Out of Pride

"Look!" cries Choreographer-Dancer Alvin Ailey. "Look what you've made! Look how beautiful it is. It's yours. You did it out of adversity. Don't you feel a little dignity about yourself? Be proud of it."

Ailey's impassioned plea is directed at his American Negro brethren. His mission is to awaken an appreciation of "the trembling beauty" of the Negro's cultural heritage--through dance, through "the exuberance of his jazz, the ecstasy of his spirituals, and the dark rapture of his blues." Trouble is, nobody is listening--in the U.S., that is. But in Europe the message is echoing loud and clear: the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, consisting of eleven young Negro dancers, has created perhaps the biggest sensation on the Continent since the tour of Jerome Robbins' Ballets: U.S.A. six years ago.

Under Rhythm. In London, once a wasteland for modern dance, the company was held over for an unprecedented run of six weeks. Sweeping through Germany this month, they scored one resounding triumph after another, including an unheard-of 61 curtain calls in Hamburg. Wrote Die Welt's Klaus Geitel, "They are not stuck to the rhythm. They run under it, draw circles around it. They dance its impulses in the most manifold way and with a glorious freedom. It is a triumph of sweeping, violent beauty, a furious spectacle. The stage vibrates. One has never seen anything like it."

The company's repertory ranges from the raw brutality and passion in Talley Beatty's classic jazz ballet, The Road of the Phoebe Snow, to the chillingly abstract study of loneliness in Anna Sokolow's Rooms. Ailey's own Roots of the Blues and Revelations are danced with savage grace and elan. Roots traces the evolution of the blues from the barrel houses of New Orleans to the speakeasy era; Revelations, drawing on Negro spirituals, evokes the hope and despair of a beleaguered people.

Lost Money. Now 34, Ailey is the son of a farm worker his mother hasn't seen for more than 30 years. An all-round athlete in high school, he gave up sports to join the Lester Horton Dance Studio. After 31 semesters of college, he came to Manhattan and appeared in several Broadway productions, finally saved enough to form his own small troupe. By 1961 the company had worked up to four concerts a year, "all the time losing money like mad." The State Department spotted it and in 1962 sent it on a successful tour of the Far East. Then came three months in Australia, where its appearance was hailed as "the most stark and devastating theater ever presented on the Australian stage."

But success abroad is not success at home. When the dancers return to the U.S., they must temporarily disband for lack of employment.

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