Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater – Program II: Excerpts from New Works

Presented as part of the Edges of Ailey exhibition, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to the Whitney to present new works by Company veterans Hope Boykin and Jamar Roberts. In Finding Free, Boykin along with composer and pianist Matthew Whitaker examine the challenges and restrictions throughout life’s peaks and valleys that propel the journey forward. This insightful work uses Boykin’s movement-language and Whitaker’s jazz- and gospel-influenced score to explore personal freedoms. For Al-Andalus Blues, Jamar Roberts journeys back in time to the Golden Age of Al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula, evoking the north African Moors who inhabited the land prior to the Christian Reconquista. The music of Roberta Flack and Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain sets the tone for this abstract ensemble piece.