At Alvin Ailey, a Quiet Disrupter With No Time for Tears

At Alvin Ailey, a Quiet Disrupter With No Time for Tears

12/09/2019

Sometimes riding the subway has its upside. It affords time to think — and, in the case of Jamar Roberts, to choreograph. Recently, as he headed to the final working rehearsal for “Ode,” his new dance at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, he had to think about what it was missing: an ending.

He listened to the music, Don Pullen’s “Suite (Sweet) Malcolm (Part 1 Memories and Gunshots),” a jazz piano composition, by turns dreamy and frantic. He had originally envisioned the final moment of “Ode,” a poetic lamentation about the effects of gun violence, to be an empty stage. But on the train, an image came to him.

“There would be a body left on the stage,” he said. “I was holding back tears basically all the way to work. It’s just like when you read a sad novel. You know how it’s going to end before it actually ends? That’s what I was dealing with.”

Later at the rehearsal, Mr. Roberts, who is both an Ailey member and its resident choreographer, arranged five dancers in what he called “this one long arm.”

The dancers bent over one another to create a slope of bodies as they leaned tenderly toward a listless sixth, lying on the floor. “Ode,” which has its premiere on Dec. 10, has two casts, one male, one female; as Mr. Roberts worked with the men in the foreground, the women, following along in the back, slowly realized this was the dance’s ending. Some started to cry.

“I know, I know, I know,” Mr. Roberts, 37, said. “I cried, too. You all have to focus. I don’t have any tissues here.”

“Ode,” for which he is also designing the costumes, is just his second work for the company, a follow-up to his acclaimed exploration of the blues, “Members Don’t Get Weary.” In naming him the first resident choreographer of Ailey, its artistic director, Robert Battle, was impressed by both the piece and how he worked with the dancers.

“I wanted him to do more immediately,” Mr. Battle said. “I thought, there’s more in there — I can tell.”

Mr. Roberts, a self-described loner, is so tall and muscularly built, he doesn’t always seem real, even up close. But for all his power onstage, he is a quiet man. He isn’t, as Mr. Battle put it, a self-promoter. And he didn’t just suddenly start making dances, though “It’s secret to New York, for sure,” Mr. Roberts said.

In Miami, where he grew up and where has returned throughout his Ailey career — he has left the company twice since joining in 2002 — he basically lived at the studio. “I spent a lot of time by myself when I was younger,” he said. “My brothers were playing sports, and I never went outside because Miami is too damn hot. I would always be inside making a dance to some Disney soundtrack or writing a play.”

Mr. Roberts has always relished creating in solitude, whether making visual art, writing or designing fashion. But now his impulse to choreograph overshadows other pursuits. Along with “Ode,” part of the Ailey company’s current City Center season, he has created a work for Juilliard’s New Dances that runs through Dec. 15. In the spring, he unveils a premiere for New York City Ballet.

Like “Members,” which featured music by John Coltrane, “Ode” is set to jazz, which Alvin Ailey was drawn to throughout his career as a choreographer. Researching Ailey’s works was like falling into a rabbit hole of jazz, Mr. Roberts said: “It was just like, why isn’t dance using these people? This company has been around for 60 years plus, and no one’s ever used Coltrane. I found that kind of crazy.”

At first Mr. Pullen’s composition was terrifying to Mr. Roberts, in part for its “cliché dance-feeling beginning,” he said. “That scares me — there’s no tension if everything is floating and nice and pretty.”

But the frenetic six minutes in the middle of the score — even more frightening — won him over. The music fit his vision: “Ode” isn’t about gun violence, but a balm for those who have lived in its aftermath. It’s rooted in healing.

As part of his research, Mr. Roberts read “When They Call You a Terrorist,” by Asha Bandele and Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a founder of Black Lives Matter; and “Eight Men,” a book of short stories by Richard Wright. He watched video footage of shootings. “I to try to build an experience for myself because my life is pretty cushioned,” he said. “I wake up, I come to Ailey and I dance every day. I’m not as in the world as much as I would like to be.”

Still, he tried to keep the research to minimum because he wanted the work to come from personal feeling. Mr. Roberts, who relishes solitude, admitted he is tight about revealing aspects about himself.

