![]() But Revelations is also haunted by voices, voices that r emember, admonish, implore, testify, and rejoice. For many of the countless millions who have seen the dance, its images and choreography are indelible the huddled bodies, individuated yet allied, with outstretched arms and splayed fingers in its incantational opening scene, conveying a sense of shared history and collective aspiration, come quickly to mind. It has become the best-known-surely the most-watched-American concert dance of all time, performed continuously by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) for sixty years. The historical importance of Revelations is secure. Ailey vividly recalled the night he heard Sellers: “I said to myself, ‘Who the hell is that singing?’ I started stopping by the club all the time to listen to Brother John sing.” The back-home familiarity that Sellers’s sound summoned for Ailey, who was raised in southeast Texas about fifty miles south of Waco, harmonized with the vision that he was eager to pursue in original pieces for his new dance company, works weaving together his choreography, his attraction to theater, and the memories conjured by Sellers’s voice-above all, the landmark Revelations. He eventually found his way to New York, where he became a fixture at Gerde’s as both a performer and an emcee.Ī frumpy cabaret tucked on the corner of West 4th and Mercer Streets, Gerde’s brought together bohemia and the blues, booking the likes of Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and John Lee Hooker alongside local favorites for patrons who ate, drank, smoked, and sang along from the club’s densely packed tables. Ailey was heading home from rehearsal for the William Saroyan play Talking to You at the East End Theater four blocks away: “I used to go through Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to get to the subway, and one day I passed by this club called Folk City and heard a voice singing ‘ Evening When the Sun Goes Down,’ one of my favorite blues songs.” The voice belonged to John Sellers, a Mississippi-born migrant to Chicago, who, following the example of gospel songster Sister Rosetta Tharpe, added “Brother” to his stage name. ![]() Sometime during the early months of 1961, Alvin Ailey, a thirty-year-old African American dancer and aspiring actor, walked past Gerde’s Folk City-the New York venue Bob Dylan called “the preeminent folk club in America”-and was stopped in his tracks. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |