In the three years since Robert Battle became artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, he has shown remarkable poise in balancing between boldness and cool calculation as he revamps a repertory long in need of renovation.
His imports have mostly been canny, challenging the dancers — and their loyal audiences — without alienating. New works, equally necessary, are an inherently riskier form of matchmaking, and it’s to be expected, if also a little worrisome, that Mr. Battle’s commissioning choices have so far yielded much more mixed results.
The score, which Mr. Moses composed with David Worm, seemed to hold clues. Starting unpromisingly with the sounds of heartbeats and breathing, it gathered rhythmic force, at first with voices alone and then with drums, bass notes and blasts of brass. Drifting through were words in plummy British accents. I thought I heard Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, the acrid one about post-coital regret.
That might explain why the work’s five men and five women faced off in battle-of-the-sexes rows and tribal patterns. Or why the men seemed to swallow one of the women with a wave of their bodies, and why the women stepped on the men and why the men launched the women skyward in throws as ejaculatory as the fountain in the plaza outside the theater. Mr. Moses’s vision of sexual passion was dark but also frustratingly murky.
The pleasures lay in passing aspects of the movement quality: a beautiful underwater softness here, percussive punch and whiplash speed there. Structurally, the work frayed into a series of insufficiently distinct duets, yet the last one had genuine sexual heat, with Jacqueline Green (marvelous throughout) pushing Antonio Douthit-Boyd to the ground by his head and walking her fingers along his body.
“The Pleasure of the Lesson” was followed by a work more structurally sound — Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations” — and one with similar structural flaws: Wayne McGregor’s futuristic ballet “Chroma” (created for the Royal Ballet in 2006). One of Mr. Battles’s most daring acquisitions, “Chroma” is way outside the usual Ailey mode, and though Thursday’s performance was an improvement over the debut presentations last December, the Ailey version is still a work in progress. Mr. McGregor’s assaultive hyperextensions remain half-translated into Ailey attitude, and the requisite balletic precision still eludes some of the cast.
But such flaws are no cause for regret. Different liaisons hold different lessons, and it’s wonderful to see Mr. Battle playing the field. There are hopeful signs that he and his company are learning.
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