“I have a lot of thoughts that I don’t really share, and I thought that it would be maybe even cathartic for me to share,” he said. And, in this case, it’s necessary.

“I found myself sharing a lot more than I ever have in the studio with the dancers,” he continued. “They probably feel like me in the sense of we live in this little bubble every day of our lives. Some of them probably wish they could be on the streets, in the protests. But we kind of can’t, so we have to do what we can do where we are.”

Mr. Roberts said he feels he has a guiding spiritual force in all of this: Alvin Ailey. Though he died in 1989, 12 years before Mr. Roberts joined Ailey II, “I always feel like he’s my artistic director,” he said. “Now I feel the weight of what it is to be here and feeling the responsibility to answer that call.”

Ailey formed his company, in part, to give people of color a place to dance, Mr. Roberts said. It was also a place for him to to tell their stories. Mr. Roberts wants to continue that, but times have changed. “Are we just saying, ‘Yay, we have a place to dance’ and is that a responsible conversation?” he said. “Is that relevant considering all that’s still going on? I feel wrong for asking these questions. I have a problem when I feel like I’m being disruptive.”

Yet he doesn’t avoid having disruptive forces in his life. One of his good friends is the experimental choreographer Moriah Evans, whose work pushes against convention. They were roommates for five years and remain close. “I don’t think she influenced me, but she definitely solidified ideas that I was already having about my place in dance, my place at Ailey,” he said. “She would always encourage me to challenge the system.”

Ms. Evans, who also pushed Mr. Roberts to see dance outside of Ailey, has long been impressed by his curiosity, and, she said, she often has him in the room for her own creative process, too. “He’s not just an Ailey bunhead,” she said. “Jamar is not limited. He is in a position where he can still champion all of the wonderful things about that vision that Ailey had and hopefully take more risk. I think he’s already doing it.”

Growing up in Miami, Mr. Roberts trained at New World School of the Arts and at Dance Empire, where its founder and teacher Angel Fraser-Logan took him under her wing. Marion-Skye Brooke Logan, her daughter, is now his rehearsal associate. Now 25, she met Jamar when she was 10.

During a rehearsal for “Ode,” he told the dancers to ask Ms. Logan anything. “She knows things I don’t know,” he said. “I’m really impulsive. I just do things and they come out, but how to clean them and intention — she’s really good about intention. I just expect it, so sometimes I don’t emphasize it.”

It was with Ms. Logan and her mother that Mr. Roberts rekindled his love for choreography. He had left the Ailey company for the second time in 2011 and considered himself done with dancing. But then he started teaching at Dance Empire: “That’s when I really put in my 10,000 hours,” he said.

He played around, creating dances evocative of Pina Bausch, Martha Graham and Ohad Naharin. That was useful as a teaching tool. He made up original dances too and eventually realized that he needed to be back in New York. “I could see that the magic of Jamar being in the room was kind of wearing off,” he said. “I was turning into any old teacher that they could just be late and be like, ‘Sorry, I got a Frappuccino.’ ”

It was then that he started to engage with choreography in a conscious way. But he doesn’t feel precious about his dances. “I’m not making them for the accolades,” he said. “I think this company needs fresh” — he opens his arms wide — “fresh. I’m just here to be of service to that. I didn’t want to care. I mean I left this company two times.”

Again, it comes back to Ailey. The seed he planted when he formed his company in 1958 is what Mr. Roberts wants to revisit. “A lot of things have been piled on top of it, and that’s great,” he said, gesturing to the institution’s state-of-the-art building in Midtown Manhattan. “I can come here and walk into a studio an avenue long. But I just keep thinking that there’s so much that’s being overlooked.”

If, as he put it, the Ailey organization is high in the sky — like riding on the overpass of a highway — there are trees and life underneath.

“The perspective is cool, but the bridge extends from the ground, and that’s just important to me,” he said. “I’m so much about finding out how we got here and using that foundation as a way to move forward in a very real way. Not just with words or photographs, but have it be in the work and in the bodies. I’m really turned on by bringing that vision out.”

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