose administration laughed at the horrific toll the disease was taking on the gay community.

As the saying goes, writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and not even Ailey’s peers can articulate the innovations and soulfulness of his choreography half as well as the work itself. Revelations long ago entered the American art canon, and even the briefest clip of one of its performances testifies to its undimmed radicalism, how it uses the human body as both canvas and projector to capture centuries of pain and endurance and transforms that into ecstatic jubilation without sentimentalizing the horror at the heart of the work.

Indeed, Ailey’s work is still so invigorating that it’s hard not to wish that Wignot had expanded on the minor but intimate subplot of choreographer Rennie Harris conceiving of a show, titled Lazarus, in tribute to the 60th anniversary of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Wignot provides more screen time to Harris discussing his work on the project than the actual dancing, but what little of the ballet is shown astonishingly elucidates Ailey’s identity and works better than all of the film’s talking heads combined. Fusing the gospel touchstones of Revelations around the secular, queer ecstasy of old-school house music, the ballet is a joyous eruption of music and movement. As a result, it’s easy to imagine that the cathartic power of Lazarus would have found more favor with Ailey than Wignot’s routine overview of his life.