A search for truth through movement – that’s how dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey characterized his art form. His life is chronicled in a new documentary, “Ailey,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and now it will have showings at Atlanta’s Landmark Midtown Arts Cinema. Director Jamila Wignot joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom along with Robert Battle, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. They talked about the film and what Ailey’s work means to the community of dance.
Producers from Insignia Films approached Wignot looking for a director to helm the project, having first supported her work on the PBS women’s series, “Makers.” “My jaw dropped because I had been a fan of the company since I first saw them perform in college, and I just couldn’t believe that it felt like this film was finding me,” said Wignot. “I said ‘yes’ right from the jump, and we set off to get the film made.”
Many consider the ballet “Revelations” Ailey’s masterpiece. It premiered in 1960 and expressed his “blood memories” of growing up in Black spiritual communities in Texas. The ballet received great acclaim and remains on stages all over the world to this day. But the artist may have harbored ambivalence about the overshadowing success of his creation, at times requesting to have it discontinued. “‘Revelations,’ it’s one of the wonders of the world, in a way,” said Battle. “I don’t think you’ll find many creatives who have that problem.”
But Wignot and her documentary team wanted to tell the true story of the artist, his triumphs and his struggles. Their research was guided by audio recordings made in Ailey’s last year of life, materials he intended as part of a biography. “There’s a quality to those recordings because it wasn’t him as… the Artistic Director of the company on a press tour, or trying to talk very broadly about his vision – it just had a different, kind of quieter, more relaxed tone to it,” said Wignot. “He shares his sexual awakening, he shares a story of personal heartbreak, he shares his struggles with mental health, and I think all of that really guided us in thinking about parts of his story to share.” Ailey died tragically in 1989 after a battle with AIDS.
The film makes a point to capture the present-day operations of Ailey’s dance company, the living illustration of Ailey’s legacy, and the footage provides occasional interludes from a more narrative history of the company’s founder. Serendipitously, at the time of the documentary’s making, the dancers at the Theater were rehearsing hip hop choreographer Rennie Harris’s ballet “Lazarus,” the final work in a trilogy inspired by the life and times of Ailey himself.
