- Share this article on Facebook
- Share this article on Twitter
- Share this article on Flipboard
- Share this article on Email
- Show additional share options
- Share this article on Linkedin
- Share this article on Pinit
- Share this article on Reddit
- Share this article on Tumblr
- Share this article on Whatsapp
- Share this article on Print
- Share this article on Comment
While the trailblazing work of choreographer Alvin Ailey has been duly celebrated, Ailey himself has been less explored — until now, with Jamila Wignot’s doc Ailey. The filmmaker has been a fan since college, “but I didn’t know very much about the man behind the company’s dance works or vision,” she says. “The film was an incredible opportunity to immerse myself in Ailey’s story of becoming — to live in his skin and hopefully channel the memories, experiences, drive, and vision that animate his work.”
Alvin Ailey was a dancer, choreographer and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and his choreography “Revelations” is one of the most performed ballets in the world. He died from an AIDS-related illness on Dec. 1, 1989 at the age of 58.
Related Stories
The director of the Neon film knew she would have a wealth of visually stunning historical footage to draw from throughout such a storied career, which she strove to balance with more intimate explorations of everyday life during Ailey’s era. “It was going to be such a rich experience to work with dance material, both the original photography we captured of Rennie Harris’ rehearsal process for Lazarus — an amazing dance that I hope people will be able to see in a live performance — as well as explore new ways to harness archival materials of dance as well as documents of everyday Black life,” she explains.
Audio recorded during the final year of his life makes Ailey very present as, in essence, the film’s narrator. “In listening to the tapes Ailey conducted in the last year of his life, he articulates how much his commitment to dance required of him,” says Wignot. “He sacrificed, he says, everything. We weren’t interested in presenting that as an ode to martyrdom, but rather as a reminder of the context in which he was creating his work and to resurrect the human being at the center of this legacy.”
Wignot says that she faced different challenges in the making of the film “depending on the day,” but she found that a significant hurdle came in navigating significant pieces that, at least on the surface, seemed to be missing from the choreographer’s life.
“Artistically, it was coming to grips with some of the absences in Ailey’s life, his lack of intimate relationships, romantic and otherwise,” she explained. “There was an impulse, in the early days, to make sense of that by assigning it to something concrete: his mother, his poverty, his sexuality, his race. Ultimately, it was everything — and the most important part was to present a portrait that complicated Ailey by presenting his duality.
“Ailey was alive to the world around him and was a person with something to say; about Black people, about people in general, about self-love and self-acceptance,” says Wignot. “Those were themes that course through all of his work — a message that we need as his audience, but that he also needed.”
The filmmaker adds: “What that came down to, fundamentally, was being in the rehearsal room. Those are my favorite scenes: Alvin Ailey at work, taking a body or two, as he says, and carving the space to say something about our human condition, or being in the rehearsal room bearing witness to works in the making, bodies in motion, striving for the heights of expression. That was the sacred space and the essence of Alvin Ailey.”
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day