Alvin Ailey_® American Dance Theater
2009 Program Descriptions

Anniversary Highlights - This brand new program features excerpts from many of Alvin Ailey's most popular and beloved ballets, spanning each decade of Ailey's phenomenal career. Discover rarely-seen gems and revisit favorite works including: Revelations (in its entirety), Blues Suite, Streams, Choral Dances, Mary Lou's Mass, The Lark Ascending, Hidden Rites, Night Creature, Cry, Phases, Landscape, For "Bird" - With Love, Caverna Magica and Opus McShann.

Blues Suite (New Production) - With the rumble of a train and the toll of distant bells, a cast of vividly-drawn characters from the barrelhouses and fields of Alvin Ailey's southern childhood are summoned to dance and revel through one long, sultry night. Ailey's first masterpiece poignantly evokes the sorrow, humor and humanity of the blues, those heartfelt songs that he called "hymns to the secular regions of the soul."

Festa Barocca (Chicago Premiere) - Acclaimed Italian choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti, praised for his fresh and inventive sensibility, brings his distinctly European flair to the Ailey repertory for the first time. With a highly dramatic style, complex partnering and seamless integration of classical and modern styles, Bigonzetti showcases the Ailey dancers' emotional intensity and technical prowess.

Go in Grace (Chicago Premiere) - Company member Hope Boykin weaves a gentle, affecting tale of community, family and growth that illustrates the African proverb "it takes a village to raise a child." To a score composed and performed live by Sweet Honey In The Rock, Boykin casts the dancers and singers as members of a society who unite to move a young girl forward in wisdom and grace.

Night Creature - One of Ailey's most classically choreographed ballets juxtaposed within Ellington's jazz idiom - the dance capitvates with Ailey's sexy nocturnal rituals that propel the movement into a fast paced climatic catharsis.

Revelations - This enduring classic is a tribute to African American heritage and to Ailey's genius. Using African-American religous music - spirituals, song-sermons, gospel songs and holy blues - this suite fervently explores the places of deepest grief and holiest joy in the soul.

Suite Otis - Otis Redding's sassy, sizzling music sets the stage for George Faison's playful battle of the sexes. The yearning sensuality of such timeless songs as "Satisfaction," "Try a Little Tenderness," "I've Been Loving You Too Long" and other favorites bursts through this sexy, charming and witty suite. George W. Faison danced with the AAADT from 1967 through 1970. He was the first African American choreographer to win a Tony Award for his choreography in The Wiz (1975). In the early 1970's, he created two modern American dance classics, Suite Otis and Slaves for the George Faison Universal Dance Experience.

Treading - The man and woman in Elisa Monte's ballet come together in fluid, intricate movements that combine with Steve Reich's evocative music to create an aura of mystery and sensuality.

Unfold - Robert Battle's sensuous, swirling duet evokes the tenderness and ecstasy in Gustave Charpentier's aria, sung by the exquisite diva Leontyne Price.

* programming subject to change