Blues Suite

With the rumble of a train and the chime of distant bells, a cast of vividly drawn characters from the barrel houses and fields of Alvin Ailey’s southern childhood are summoned to dance and revel through one long, sultry night. Mr. Ailey’s first masterpiece poignantly evokes the sorrow, humor, and humanity of the blues, those heartfelt songs that he called “hymns to the secular regions of the soul.”

Blues Suite is the ballet that launched Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1958. Remarkably, Mr. Ailey was just 27 when the dance premiered, and it was only the sixth piece he had ever choreographed. This ballet is where he found his voice as a creative artist, presenting real people on the concert dance stage.  

As Jennifer Dunning wrote in her book Alvin Ailey: A Life in Dance, "[Blues Suite] is set in a 'sporting house.' The characters are the men and women who frequent the place, drinking, dancing, and flirting to the music of the blues over the course of a night that ends with the early morning sounds of a train and church bells."

The New York Times explained, “Created two years before the first version of [Alvin Ailey’s] Revelations, it has often been described as that spiritual work’s secular counterpart, a representation of the Saturday night sinning that precedes the Sunday churchgoing…hailed for its social observation, for putting ‘real people’ onstage, characters from the milieu of Ailey’s Southern childhood, then underrepresented.”