Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Whitney

Presented as part of the Edges of Ailey exhibition, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to the Whitney to present excerpts from 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 set the tone for this abstract ensemble piece. 

Program

Finding Free (excerpt) by Hope Boykin

Al-Andalus Blues (excerpt) by Jamar Roberts