Alvin Ailey was a New York actor – performing, yes, in Broadway musicals with Lena Horne and Pearl Bailey starting in 1954, the very year he arrived in New York at the age of 23. But he was also an actor in straight plays both on Broadway and Off Broadway, co-starring with the likes of Robert Duvall and Cicely Tyson, and he even studied with the great acting teacher Stella Adler, taking her lessons on acting – and those by her teacher, Konstantin Stanislavski – to heart.
click on photo to enlarge
That is among the revelations in “Edges of Ailey,” an ambitious exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American about the visionary artist and activist best known for founding the world-famous Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Opening next week, “Edges of Ailey” will take up the entire fifth floor of the museum, whose walls have been fitted with 18 enormous screens that will show videos of his best-known dances. The museum’s third floor theater will offer a schedule of live performances, including “Ailey in residence” for one week each month through February. There will also be paintings and sculptures by some 80 visual artists who influenced Ailey, or were influenced by him. And all kinds of material on the walls and cabinets and computer screens documenting Ailey’s life, and revealing his thoughts.
One fascinating if relatively small corner of this massive exhibition focuses on his experiences in New York theater, and how these influenced his development as what the exhibition calls “an icon of modern dance” who is “also among the most cultural and historically impactful figures in the United States and the world.”
For example, we’re told that he used the connections he made while making his living doing Broadway shows (such as House of Flowers in 1954) “to gather a group of dancers to present his very first work that would become known as part of the Ailey Company in 1958 called Blues Suite.”
But as early as 1955, he acted in a non-musical play on Broadway as a character called the Purple Bandit in a non-musical play by Aldyth Morris; entitled “The Carefree Tree,” and seven years later in “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright,” a play by Peter S. Feibleman that featured such current and future luminaries as Claudia McNeil, Roscoe Lee Browne, Al Freeman Jr, and Cicely Tyson
In 1961, he scribbles “Carlo, I’m in a play! As an actor and not a dancer. I promise nothing, but I hope you will be able to come and see it….” — on a poster for “Call Me By My Rightful Name,” a play by Michael Shurtleff based on “The Whipping Boy” by S.F. Pfoutz, at One Sheridan Square in the Village, with a cast that included Robert Duvall, Joan Hackett, and Robert Hogan.
In a datebook from that same year (whose pages we can flip through via computer screen), we see numerous references to attending class with Stella Adler. On one page, he writes that “Carmen [presumably Carmen De Lavallade, his long-time friend, co-star and collaborator] is a great, intuitive actress..great poetry seems to come out of great feeling…great and deep feeling.”
He then observes: “Can the Stanislavski Theories of sense memory and all be made ready to work for dances ….I will demand a great deal from dancers hereafter. They must be technically studied in a dance way, and in an acting way.”
“The dazzling scenes of Broadway, Hollywood, and theater — especially his acting teacher Stella Adler and the choreography of Jack Cole– informed his distinct sense of theatricality and the glint of entertainment in his dances,” the curator comments.
Edges of Ailey,, September 25 to February 9, Whitney Museum of American Art
