Ailey II – Harmonic Echo

Ailey II is universally renowned for merging the spirit and energy of the country’s best early-career dance talent with the passion and creative vision of today’s most outstanding and emerging choreographers. The performance opens with Divining, a dance by Judith Jamison set to a score of North African, Central African, and Latin rhythms. Divining builds on African dance idioms to create a striking, pulsating modern dance work. Divining is followed by excerpts from Blues Suite, Ailey’s first masterpiece, which poignantly evoke the sorrow, humor, and humanity of the blues—those heartfelt songs that Ailey called “hymns to the secular regions of the soul.” Lark Ascending seamlessly fuses ballet and modern vocabularies to display the dancers’ technical abilities in both disciplines and has entranced audiences for years. The performance closes with the formal, meditative mood of Streams. The dance evokes images and sensations inspired by various bodies of water—from gentle brooks to turbulent oceans—that correlate to the changing tides within us.